HEINRICH HIMMLERS LOST FIELD HQ HOCHWALD

small beautiful forest lane leading down here uh to where himmler was staying when he was visiting east prussia not far from the ss headquarters and their bunkers and hitler's headquarters and his bunkers and the german high command and theirs they're all centered around this small town here in east prussia alongside with a lot of military in the area leading up to here in the surrounding area from here there was always a lot of military bases barracks soldiers stationed this was german territory before the war began we've got another military vehicle passing us here there's a lot of military still going on here today there's a jordan forces training base uh us polish some 30 clicks from here but you know what uh sir you guys i see you a lot in my everyday life so if you don't mind i'm just gonna stick to history and uh do my own thing unless i need a px and some more bug spray yeah oh now i recognize it man this is i've been here for a lot longer than from when himmler moved in here yes his house where he was staying i think there's only a staircase left just interesting to see i did not see any security messages or whatsoever coming in here we're here in prussia at one of himless residences and you really cannot blame him this is absolutely gorgeous out here it's a hotel today so you can actually say you went to these prussians stayed at himalaya's place and smoked cigars i don't think he liked those now i will admit having expected himmler having been raised by a catholic schoolmaster i would have thought him a bit pedantic and not really one to imbibe in cigars however he did there are more pictures of himmler smoking cigars than there are of his actual field headquarters but then again he also did have an affair with the secretary and i guess he had more fun than we thought and here he is smoking even with his children what a nazi but for the view alone this is a good enough reason to be here this is uh you can see why he picked this place to stay i'm pretty sure next time i'm in prussia i might pick this place myself interesting thing was coming in here i did not see anything that looks like guard posts security anything no remnants of buildings this looks familiar this type of road work yeah if i was going to run a war this is where i would do it now i will say this is an absolutely gorgeous place and you can stay here since it's an actual hotel so you can go over how you want to run your war the actual house heineken lived in and especially stayed here when hogwart was built is no more there's only a foundation left and a small staircase leading up to it why would you not want this drive to be your drive on the way to work there's very little indication from the main road which is right behind me that there ever was anything here for this to have been the ss field headquarters um i'm not looking at much of the woods nature claimed a lot so i think we're gonna have to go look for it now of course when himmler wasn't flying he would have his special train sundatuk heinrich it would be parked on a siding where he would work from for several months why accommodations were being built here close to hitler's headquarters and the army's headquarters felt commando stella hawkwald it consisted of five large reinforced concrete type b bunkers and about 20 large wood and brick buildings underground garages those transformer stations telephone and telegraph center radio center dining rooms a cinema staff barracks sauna and a lot of other supporting facilities it was not nearly as large as wolves lair with only about 35 to 40 support staff and servants and 500 ss men working it was surrounded by barbed wires minefields and extremely well camouflaged it was constructed by the tour organization and throughout its duration hogwarts was commanded by ss obersteumbenfuhrer josef thief it's only one thing i can do out here at himless old ss headquarters or their field headquarters is i can spray myself with an insane amount of deadly poison to ensure that the mosquitoes don't eat me alive and then we can go for a walk long walk because we have to look for everything here nature's reclaimed a lot of it and doesn't look like it's been kept as an active museum which makes it interesting and for a lot of us when we like to go exploring and we're not entirely quite sure where you're going just a quick tip is always bring a little bit of water keep a compass and check your gps my gps i don't reach out here so i need to map any compass just in case i need to find my way back the hard way one of the access roads coming in from here from the main road from the small town here and here down past the foliage you see an outline of a very large bunker and the road leading through the area what i want to go look for is signs of security measures coming into the area and look at the enormous construction we walk in here on the little path see the first sign of something very large and here's the first sign of a security line of a trench flanking the bunker parallel with the road and when you start looking and exploring through the landscape now we start seeing access panels down below it's round with a square hole in it and it's not at your brook however and there were ladders coming down here so this could have been a sewage hatch i don't see any machine gun in placements or possibilities here and usually machine gun positions are around not with a square top so this don't see a bottom and i don't see any pathways underneath so i don't think this was part of the outer perimeter defense or the inner perimeter defense here we have the first the type b bunkers were built to withstand a 500 pound aerial bomb there was a 80 centimeter wide hallway running throughout them with double gas tied doors blocked both ends and firing ports there was also an internal emergency system with lighting ventilation in each bunker in early 1944 himmler's bunker was reinforced with another outer shell you know i've seen a lot of these this is a very large above ground construction this is pretty damn big it really is this is somewhat surprising and familiar cement roof obviously they tried to blow this or they did i see the wall separating and the first room again it was blown up well see the walls coming apart on the inside and separate all the way up inside inside these bunkers outer shell was an inner shell that was separated so in case of an air attack it wouldn't destroy the inside never seen blocks quite like this before and obviously the roof is about six some feet over my head from where i'm standing i'm interested in is we had that's what that was we have pieces of wood in between these for nails so you could have put a comfortable inside wall of wood as you get a paint and clad i don't know how elaborate the decked out himmler's bunkers were if they were for military use it was more a heating or insulation issue you would think the the boss may have had something a little nicer let me see here's the corner where the wall is separated and all the rebar sticking out and every one of these are separated by what looks like two inches of wood and this is interesting because the rubble inside here didn't come from the ceiling the ceiling hell the sets thick cross beams so all the rubble in here i don't actually know where it came from it could have come from the wall from the inside there's presumably what was another door two pair of doors leading into a room or this would have led into another room now this leads out to the hallway and here it's only three four feet solid bar sticking through here a little alcove in here again it's very hard to see there's no sign of hinges or anything else but there are pieces of rebar sticking that again what looks like a foundation hello hello hello i'll come back out to the same hallway again that's marked with holes presumably from the demolition and there are pieces of the ceiling here that have been peeled back this is where i would wonder if they drilled homes this is where i wonder if they drilled holes like with regular demolition of mine excavation to blow it or they just left large explosives next to the walls would have been interesting to know because they expended a lot of munitions to get this result and it's still standing and i wager if there's a 250 kilo bomb dropped on it i don't think that will take it down see here's a separating hole up here between the two sections the ravel came in gonna walk through to one room so you literally have all of this for one 20 by 20 room and you see cracked all the way down so you got this enormous bunker and it cracked down the side straight down the middle here any couple of kids that was in here just before me said i should go in there if you can all right i'm gonna put my backpack down for this this is a very very narrow little hole here let's see what we can do on that if the skinny teenagers can do it i can damn well do it and if they can't do it then they'll find my bag on the outside with the hard drives and someone will remember me in posterity and say hey that was that idiot who crawled around inside the bunker until one finally fell on him all right at this so looks like i'm just taking a piece of rebar so this would have been the outside this is the outside wall and the inside bunker this would have been the separation between the inner and outer shell so the inner sunk from the explosion but the outer stood and held wow wow that really is something to say all right all right fatty's gonna crawl out through the skinny hole again all right we know how this goes i was a kid i saw a horror film i think the main main part was kids disappearing and there were cracks like this son of a motherless goat the outer shell they built around himmler's bunker and 44 was originally only supposed to be about 40 centimeters of space between that and the existing one inside it was then to be filled up with gravel to better absorb a direct hit the bombs they now feared in 1944 was the weight of 2500 to 5 000 kilos that's why the new reinforcement on january 21st 1945 the last security units left the area and german soldiers under the leadership of general eduard hausa the head of the ss sunder commander from division 605 was tasked to blow up hogwatt and he did an exceptional job except for himmler's bunker still stands these are enormous structures and we'll be seeing quite a few of these but i'm looking for the inner ring of defense which might today just be a hole in the ground first bunker we see here there's still a running trench along the forest floor so there was one inner ring of defense and here is another that has been blown up very well it appears that the good general hauser did an exceptional job destroying everything in the area you see the wall has fallen over this was at one point the roof which means they actually managed to split it now a little bridge look at that this was cracked like an egg and you got the again a trench running down here all the way up next to them and little little and big pieces of this is just scattering the area this would have been some hell of a blast not in the party sense but yeah these were outer walls and this tilted over 45 degrees from the explosion and until i sit down with a map uh i will no longer have this part of the air and take this piece did not belong here in blue here there came down here and more pieces of it and here it's completely destroyed there's no no entrance on this since a part of it lived over 45 degrees it's a shame so one thing i'll say if you are making a maniacal crazy dictator and you build cool things in big castles when it's your time is up don't destroy it you know just think of it as a future legacy whatever you want don't destroy the crap you build we might want to turn it into a museum or harley shop with to our right of the majority of the bunkers i'm going to walk down here to see if i can find some perimeter or discover if they're on both sides of the road at the road gravel a lot of the gravel on the road here that you see actually came from places like theresa when they all those laid laborers they dug out the stone it was multi-purpose they were digging in and they were using all this road construction throughout their territories as well as of course bunker building but this black stone we've seen before we get 300 meters away from the first destroyed positions and it's very hard to tell if this was the foundation of something it's uh i would expect foundations of a guard house at the very least most of the buildings here with these wooden beautiful chalet style buildings makes it very hard to find any of them since there's no map of where exactly they were himmler had an office in one of them and most of the work was performed inside these also himmler would host several international dignitaries such to hear the prime minister of india suha sant rabose and also he would host the quran mufti amin al-husseini who eventually ended up getting his own ss division i will say here next to the road is an unnaturally large indent in the ground parallel to it the place fell without a fight there was no battle going on here they had time to destroy everything blow it up and leave before the red army came in and the first after the russian fighting troops cleared the area was the smersh teams that dug through everything and russians being very meticular most definitely found everything that was to be found i doubt they buried the germans buried anything out here actually had time to evacuate somewhat orderly but here we have something that is again man-made trees are less than 75 years it could be vehicle vehicle secured it could be a place to safely store vehicles has about six feet deep enough for say a himmler's car to sit here in case of air raids although none were ever known to have happened here i well well i was gonna say i don't see any piece of cement or concrete or anything in here let me see maybe i do the bottom is very well this is piece of the tree that's ironed for some reason it's also it was probably deeper than this at the time since the bottom is covered with leaves i mean at the main room the road vehicle even here's what looks like either another one or a small trench and here we go again spiders again man-made and what over here what have we here this is the foundation of something yes it is 150 meters up from the two destroyed bunkers and here's a red brick foundation and we have nine degree angles so this was a building yeah [Music] there's a building here that probably the staircase this building leads right up to what looked like the vehicle storage obviously there have been office buildings structures um places for the guard crew to sleep hollow so it would have been a chimney this could have been the chimney that's falling over that's that shape yeah this was a small building that probably had a wooden structure top structure and cropping in here and here's more when i say a little building this is the same building and it looks like it is this is a bigger building than i thought because it does seem to go all the way over here by the large foundation to be quite honest and here's more of it if this was demolished which would have been a lot easier to do the walls would all have fallen outwards which it does look like they did makes a little harder this is not foundation this is a piece of the wall look at the shape of the bricks and here's another looks like a vehicle grave or another duck out here yeah another duck out on the other side of the building and now i wonder if there's another building here next to it in the same pattern as before but if not however there's a running trench into another hole so we're looking at a more and more elaborate trench system which wouldn't tactically i would not think this would be the inner oh the inner trench and uh in fact i don't think it was here's another one of those but this was round so this could have been so there's a round pipe around pipe and another half pipe down there so there's two quarters of the pipe and then one in the center and a trench could also have been a cable trench again without having designed the layout with me of what this but there's an elaborate system of trenches here and a small concrete hole here this is not a fighting position this could have been a vent this could have been a lot of things i do not yet know here's another trench expecting to find a lot of tunnels and trenches for utility and sewage and so on but there's a lot more that looks different than i thought i'll honestly say i'm a little surprised at the number of trenches this close to the large bunkers these trenches that should then at least somewhat be circular and here's more could be a machine gun position again it's hard to tell probably also people have been digging out here this looks more like a two-man position with a small mound a little things down here we're looking at a lot of footprints in the ground here that i'm not really able to identify the trees are they could be about 75 years so the trees would not have been here which means it's hard to tell already by that definition there's no trees here the nature had a lot of time to fill in with overgrowth but they would want to have covered this up one would think so there were trees on of the roofs of the bunkers a lot of netting and trees would have been planted closer so the trench system here and the direction behind us are the two main bunkers that i found so far is the foundation of a house red brick fell to the ground so it wasn't for the red brick i would just say this was a running trench however could also have been a cable trench there would have been transformers some way of producing electricity cement foundation the other foundation over there is red brick and then french is running away from it without a map of the layout it's very hard to determine what was what at the time of operation and it's not like the ss published their construction plans and here's another vehicle dugout that is what i have determined that it is because i've seen those verified in denmark and other forests where german forces were stationed shape same diameter and there's more very subtle footprints in the ground or something having been here possibly more nature does reclaim everything sooner or later the t intersection that is leading back down to the main bumpers here's an earth mound behind the trash can draw the launch actually this is a far larger hole than the holy hell okay all right fine spider in my hair i'll suck it up this is a very very large hole easily 30 by 30 meters i don't see any [Music] i don't see any pieces ah all right i'm sorry i'm just throwing spiders out of their homes here sorry this is huge this really is huge and this is definitely from the right time whatever it was it was blown up well one thing that's fairly obvious to me is that this ss complex was not nearly as large and as elaborate as many others and certainly of course not as large as the armies or hitler's headquarters compounds it obviously would be protected and hidden in the same way i'm going to peel over the road close to towards the large bunkers we've seen that were destroyed see we find something in the forest floor although that would be a bit of a miracle considering how well concealed the large bunkers are to find any smaller pieces of anything well that would be intervention by higher power and i'm not buying it but i'm crawling through the spider nests just to make sure so certainly trenches was used for close perimeter defense inner and outer rings we knew that but it's nice to see them here they are so on either side of the roads obviously there would have been machine gun positions and more trenches or this could have been this is large enough for it to have been the foundation for a building it does look very much like a bomb crater but it does shoot out to the sides it's hard to tell i'm surprised that so many of the defensive trenches we've seen have just been earth dugouts not reinforced concrete or cement or anything but maybe they're called maybe they're somewhere else maybe they're closer to the main bunkers or further away there's another trench running in there trenches are literally crisscrossing the neighborhood here compared to wolf's lair life here at hogwarts was not quite as bad it was designed and built on a slightly higher elevation than wolf's lair so therefore you didn't have to deal with the same amount of swamp mosquitoes and snakes as hitler did himmler was at all times protected by several close protection units 20 from the rsd and a unit from the ordnance bullet side there's a lot of man-made trenches in here the only thing unnatural it's a spider crawling up the back of my neck if you didn't know this was here i see why this has been very hard to find and this is why you like to have a compass because you get very easy to get turned around in a place like this and you walk in the wrong direction so yes when you're not looking i am checking and here is a mound of something that is protruding from the ground so and the trench running here parallel again trenches everywhere they could have been wider but not wide enough for a vehicle there surprised since there's an actual bunker right there completely demolished impossible to tell anything about it except it was blown up well so this is the furthest bunker we have found that's the bunker we have found that is the furthest away from the others it is sitting on on the trench and it is smaller than the main ones so and here we're coming to another and you will not see any of this coming off the main road i guarantee you that this is not the main road or the path but if it was what would i be doing here this looks like big enough i'm guessing this would have been the center of it so it split here when they blew it up and down here are the holes down here is the inside what we're standing on here and here is the outer shell and down there is the main part of the bunker down there likewise down there this was a very large piece here and this is giving me a good idea that this place was somewhat larger than i first thought this was one of the regular regular-sized bunkers that was blown up definitely but again it's very hard to tell you really have to look to see what's what underneath it underneath all the rubble i don't know if they left anything or they just destroyed it just because and here back to the trench again i'll try to go parallel with the trench see what happens first one in the trench leading us over to the next so the bunkers were connected by a trench system definitely and an outer ring of trenches and an inner ring of trenches see how broken apart here's the trench again i'll try to navigate around this one let me look at the side of this thing you really see the details the rebar and this coming over to the next one is actually a path that has been navigated by man in the trench again and again it's been completely completely destroyed split down the middle of the explosion here's another piece of it and we follow the trench so that was three large bunkers in a row with a small one on the outside and the trench coming in here leading back to the part of the complex that's still intact as the back side of the third one i'll go back here see what's on the other side all right here we're looking at what would have been side of a building you got red brick on the ground this looks like here would have been a building it's a deep hole over there looks like from offendable foundation and here you'd have the trenches that would have run throughout the area large piece over there and here we have a very deep hole that's a lot longer than its width and over there it's what looked like flooring on that foundation piece it's hard to tell what would have been around here it's the large bunker the largest intact bunker for the running trenches there's still pieces blowing off the side of it have trenches here and then that very large deep hole over here i would think used to be a building but it's very hard to tell what it was except red brick and they look like they're positioned in the right position great work and i'm i'm thinking this looks like foundation this looks like it could be flooring this used to be yeah this very very deep hole here could have been underground garage there's a foundation to leading up next to this looks like hell i don't know what it looks like that's the problem here this could have been again if you have piece of a wall you have something that looks like a smaller piece and again over there as well but it is hard to tell if they were once connected and they were part of that large hole and they were once united in that large hole it's very very hard to tell it was very well exploded indeed got a lot of rubble and brick here unlike the pieces of the main bunker so this must have been again housing there must have been a house here there's another piece of a foundation regular brick are strewn all over the area and here's a piece of a wall that fell over i do wonder if there's anything underground has been top of a chimney made in the same brick as that piece with the hole there and there so this was a chimney that was placed this is a little strange it started there which means underneath here is an underground building here's the large bunker the first one with the cracked walls and here's a piece of something well this used to be a wall it used to be vertical so this was a piece of something that was blown over here is a very very large several ton piece full of rebar sitting there and here's another here's another and here's another piece wait this so okay so we have two pieces of l-shaped ah damn it's hard to see what this was it is very destroyed and this continues and there are more pieces and again this would have been cast with these lines parallel to the ground so this again is a piece of something that was demolished and thrown here by the explosion from what i understand they blew him right bunker as the one that was destroyed it must have taken quite a lot to destroy these as we heard out as we heard on the east wall most of one kilogram per square meter it's a very large piece of cement remember inside all of it there's an additional amount of rebar of steel so this whole mountain a little piece of rebar sticking out honestly it will not be long it will not be very long before nature reclaims this completely and it'll be impossible to tell what's underneath but from the terminology we picked up on the east wall this was blown up well it's impossible to tell what it was but it was blown up very well and it was very large and pieces of it are scattered throughout the forest floor rebar sticking out of it everywhere it must have split here you see how coarse the gravel inside of this it's for every mountain there literally is a bunker underneath or pieces of one and there's smaller pieces everywhere it makes me wonder every time i stand on a little mountain or something or see a hole in the ground i would imagine there's some relevance of what we're doing the forest is very dense here it would have been very hard to see through it especially from the air i doubt very much air surveillance would have picked any of this up the way it was constructed and camouflaged we have more rubble and another very large piece over there it's impossible to tell but it gives you an idea of the scale of how large this was it really it's the most prehistoric castle-like atmosphere over these and i guess in some hundred years it will be considered as such now that i've seen the bunkers that were here a few smaller ones a few slightly bigger ones and then this one which was clearly the biggest one of them all which is probably why it was allowed to remain standing they probably could not blow it they tried but it's still here there's an extraordinary amount of reasons why i'm going to keep coming back to east prussia there's a lot of things i haven't found that i would like to see and with new maps in hand it's going to be interesting to digging through the outer perimeters of some of these great places i'm going to start getting into arranging tours so you guys can come with me and enjoy the landscapes the spiders and the bugs and the mosquitoes but for now i have to go back to western europe go to the maginot line fort ibm i have to go up to denmark norway czechia and i have to go visit my back two and one see if i can find what's missing keep up follow like i hope you enjoy what i do so i can keep going you

Channel: Lost Battlefields w Tino Struckmann

Views: 80,293

Keywords: HEINRICH, HIMMLER, HOCHWALD, WW2, SS, WAFFEN, BUNKER, FORTS, SECRET, HIDDEN, TINO, STRUCKMANN, historian, fort, hitler, swartswald, poland, east, prussia, history, lost, battlefields

Id: GuE7nm4ffxo

Length: 53min 0sec (3180 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020