WOLFS LAIR THEN AND NOW, HITLERS WW2 FIELD-HEADQUARTERS

in 1941 when operation barbarossa became a reality and hitler began his invasion of the soviet union it was clear that he needed a headquarters closer to the russian border already in 1940 had it been decided that east prussia was the place it was already one of the most fortified districts in the third reich it was also littered with lakes and impenetrable forests that would make it hard for an enemy to penetrate the area that was chosen for hitler's headquarters was located far away from any thoroughfares it was an old mixed forest that constituted a good year-round natural protection somewhere between three and five thousand people worked at wolfshuts at any given moment however as many as fifty thousand have been involved in the construction and building of the site it was not even ended until the day they pulled out in front of the advancing russian army to be close to the fuhrer the army built its own mauevald 8 miles away and 30 minutes drive further heinek himmler head of the ss built his the wolf chances consisted of three security zones with security zone one being the most secure where the fuhrer himself lived and had bunkers as well as hammond guring when he was there the area was protected by over 50 000 landmines it would later take 10 years to clear the whole area initially besides a few bunkers most of the complex consisted of wooden barracks and buildings that was over time upgraded and turned into more reinforced buildings including hitler's own bunker that was continuously upgraded and reinforced throughout the war adolf hitler spent over 800 days here at wolf shanxer eva brown never visited but he did have his dog blondie that he took for a walk as part of his routine every morning hitler was protected by the rice security service the rsd two groups each consist of 10 members from the criminal service and several members of his own bodyguard they were all ordered to keep people away from him not to talk too much and above all not entered his bunker or shelter unless directed to do so if hitler was outside the shelter the rsd officers had to stay as far away from the fuhrer that people approaching him could be stopped without disturbing him hitler's motorized side battalions eventually grew to the size of a regiment now equipped with his own tank anti-aircraft guns and heavy weapons 75 kilometers away was an air landing unit stationed the security for the wolf's lair was also watched by listening troops whose task would detect aircraft up to a radius of 100 kilometers away of course camouflage was key it was most important that the wolves layer would be hard to detect from the air and it still is today to some degree natural trees and foliage with extensive camouflage fake trees and all pathways were camouflaged with overhangs the masculine camouflage of the wolf's lair was entrusted to specialized gardening company called schedenspina from stuttgart still exists today also most of the buildings at wolshangsa like many other bunkers had a flat roof with cavities of 10 to 30 centimeters they were filled with soil which bushes grass and trees were planted arriving at the wolves lair today you first crossed the train tracks on which the trains were run to and from where hitler would greet mussolini when he arrived after the assassination you see a modern parking lot that's been constructed for the thousands of tourists that are visit every year in the center of which is hitler's old original air raid shelter next you get to the hotel that used to be the rsd building i'm staying in the hotel and i'm very excited about it because they did a great job renovating it i look forward to showing you what's here today as well as pictures of what used to be and i'm not going to go over a lot of the things that you already know like the details of the july 20th assassination attempt however since we're here let me show you what's left this is the foundation of the briefing stafford that stealthenberg placed the bomb the building was originally a wooden building called the laga building and hitler lived there while his own bunker was being renovated now it was being used for staff meetings this video and these photos were taken on the day in front of the laga building here hitler walking in front of the building with martin borman and hammond girling an interesting note is most people today believe that the plastics explosive that was used for the assassination attempt was british made it was not it was actually german made plastic w made to copy and better the british made plastic explosives it's still not been determined how exactly stauffenberg was able to lay his hands on these explosives or who gave them to him no investigations even by the gestapo have proved these facts after the assassination attempt hitler was in good spirits although 200 splinters had to be removed from his legs it is noted that later in his life he did mention to his secretary that he was still in pain from that day one of the things that immediately strikes me here is the wolf's lair complex is larger than the the one of the my back complexes absolutely my back was completely differently constructed and as i enter spare case one this is not the buildings i had expected to see you see how there this is not a reinforced building since built on red brick with a concrete roof with trees on top of it again for the camouflage purpose this is very interesting and very different than what we've seen before because you it looks like you have a reinforced roof on top of red brick wall supported by of course pillars inside but not at all what you'd expect from a bunker at all or a fortified building either so interesting this is the sonographer's building where the secretaries lived well earlier when this was a wooden structure i could see why it would have been more uncomfortable but this is not the worst building i've ever seen in the world although it is one very large room and hitler insisted after a while that all meetings be recorded and painstakingly noted down because there were some misunderstandings between himself and the high command of the army that he trusted less and less throughout the war and for that reason he wanted notes made of every meeting and every briefing the building's external walls was was up to and height of the other level of doors and windows made of brick the upper part strengthened with reinforced concrete and the ceiling with pre-stressed concrete beams the interior consisted of wooden walls and a suspended ceiling you could enter the rooms on both sides this is a 15 50 by 14 meter building and the building on the inside would have been subdivided with walls and into rooms but you don't see at all what i had expected was every building large structure here would have been a reinforced concrete bunker protecting everything from air raids would imagine there will be several underground storages and bunkers that some of them are not have access to but this is obviously but this is not a reinforced or in any which way a safe underground structure is not deep enough and this was bormon's that explains it far larger than the one we saw at himmler this is a heavy general purpose air raid shelter 36 by 23 meters and because this was due to the proximity of the home of the nsdap chief martin bormann hitler's secretary this was referred to as boermann's bunker it was built from scratch obviously but there was never a structure in place before it was commissioned in mid-1944 and it had only one entrance through the corridor protected with armored and gas tied doors just like everything else it served as a heavy air raid bunker and used exclusively in case of threats and it's equipped with benches so no one lived here i should have been a door here completely compressed in the middle here the arrow casing and the inner casing there's not much left this was a shelter for contingencies every building here the wolf's lair of these major shelters as just like himmler's structure been the inner and outer shell have been separated by 50 centimeters of basalt you see the reinforcement inside and the rebar this was the outer wall that fell you see the metal beams sticking up there running through the top of the structure this is a very very very huge typically this is something you would build underground certainly but if you have to build it above ground to protect against air raids this is what you would see and this is the wall of the inner shell that fell away from the outer shell and then the tree group here this is the outer wall this is the inner of the outer layer and it is the inner of the inner layer and you can see how it split open here and you see the separation it actually looks like there are three layers of separation again it has been exploded quite well here's the separation this is interesting because it looks like here's an inner wall and an outer wall and then a third layer this being one part a second middle wall and a third that in there being the inside of the bunker which is really interesting because that is not what has been prescribed in any of the texts or been said about this see if we can get a little bit more see this is definitely exploded well one of the pipes sticking out from the concrete this is fascinating because here we have the whole back of this was blown up and here you have the rebar an inner wall an inner wall these were enormously thick see how the reborn was bent from the explosion yeah look at this really looks like the whole roof was blown in this but this what makes this interesting is this was blown from the inside not from the outside you see the rebar sticking out and the pillars the heavy duty samus would be used for the roofs to get some of the pulls to fighting positions you come down here i have no idea what's down there this must be the back of the warmer bunker this is huge this is an enormous structure it truly is so the blue up the back of it it's hard not to be a little bit impressed with what they built out here but so half of the boarman bunker or shelter is intact it says there's only one room in here but i see more it also says there's only one inner and outer wall but it looks like there's more as well architectural drawings forthcoming so what happened was when it was demolished the walls blew apart and the roof came down in that position here but it must have taken a lot this looks like a piece of the roof that landed on its back there are more smaller pieces sitting in the in the woods surrounding it looks like this is a roof beams pointing skywards here hmm not necessarily it's hard to tell but it definitely did crack and split really uh impressive this looks even bigger than the borman bunker and you can see the layers on this one but i was absolutely right the this is even bigger 67 meters by 38 hitler's original bunker was built in 1941. and reinforced concrete part of the airaid shelter also houses bedroom and a brick and reinforced concrete part for work and daytime stays he had a briefing room and his office the entrance to the shelter was encaged in a wooden porch the largest bunker here was hitler's personal bunker with a five meter thick wall of reinforced concrete covered with another roof of eight meter thick reinforced concrete there was also a flat gun on the roof this bunker served hitler as a home work area sleep area it also had two wings on the sides that housed a kitchen and ventilation and heating apparatus remember ventilation is very important in these hitler's bunker was originally built with walls two to three meters thick but then it was eventually upgraded and upgraded again all these bunkers were only to be used as airaid shelters except for hitler's which was the only one that had living quarters of course cast height here blah blah blah um i don't know if that's the original door it's hard to say it's interesting to note that most of these bunkers are extremely large outside but the working area inside is actually very small safely as german forces left the wolf lair orders were given for all the buildings to be demolished and blown up most of them still stand in somewhat intact order however hitler's bunker was the most damaged and it's impossible to get into the center it was estimated that eight tons of tnt was used to blow up each bunker the traditional ceiling we all know the roof have come down would have been hitler's study in here how much left of that all right i have attachment points on the walls wood dowels ventilation pipes large concrete pieces flew 20 30 meters up into air and away witnesses has testified that resulting explosions have cracked ice in the nearby lakes miles away that is one of the reasons why it is a little complicated to identify where all the pieces go it's like assembling a puzzle blindfolded there you have the roof of the adjoining building what actually looks like a small window although i don't understand why they would be looking at another there wouldn't be any firing slits or any other light we're used to yes you actually have a piece of wood here for the door so wooden dolls were in place right here so this was the original structure and you see on top here sitting there is piece of an additional added piece of reinforcement this is fascinating again there but this is again you're looking at looking at red brick on the outer layer so in case it was hit by an aerial bomb the outer shell would explode and be destroyed but the inner would remain intact look at remnants uh more destroyed here's another one of those that looks like storage down to an underground not particularly reinforced but i'm imagining there's be a lot of need for a lot of storage and the entrance was probably encased by a small house or a hut at the time are you looking at the sloping roof of one of the bunkers and that round circle we know that looks like a little machine gun position about time let's see something that would feel some weaponry around here i was getting worried but this would have been the roof and that flipped over again i don't know what it was bunker is right over there but yeah this was this was a little trebuk tower a little machine gun tower on top not big enough for a flock but certainly for an mg and this was also well destroyed but if we have machine gun positions here this would be the outer of the inner perimeter i would imagine and you see a partially reinforced roof with partial beams [Music] clearly this was the roof that usually these beams crisscross and i don't think they're missing because of the explosion because they stop here so this would have been an entrance reinforced and remember how we always say there's always a hole behind us when we're excavating this and there is okay i give what the hell is this these two pieces could have been from this bunker over here and here's another machine gun position on the opposing side of that destroyed bunker and these two could have been pieces thrown here from the blast i honestly do not know what this is it's not a swimming pool as a water reservoir of some kind looking at the tar on the inside this would have been a water reservoir definitely not a swimming pool because it's a little steep on the slopes and these pieces are all from the bunker over here and out here there would have been far more perimeters that i have yet not found so at least opposing hitler's bunker there is one bunker for with two machine gun positions this is the side of hitler's bunker so when it was blown it was blown quite well and several stories one story there two and a third this would have been part of the roof it's hard to say again this would have been an add-on in some way and here this would have been the divide between the inner and outer wall or it could have been a hallway again it's hard to say i'm thinking hallway because there's wood there's wood pegs here and here so i'm thinking walkway and up here you're looking straight through the side of it again it was blown quite well and it was surrounded by what looked like red tile and underneath me is a walkway into it this could have been part of the roof of hitler's bunker thrown here i am sort of leaning towards that theory and since i'm not standing on ground down here was either original spacing with the main building here and certainly well destroyed and here this must have been a wall and this certainly must have been out of wall because here you have stairs leading to the roof on the outside this is the exterior wall that broke apart from here so this is one exterior wall with an underground passage but this is yes this is the outer wall as well you see the black tar this was huge see the black waterproofing on the outside and in here the other part of the outer wall and then where it broke a piece part housewives but yeah this was an outer wall what looks like a field something is possibly in there besides all the small trenches and soldiers guarding him but i am surprised hitler's bunker is not in the center of all the different concentric rings of this complex i would have thought putting hitler's bunker in the very center for protection within all the concentric rings of other buildings and security here it appears that is on the outside although there was something here i would imagine a similar smaller a smaller bunker was here actually quite a few would have been several bunkers would have been here with machine guns but still the majority of the complex so far is on the other side of hitler's bunker and here is very clear to see the outside waterproofing this is a fascinating sight to see this is very very very large it's very well known that wolf's lair was built on a swamp full of mosquitoes and at one point it got too much for the staff so they had the lakes covered with oil killing all the mosquitoes in the lakes and the frogs when hitler found out he had a fit saying why did you kill the frogs that eats the mosquitoes where after the lakes were cleaned and replacement frogs were called in to continue eating the mosquitoes and today the mosquitoes still outnumber the frogs so i suggest you visit in the winter autumn or spring [Music] i don't take directions well i'm a horrible soldier standing here this is the roof that is what will be above you very very very thick and you have here one of the separate slabs broke loose oral to be separate rebar sticking out that would probably probably have held different layers this is the part facing away from the side of the building and the foundation the casino was built in 1941 the brick and reinforced concrete barrack had two floors of which the lower had his own water intake and food warehouse in addition to the kitchen rooms the casino also had two dining rooms first for hitler guests and important members of this immediate circle the second for secretary security officers less important residents of zone one we earned zone one in 1942 a tea house was built a stone throw from the casino casino again the entrance to both buildings was connected by a passage supported by wooden pillars 1944 the tea house was covered with red brick and reinforced layer of concrete while the upper part of the casino bear was demolished and replaced with a new red brick reinforced concrete building hitler's daily routine on average would start between nine and ten o'clock he would take his dog for a walk and nobody should disturb him without being absolutely necessary about 10 30 he would start browsing the mail which had come in by airplane and trains at 12 o'clock war council would begin after which he would eat lunch until 1942 september he would eat his meals in the dining room here at the casino after september he would eat his meals in his own bunker and yes that is a red star at the end of the casino dining room wall it was from a russian airplane that was shot down during the war at 1800 hours or six o'clock for those who were civilians the evening talks would take place during which initially he will talk much about the air war and then later the war in general these were attended by his closest friends and confidants and these meetings would usually last an hour and was held in the hitler's working room later on more and more gatherings would start in the tea room that would last into sometimes the small hours of the night of course quite often hitler would entertain various generals and field marshals visiting including mussolini who was there on several occasions when they didn't spend time visiting the eastern front also manheim went to visit hitler and vice versa of course decorations were handed out to his favorite soldiers and here hitler's with his falsehood yeagas also inspecting new weapons to keen interest of hitler and here he is with the first tiger prototype it was brought in on rail fled beds while the engineers were still putting the finishing touches on it so hitler could inspect it himself at the wolf's lair you do see a lot of rebar and a lot of steel but i don't know is exactly what this was oh this is one of the pipes this heavy duty plan this is a very heavy duty pipe more so than what i would have expected that's so this wall used of course used to be standing up and the piper leading upwards somebody should clear away all these trees and here is the ceiling we at least recognize partially from some of the fighting buggers we know of the reinforced pillars but not up there which i'm imagining would have been the entrance why it's only partially reinforced and a lot of indents for cable switches the back of the tea house with a very very large foundation i really will say this is a very very huge complex that's very impressive and it was of course it was built uh in various stages and you're looking at here the lower floor small buildings here you're looking at the lower floor where you would have food storage we have another foundation we do spend a lot of time looking at holes in the ground when it comes to world war ii this would have been giving the weatherproofing this would have been a wall that once stood facing that way so that would have been one of the outer walls of the tea house again this is a very very large building and here's more of the foundation for it leading into the hole in the center and it is a little counter-intuitive when i keep saying tea house that's what it was referred to that sort of denotes a small cute little cabin in the alps where you have tea and cake this is anything but small and here you clearly see floor tiling on the other side of the tea house which would lead me to believe that this had once been inside the building with the wall the walls going along here [Music] and down there the entrance to under the bunker the basement of the tea house this is the underground of the old tea house little tea house again that's all that's left what's left of the old tea house but this was storage for food and so on so this is what should be expected i guess reinforced torch and hitler was notorious for spending very very long nights having tea and entertaining guests talking with them about everything and nothing for a very very long time keeping people up because who wants to be the one to tell the fuhrer you're going to bed close the party we've seen before partially destroyed roof pieces this roof is not as thick as what we have been used to see and here's a little bit of the paint on the inside walls that's the original paint in there and a lot of the pipes still sitting in the cement a lot of the black stones embedded in the concrete this is absolutely something else and again here you have the weatherproofing so you're either looking at wall or roof there's here's much more of the tea house that's collapsed it's much easier to see here [Music] this is the back of the tea house well exploded so you have more of the inside which is interesting see what actually what happened this is uh field marshall wilhelm keitel's bunker where the reinforced two meter thick walls see if i don't remember correctly that bose stark it's fly again bunker 19 here honestly at this point i don't know where the numbers are dated post or original so he would have the roof and you have the original here you have these be an outer shell and this would have been the office rooms and the walkway inside this is where the head of the army would be working just down the road from hitler's bunker of course there's one left of the inside of kaitel's bunker still see a little white paint i'm just seeing some of the walls but it's a little bit left off the inside here they all command post attachments on the walls i still came down piping and some piece of rebar that is living over my head here and some of the old some of the old door frames and hinges that's those cartels as we are now used to seeing holes in the ground we will notice that this hole look same size as the ones in the woods in the forests just the right size for a vehicle and kytel's bunker here there's more of brick buildings in the wall in the forest more bricks there should be a sign at every building depicting what it was because they are all important for history you have brick walls and you have another reinforced roof and i can only say holy hell it's very very hard to explain to show how big this is it has a placement for two reinforced concrete platforms on top of it a quad 20 millimeter anti-aircraft gun and an mg-42 gun post and this was a whole complement with a crane mount on the roof necessary for transport spare barrels guns ammunitions and when i tell you this is huge and ostentatious and well armored well you get three seconds to guess who to belong to and of course as i just said this was huge an enormous bunker so of course it would belong to him and girling and it was built in 1944 27 by 21 meters it is still smaller than hitler's but it was a heavy airaid bunker so this is a self-contained defensive gearing bunker that makes sense to me wow one one may wonder if this thing blew into the tree or the tree just decided to grow around it that is interesting that truly that is interesting and on this one well what's left of the old bunker from kaitel steel door frames hinges corner posts i have greens bunker of the big bunkers gurings really is in the best shape and pretty much all of it is accessible i am suspecting this has been walled off after so this is the inside and this will be the main room a few marshall's bunker and the roof very much like what hitler's bunker would have looked like if that interior had left i'm sure lots of pipes for air conditioning and still the white paint is still somewhat fainted here's a big wooden block to attach things to wrong but you can see the indent from the wood from when it was cast so this is the shaft to the roof up to the ceiling so the access to the ceiling come this inside in between the outer and inner shell outside this is clearly looks green might be some of the original thing but in here you have the axis up to the roof here across some goes bunker in the woods are two airaid shelters they look very similar to what i see in denmark and here we have the side of gearing bunker the walkway up to the roof of guring's bunker and you see there is the top part of the staircase that broke away when the outer shell came down the inside of during bumper and here is another building with outer red brick walls and a reinforced ceiling this seems to be the standard build type you would see in this area so this was the 1942 first version of the two interconnected wooden buildings in 1944 the eastern wing was enclosed in brick and reinforced concrete layer and the existing high roof of the building was lowered then replaced with a ceiling made of pre-stressed concrete beams the wooden western wing was demolished and replaced with a brick structure the resulting building was 35 by 11 by 27 40 meter structure base floor of the western wing house of central heat of boiling pool of course being a second man in charge of the third reich hammond goeing head of the luftwaffe and head huntsman of the reich needed his own super bunker and a house adjacent to it with all the luxuries therein however hammond gerring spent most of the time in his personal hunting lodge in the hometon area some 90 kilometers northeast of wolfshanksa here you can see the specially planted trees natural and artificial for camouflage netting a bit of water down here with that brick going through there's a whole underground under these buildings i'll release under some of them it's full of water this is the ladder and store stuff except for water mosquitoes not sure what that was underneath these buildings there is a hole i will say this looks very similar to the secretary's building in layout except this had a boiler room and i don't remember the secretaries did but you had some reinforcement this is the pre-stressed reinforced ceiling on red brick i'm very surprised about all the red brick that was used for the walls but i guess here it was only expected that if there were to be an attack it'd have been from the air so reinforcing the ceilings was enough but yet these were thin these were not two meter thick for the majority of these work buildings and i'm still not seeing the outer layer of security which i'm certainly expecting to be out here in the woods surrounding all these by several layers this is the other side of kytel's bunker which appropriately enough is positioned right next to the army operation staff bunker which is here which has been repurposed into something else i don't know where that piece came from if that went off the roof when kaitel's bunker was blown it probably did there's a lot more that's been destroyed here than i thought this i have not seen before there's a hole and i'm thinking this was a roof and there are several of these i do not know what this used to be this is kytel's bunker although this looks like another one of those work buildings and a ramp to here used to be a door here this is the same type structure and this is not the full thickness of the roof and it smells of uh i don't know sewage i think it's the right word see again one of the red brick walls with a solid pre-stressed concrete and in here is just the and this building was mess hall 2. mess hall 1 was only for the rsd the highest security service and that building is almost no longer in existence you see the red brick walls they were not really built to withstand anything but there is still steel on the windows this could have been placed thereafter it could have been a secure store building which makes perfect sense a lot of attachments in the roof in the ceiling to attach various things outside the mess hall is an interesting structure that looks more like a funnel it is labeled as a ventilation shaft or ventilation channel and i'm not entirely sure what in the underground it is ventilating from and here we see this is interesting because the attachment for the camouflage nets here are different than what we see in some of the bunkers that are expected for france and frontline frontline duty this is a roof that came down it could have been one of those prefab buildings or pre-stressed buildings it's hard to tell i don't see a lot of uh bricks laying around here i'll be able to identify this with a map and there is another prefab building i'm going to call it a prefab building because the roof was pre-stressed pre-fabricated and here yeah god there's another one we'll choose trees growing on top one of the prefab buildings again and remember this is not the thickness of the roof this was actually the communication shelter which is one of the most important buildings that was here and in march 1944 after four month long expansion the work began during which the existing buildings were covered with a reinforced concrete layer and now it looks like a heavy duty building but originally it has a good shelter of two meters now but this is not what it always looked like this was what the communication building was and here you have heavy piping a lot of piping coming from the roof on this one i have not seen that then there the others which is very interesting communication shelter 40 by 23 meters two meters reinforced it's a huge building and one of the most important ones here there's nothing more important than communication especially during wartime so the reinforced bunker for the communications were the most important building on the site without which the fury could not command his army for reference here's the person and here's the full length of the communication building and there's pretty much only one hallway running through where you go from one end to the other and from there you have walkways passages into the interior and this looks very intact parts of the roof here seems to have come down but from this side it all seems to be there this is the communication bunker's other side where you see the shells have separated and here's another entrance and inside the interior have collapsed into the interior so there wasn't an entrance from both ends for comparison you have one of the red brick wall buildings right next to the communication bunker so you can clearly tell which is the most important of the two and this is something we see in the western sea quite often how entrance parts that was built separately has been blown away from the main structure because they were cast the concrete was set separately and these small buildings were placed there and cast at a slept a different time and here you have on the roof an enormous amount of rebar sticking up this cannot just have been for camouflage netting actually that's very interesting another red brick building i actually didn't look at the map before i came here because i wanted to get an idea just from walking it this is a lot larger than i thought certainly a lot larger than himless ss complex this huge bunker is the guest bunker it actually had its own little security zone within security zone one because from july 1944 hitler lived here for a while while reinforcements to his personal bunker was undertaken and not yet complete this is where visiting dignitaries were staying there was two flak cannons on the roof that was accessible by a wrong ladder on the side of the bunker 45 by 23 meters with seven meters of wall and ceiling next to another prefab looks slightly different but that's why it looks so different the roof is up there with the plate then supported by red brick and another cross beam and more red brick smaller than what we've seen before so this is where the shells separated coming down so this end would also have been a later addition which is very interesting and of course you can't see back through this dumbass that i have here we go so this is the interior of this very very interesting and again red brick these are used to be walls that have collapsed these are some of the photos taken over the years of hitler in front of the guest bunker there are several famous photos that were taken on the day of the assassination attempt on july 20th especially this one with gotham stauffenberg where hitler is shaking hands with general kyle borden shots right in front of the guest bunker and when it was demolished one of these huge pieces landed over here around passageway there must have been several rooms in here a lot of space since it forgets because the walls are enormously thick with several entrances in the autumn of 1944 they started reinforcing the entrances the ant rooms that was not all finished by uh by the time they evacuated but they had started that explains the red brick and the other smaller newer added on uh bunker at the other entrance but for all these years of looking at fortifications around the world the double walls with the 50 centimeter spacing in between i've never seen anywhere else for extra camouflage some of the buildings were covered with a mixture of seagrass and green dye which eventually would continue growing on the walls of the bunkers it is a museum in a sense they take good care of it out here they preserve the buildings restaurants and soda for the kids and down the road there's i don't know it looked like a wolf chunks of play house a very well known historian friend asked me what my first impression would be when i got here and i'm used to abandoned cold wet bunkers deteriorating in the forest and that's sort of what i expected to see that was a thousand tourists 7 500 200 cars a hotel ice cream it was it felt so commercial that my initial impression was this is weird this is not right there's something wrong with this but the more i think about it it is preserving the history uh i don't really care that there's a hotel in the old barracks especially now because i'm staying there for the phenomenal amount i'm staying at the hotel for the phenomenal amount of thirty dollars a night so all right fine they turned it into hotel it it's really hard to disguise a bunker for what it was but i actually like what they did here uh after spending a day or two because it preserves the history of the place and not really in an intrusive way i will say don't worry about the guided tours do your own it's more fun and you'll see more especially in the surrounding forests it's going to keep the place here on the map existing for future generations so if that's what it takes i'm actually on board back there's my hotel nice sick of his security garage and staff quarters i mean it does make sense after so many years of working with personal protection that if i'm gonna stay at the wolf's lair i get to stay at the heist cigarette security garage and staff quarters bloody hell i guess we must admit that had i been stuck there at the time german uniform i would have been somebody's bodyguard and i would still have been here being eaten by mosquitoes on january 27 1945 soldiers from the 31st army occupied the area and on february 14th the nkvd moved in and the demining operations could begin the whole area of 15 square kilometers was fenced in by double rows and barbed wires the density of mines that was never before seen the 130 meter lanes were so full of minds it was impossible for anybody to cross it would take 10 years to clear the 54 000 mines and 200 000 rounds of munition and artillery rounds the sappers died doing so in the next episode we're going to go to spare case 2 where some of the more intact bunkers and buildings still exists and i found a few buildings that i could not identify on any of the maps although i have my hunches and one very very very large shelter really was something to see in episode 3 and 4 we'll visit the army's field headquarters and heinrich himmler's field headquarters [Music] you

Channel: Lost Battlefields w Tino Struckmann

Views: 62,456

Keywords: ww2, himmler, adolf, hitler, wolf, wolf's, lair, wolfsschanze, east, hochwald, tino, struckmann, hidden, tour, field-headquarters, fieldheadquarters, Adolf hitler, goering, third reich, headquarters, wolf's lair

Id: 3LV68W39d5Q

Length: 60min 48sec (3648 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020