Heart of Darkness
At this time of the year, when the Gierloz forest in northeast Poland turns a rich autumn gold and the trees lose their leaves, a sinister secret is revealed: Scattered through an eight-kilometer square of this dense forest are the concrete remains of Adolf Hitler's World War II headquarters.
Called the Wolf's Lair, the area's 80 fortified concrete monoliths werehome to about 2,000 Nazis and support staff from June 1941 until November 1944.
Back then, the Wolf's Lair (apparently the name appealed to Hitler, who liked to be referred to as "The Wolf") was like a small village: with one post office, a sauna, cinema and teahouse. It had a garage for Hitler's cream Mercedes limousine, and a special exercise area for his favorite pet Alsatian, Blondi. There was a 45-meter-long typing pool, a water reservoir, and underground food storage areas.
Today, it is open for passing tourists and all that remains are half-destroyed concrete walls a reminder of this fascist regime's paranoid madness. The Nazis blew up their fortified lair and laid 54,000 mines in the surrounding forest when they beat a hasty retreat at the end of the war, but Mother Nature is slowly reclaiming it; tree roots work their way through the broken concrete and moss swallows up entire walls. Water drips from the ceilings and rust eats the exposed reinforcement cables.
For $25 three friends and I employed a guide for a one-hour tour of the Wolf's Lair, although you can do a self-guided tour with a map for an entry fee of $2.
On the day we visited, en route to the Mazurian Lakes, the sun was shining and a gentle autumn breeze rattled the trees. To suddenly see a huge concrete wall rising from the forest floor seemed incongruous. To know who lived here and what evil they committed was an eerie feeling.
Our guide reeled off facts and figures like an encyclopedia. "And this was formerly Hitler's guest bunker," she said as we walked toward an ugly gray pyramid with sloping walls and a flat roof. "It measures 45 meters long, 27 meters wide and 6.5 meters tall, with walls six meters thick."
A great crack ran through the walls and shining a torch through the slim door revealed a dark, dank cave not the sort of place you'd expect to find Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini spending the night.
Indistinguishable chunks of concrete, all in various stages of decay, lay throughout the forest like ancient Roman remains. One very badly damaged bunker the size of a small duplex, simply marked #13 on the map, was Hitler's home. The largest of all the bunkers, its outer surface area totaled 2,480 square meters, and its roof, which was 8.5 meters thick, supported a flak tower. Hitler spent 800 days in this strange concrete home.
Its back has been blasted away and only the front is relatively intact, where you can feel your way along its darkened inside walls. In Hitler's day, a power station, air purification plants, heating and a clean water supply made the bunker livable. A railway line and two nearby airfields enabled easy access.
Hitler even had neighbors. The Luftwaffe commander in chief, Hermann Goering, and the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, lived in custom-built fortified structures. The ceilings and walls had interior gaps to provide a buffer zone in case of mortar attack and a ventilation system protected against gas attack.
Our guide showed photos of the bunkers from the early 1940s: Cozy interiors with tables and chairs, lounges, carpeting, and artwork on the walls. The exteriors were daubed with a seagrass and concrete mix, and painted green as camouflage. Fake leaves and netting were strung overhead and changed with the seasons. In fact, you can still see the metal wires in the trees where the netting hung. Other artifacts are harder to spot; a guide recently found a teacup and plate stamped with the Nazi insignia lying in the forest. It's now on display in the Wolf Lair's visitor shop.
"It was probably one of the soldiers eating his lunch in the woods, and he left his cup and plate behind," our guide suggested.
Construction of the Wolf's Lair began in 1940 and continued until 1944, requiring the labor of nearly 3,000 men. The scale of the project says a lot about the paranoia that existed in the upper levels of this dictatorship. But thick walls, isolation, and 1,200 soldiers were not enough to protect Hitler.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and a team of German officers plotted to assassinate their leader. During a meeting at the Wolf's Lair, von Stauffenberg left a suitcase bomb before excusing himself to answer a pre-arranged phone call. Four people died in the explosion. Although Hitler was injured, he traveled to the train station that afternoon to greet Mussolini.
Meanwhile, von Stauffenberg was caught and executed. His immediate collaborators and some 5,000 others involved in the plot were also killed.
The only reminder of the bombing is a plaque marking a pile of rubble. But it was a portentous event. Four months later, on Nov. 20, Hitler returned to Berlin and the destruction of the Wolf's Lair began on Jan. 24, 1945, three days before the Red Army arrived.
For some reason the Allied forces never attempted to bomb the Wolf's Lair. But our guide said that the Russians did drop a few bombs, which failed to do any damage to these impenetrable walls.
