Thread: Abandon tunnels
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Old 03-22-2014, 09:35 AM
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Schone23666 Schone23666 is offline
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I'm not sure if there was another thread on this somewhere, but there are miles and f**king miles of old underground tunnel networks and bomb shelters throughout Germany, a lot of it under the cities around the Ruhr area and such.

When I attended University of Maryland overseas in Germany (they had an overseas program for dependents graduating from high school over there, back then) they had just moved the campus from Augsburg to Mannheim. The barracks the campus shared with a U.S. Army transportation/logistics outfit used to be an Imperial German army barracks around the turn of the century, later got converted into a barracks and depot for a Panzer unit during WWII and also was used as one of several AA observation posts. An old concrete MG nest/AA flak tower and several observation posts disguised as bell towers could still be seen studding the roofs of the barracks buildings.

Anyway, there was a permanently fenced off entrance off in a grassy corner by itself, no adjoining buildings or anything, and I was told that was one entrance that led to a massive series of tunnels and shelters beneath Mannheim. A few old timers told us that before they'd closed it off, when the waters had receded (the tunnels were now flooded) they'd gone down below to look around and found old rotting bunk rooms, radio rooms, etc. and even found underground garages with a few old rusted, parked Panzer tanks still in them.

Look around enough and I think you'll find plenty of stories of lost underground shelters/tunnels and weapons caches they were still turning up in Germany decades after the war.
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