Wünsdorf 1939: twelve houses that were bunkers, then 41 years as a closed zone

Anyone looking in Berlin for the bunker in which the Second World War ended will find a car park and an information board. The board has stood there since 8 June 2006, put up by the association Berliner Unterwelten so that no legends grow around the place. What remains of the bunker lies beneath the tarmac. The complex from which this war was planned and directed for years is not in Berlin. It lies twenty kilometres further south in the pine forest near Zossen, in the village of Wünsdorf, and you can still go inside it today. For our new episode we rebuilt these sites as a 3D model, as a schematic based on the recorded dimensions, and tell what happened inside them.

A housing estate where nobody lived

In 1936 the German army decided that in the event of war its headquarters would move to Zossen, to an old military camp near Wünsdorf. Construction began a year later. What was built there was meant to look from the air like an ordinary housing estate. Twelve houses with pitched roofs, with windows and doors that were only painted on or attached as facades, and with chimneys that carried no smoke from a stove but served as air vents. Beneath each house lay two concrete levels, and a ring tunnel connected all the houses. The complex was called Maybach I. Why it bore that name is not recorded, so we do not guess.

A few hundred metres away the second part grew at the same time, and it was the real reason for everything: the Zeppelin signals centre. A long building of 117 by 22 metres on two floors, next to it an annex of 57 by 40 metres on three floors, built by the Reich postal service. To the outside world the bunker carried a cover name that sounded like a government office: Amt 500. Two tunnels of about 150 metres each led inside, a third connected it to the twelve houses.

The war is run from the forest

In May 1939 Zeppelin began test operations. In late August 1939, a few days before the invasion of Poland, the army high command moved from Berlin to Zossen. All the telephone and telegraph lines needed for the attack had already been switched through. From then on, orders went from this forest to troops all over Europe. According to the specialist literature, Zeppelin was the largest and most modern signals hub of the Wehrmacht throughout the war. In the summer of 1940 Maybach II was added, eleven more houses for the high command of the armed forces.

Between the houses stood towers that look like cigars made of concrete. They are air raid towers of the Winkel type, named after Leo Winkel, who filed a patent for the shape in 1934. The pointed top was meant to make a bomb glance off instead of exploding. Around 200 such towers were built in Germany, nineteen of them in Wünsdorf alone. By 1948 twelve of them had been blown up, and one is a museum today.

1945: air raid, occupation, demolition

On 15 March 1945 more than 580 aircraft of the US Eighth Air Force flew the third and heaviest raid on Wünsdorf. 120 people died. The bunkers held, the high command kept working during the raid, and only afterwards were departments moved south. In late April the Red Army reached Wünsdorf, and the town was handed over almost without a fight. The staff of Marshal Zhukov took up quarters here while his troops fought for Berlin. The signals centre fell into Soviet hands barely damaged.

After the war the Soviets blew up both Maybach complexes from 1946 onwards, once everything useful had been removed. The houses were left as ruins that you can look into today. Zeppelin, however, remained standing. The structure was so massive that they left it to itself, and in the following years its lower rooms filled with groundwater.

41 years as a closed zone

In March 1953 the homes east of the railway were cleared, along with the post office, the pharmacy, the savings bank and the shops. About 800 residents had to leave and were resettled. The main road was closed, 30,000 Soviet soldiers moved in, and Wünsdorf became the headquarters of the Soviet forces in Germany. For the people of the GDR the place was from then on a closed zone, a town in the middle of the country that no neighbour was allowed to enter.

Behind the fence a small Soviet town grew up with nurseries, schools, sports grounds, swimming pools and shops. At its peak, according to various sources, between 50,000 and 75,000 people lived here, soldiers with their wives and children, next to the roughly 2,700 people of Wünsdorf outside the fence. A train to Moscow left from the town's own platform. And beneath the forest the old bunker was needed again: at the end of the 1950s the Soviets had the water pumped out of Zeppelin and converted it into a command post for their high command, with airlocks and small work rooms. According to the specialist literature it was meant to survive even a nuclear strike. The German signals centre was given a Russian name: Ranet.

In June 1994 the Western Group of Forces celebrated its farewell in Wünsdorf, and by September the town was empty. Left behind were 260 hectares suspected of holding munitions. Clearing them turned up around 98,000 rounds of ammunition, plus 47,000 other explosive items and 45,000 cubic metres of rubbish. Anyone who finds something rusty in the woods around Wünsdorf should leave it where it is and call the police.

What our model shows and what it does not

The 3D sites are a schematic based on the recorded dimensions: twelve and eleven bunker houses, two levels, the ring tunnel and the footprint of Zeppelin. The positions of houses A1 to A6 and A13 to A17 come from OpenStreetMap, the others we added along the ring. We give no figure for the depth, because only one source states it. The fence around the closed zone is a schematic, not the historical boundary. The scenes with people in the video are illustrations, generated with AI and labelled in the picture. They do not show real people.

In our data there are 41 bunkers within five kilometres of Wünsdorf, thirty of them named: the Maybach houses A1 to A6 and A13 to A17, eleven pointed bunkers, the Zeppelin signals bunker, the Soviet bunker Panzir and the end structures of the tunnels. Across Germany there are 10,720 bunkers, more than four thousand of them in the west along the old border alone. This is what OpenStreetMap has mapped, clipped to the national border, and not a final count. The bunker layer of the orecast map is part of orecast Pro.

Going down yourself

Since 1998 Wünsdorf has been Germany's first book town, with antiquarian bookshops in the old barracks. The book town offers guided tours through Maybach I and Zeppelin, about an hour and a half underground at ten degrees. One of the Winkel towers is a museum, and around 20,000 visitors come every year. Dates and prices are on the book town's website, please check before you go. The orecast map shows you which bunker stands near you, and the video tells the whole story in eleven minutes.

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