History
The bunker complex below the vineyards and forests along the river Ahr was built inside two disused railway tunnels of a former strategic railway line built in preparation of World War I but never entered into service. After the war, during years of recession, the German state railway company lost interest in the line which was of no economic value and finally abandoned it.
Between 1930 and 1939 the disused railway tunnels were used to farm mushrooms to gain independence from having to import French fungi. During the later phase of World War II several arms manufacturing companies occupied the tunnels and a huge concentration camp for forced labourers was erected outside the protective cover of the tunnels, which was also referred to under the code name Lager Rebstock (Camp Vine). Inside the tunnels was a construction facility for manufacturing ground equipment and mobile launch pads for the V-2 rocket. With increasing Allied air raids at the end of the war, the tunnels served as makeshift air-raid shelters.
Read more about this topic: Government Bunker (Germany)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
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“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)