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)
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“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)