In 1972 I went with my father for a great holiday exploring Klodzko area in southern Poland. There was hard to find motel or hotel, so we had to find private “Bed and breakfast”.
Once we had luck and stayed overnight in nice old house owned by German “autochtone”, as they were called during communist era… Sad…
He was a very nice old bloke. My father bought a bottle of VAT69 which this time in Poland costed $2.85 and they were talking.
Grandpa Helmut told us about frantic soviet investigations right after the war in 1946.
Soviets were trying to find German reactor hidden somewhere underground in this area. Some officers were billeted in Helmut’s house and they were drinking every night talking loudly. They did not know that Helmut was Russian POW in WWI and he learned russian quite well.
Thanks to this linguistic ability he was somewhat allowed to stay in his house and survive deportations of Germans. He said: “Anytime they come I just started to yell at them in russian…and they left me alone.”
Have a look at this site which is obviously, ehm, not really reliable…
http://missilegate.com/rfz/chapter1.htm
What is important, reading through it you’ll find about the area I’m talking about…
Albert Speer - he knew … everything. Following is one of the reports on the construction of the “Riese” complex:
“This is most certainly the largest bunker and probably the largest headquarter constructed during World War Two. The work started in 1943. In the vicinity of the spa of Bad Charlottenbrunn, 70 km south west of Wrocław. At that time, Hitler was still hoping to stop the Red Army marching west, save Upper Silesia - the easternmost, industrial part of the Reich from the Russians. The headquarter near Charlottenbrunn was named - accordingly to its size - “Riese”. It was never to be used by Hitler personally, not by any of his field marshals. The construction cost reached 150 million marks, four times more than the construction cost of the Wolf’s Lair. (…) During the construction of “Riese”, 257,000 cubic metres of reinforced concrete were used, 213,000 cubic metres of underground passages were dug, 58 kilometres of roads with six bridges were laid, 100 kilometres of pipes were used.”
What it mean “headquarter”???
I will soon post some photos.
Cheers,
Lancer44