Today, the location of the underground city is no longer a secret to anyone: it is hiding in the bowels of the Owl Mountains in Lower Silesia, 80 kilometers from the Polish city of Wroclaw. According to Hitler's plan, the object "Giant" was to replace his headquarters "Wolf's Lair", designed to monitor operations in the East. Did the Fuhrer's ambitious plans come true?
Project "Giant"
The starting point for the construction was the largest castle in Silesia - Ksi, confiscated by the Nazis in 1944. Almost immediately, underground work began there. The people who caught this moment are still alive. 81-year-old Dorota Stemlovskaya, as a child, lived in the castle at that time. Her family served with the former owners of Ksienz. She remembers the arrival of engineers and the explosions that soon began to come from underground. Even then, rumors spread among local residents that housing for Hitler was being built underground.
However, it soon became clear that this was not just a cozy nest. In the rock under the castle, 2 kilometers of tunnels were cut and an elevator shaft 50 meters deep was built. The castle itself and its dungeons were supposed to become the headquarters and housing for Hitler, and what was deeper underground was intended to protect the Wehrmacht. In this complex, the Nazis planned to place arms factories for the production of the coveted "weapons of retaliation", at worst, hangars for assembling aircraft. It is no coincidence that the Nazis moved several large enterprises, such as the Kgirr machine-building plant, to these places. Even today, in the Owl Mountains, you can find abandoned barracks, construction warehouses, and tunnels started. True, most of them are covered with construction waste or completely cemented.
High price
No one knows whether the Nazis managed to complete the construction of the facility and how much they were able to realize their plans. Hard rock significantly slowed down the work, but it perfectly protected the structure from bombing. The first stage of work was the most difficult. The Nazis used concentration camp prisoners as labor mainly from Auschwitz: Poles, Italians and Russians. According to rough estimates, 13 thousand people worked on the "Giant" project. The underground work was hard and dangerous. In addition, typhoid fever and other diseases claimed the lives of hundreds of people. The bodies of many of those killed at the site have never been found. Apparently, they were left in the tunnels of the "Giant".
All in vain
Despite the attracted material and human resources, the construction was not accelerated, much less completed. The Soviet army was rapidly advancing towards Berlin. In January 1945, her route passed the Owl Mountains. This forced the Nazis to brick up all the entrances and exits to the underground city. On this page, his story was cut short …
In search of treasures
According to one hypothesis, when the Nazis realized that the construction of the underground city could not be completed, they turned the "Giant" into a huge cache. There is a hope that there are material and cultural values looted during the war from all over the world. Including the legendary Amber Room, and one of the famous "golden trains" of the Third Reich, on which the Nazis tried to take their treasures out of crushed Germany.
In the book of the Polish writer Joanna Lamparska “The Golden Train. A Brief History of Madness”contains information about the interrogation of SS officer Herbert Klose. According to the Nazi, in 1944, the police chief of the city of Wroclaw asked him to help hide the iron boxes with valuables stored at the headquarters. The boxes without any identification marks were hermetically sealed.
On the appointed day, due to his injury, Klose could not be present during the transportation. Nevertheless, he knew that the boxes were taken to different places. Whether this is true or not is a big question. However, such testimonies inspire treasure seekers to exploits. Who knows - maybe this really isn't just a legend? And someday luck, spreading its arms, will step towards them.
