Politics and Contemporary History in Germany – Panorama

For many decades the atomic shelters that were built to house both the German federal government, as well as the regional governments, were top-secret. Now, twenty years after the fall of the Wall, the government shelter in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has opened its heavy, steel-clad doors to the general public, casting light onto a bizarre remnant of history.

A simple double garage next to a detached house, behind it a tree-covered hill – this is the perfect camouflage for the former atomic shelter of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia in the small village of Kall-Urft in the Eifel mountains. A long stairway leads to a heavy steel-clad door that is set in an outer wall that is three metres thick. This is where the journey through time begins – a journey that embraces all kinds of contrasts: between the secret and the public, between the protected inner sanctuary for the privileged and the defencelessness of the population and, finally, between what used to be state-of-the-art technology and what we have today.

Immediately after entering the visitor sees the decontamination room, “They might possibly have been exposed to radiation,” the shelter’s new owner, Claus Röhling, explains to the visitors. Anybody who wanted to get into the shelter had to first take a shower and dispose of his or her clothes. If, for some reason, somebody had to go outside, to maybe repair something, they had to put on protective suits and a gas mask. “It was probably decided who had to go by drawing lots.” The further the visitors venture into the shelter, the more they start to feel the Cold War – not least because of the low temperatures.

Shivering with cold, the visitors pass those old, black bakelite phones with a dial hanging on the walls on their way to the “ABC Information Department”- one of the many austere operations rooms. Claus Röhling picks up a “WaDuForm” and explains what it is – a “Warnamts-Durchsage-Formular” – a kind of official registration form. “Every attack is given a number and the time, when and where is noted down.” The uncontrollable, the horrific inferno after an atomic attack, was able to be controlled and bureaucratically dealt with - this is the irrebuttable presumption that justified the building of these shelters and kept them going for so long – from their construction in 1962 until their closure in 1993.

A rush of visitors

Today visitors crowd into the shelter, where, in a worst-case scenario, there was room for only 300 people who then had a mere 30 days to find a way to survive. In March 2009 Claus Röhling opened the doors of the shelter for the first time to the general public. In collaboration with Jörg Diester from the Government Shelter Museum in Ahrweiler he developed an “Eifel Shelter Tour”. It links up, what was known as, the “emergency seat of the regional government” with the that of the German Federal Government in Ahrweiler, near Bonn.

Within just a few days the first 150 places for the tour were booked up. 2,000 people were put on the waiting list. “People are fascinated because these shelters – these “emergency seats of government” – were top-secret command projects and the German general public was kept completely in the dark about them,” says Jörg Diester. The dimensions of the official atomic shelter of the German Federal Government never cease to amaze, “It was the biggest of its kind in Europe, the Germans really went overboard with it.” The underground shelter was 17 kilometres long and had room for 3,000 people. They were housed in 936 bedrooms and 897 offices. One of these was particularly large – the Cabinet Room with an area of 125 square metres – the Federal Government was to continue governing without feeling hemmed in or cramped in any way. There was even a hairdressing salon. Back then the construction costs amounted to 4.7 billion deutschmarks, the annual cost of upkeep ran to about 1.6 million deutschmarks.

A shelter as an “added-on” extra

All of Germany’s federal states were required to set up emergency locations for their governments. “The emergency seat for the government of North Rhine-Westphalia is unique in Germany,” enthuses shelter expert, Jörg Diester. It is particularly well preserved and is now regularly accessible to the general public. The shelter in Saarland on the other hand has gone to rack and ruin, the one in Schleswig-Holstein can only be viewed occasionally. Only in the state of Baden-Württemberg has a shelter been put to commercial use – according to Diester, it is used to store data back-up for the state government and for some global corporations. Furthermore some authorities and institutions had their own shelters. For example, the Deutsche Bundesbank (the German Central Bank) had a special protected vault where it stored a surrogate currency for the deutschmark – there was always the fear of counterfeit money in times of war.

Sometimes the existence of shelters was kept so secret that even the owners themselves knew nothing of their existence. This is why some public properties were sold with a built-in, underground surprise, tells Jörg Diester.

Claus Röhling’s shelter in Urft also came, so to speak, with an “added-on” extra. One of the two contracting parties however did in fact know something. Röhling, who is a graduate engineer, only had to pay for the detached house next to the shelter to acquire his concrete fortress. Apparently the state government was so relieved to be able to place this legacy from the Cold War in such capable hands – after all its construction had once cost ten million deutschmarks. Röhling knew about the secret shelter, because his father-in-law had the job of keeping the “emergency seat of government” in tip-top condition, ready to be used.

A Noah’s Ark made of concrete

When confronted with the question whether the government shelter in Ahrweiler would have been any use in a worst-case scenario, for example, in the middle of the 1980s, Jörg Diester answers with a firm “no”, “Right back on the day its first foundation stone was laid, the shelter had already lost for they had tied themselves down to a certain scheme.” Any form of adapting the shelter to new threats and weapons systems was only possible to a limited extent. “This Noah’s Ark, even when it was operating, was a museum piece,” says Diester.

In the government shelter in Kall-Urft in North Rhine-Westphalia one of the museum pieces is a radio studio that was installed by the WDR, the state’s radio station. With all its original equipment from the 1960s it triggers all kinds of nostalgic enthusiasm. The studio would have been the place from which the premier of the state would have spoken to the nation. “The aim behind the studio was however to calm the people down,” explains Claus Röhling. He presses a button and with a loud click the old tape recorder comes to life with a double sample of – first of all, its functional efficiency and, secondly, of a bizarre mix of easy listening music – against a background of hissing static Edith Piaf can be heard singing “Je ne regrette rien”.