Abandoned Underground U-Boat HQ

(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.


 Hello Everyone. Holy Shit! Here we are, looking down at a hole in the ground that was once the entrance to a huge subterranean Nazi facility. They had surface buildings too but they were bombed by the Allies on the 17th April 1945, and whatever was left was blown up by the Russians when they came across it four days later. The vast underground portion survived, and the Russians used it as a munitions depot after the war. I'm not sure when they left it, but now it's just sitting here in the woods, slowly rotting away.

Isn't this amazing?
My sister and I had quite the trek to find it, traipsing through thick German woodland that was allegedly populated by wild boar and, according to rumour, still containing live munitions that hadn't been cleaned up after the Russians left. There's no phone signal out here, so if anything bad did happen, we'd be pretty screwed. Just finding this hatch was an adventure in itself! Even the old flak bunkers that defended the facility during World War 2 didn't offer much in the way of clues, but they did reassure us that we were at least heading in the right direction. Those pesky Nazis wouldn't have built them for nothing.

So, we'll come back to the hatch. First I'm going to show you one of those flak bunkers! Despite being huge concrete structures, they do seem to creep up.

Now this should go without saying, but I am not a Nazi. I was banned on Facebook once for sharing a photo of Hitler throwing a frisbee, but there wasn't anything in favour of the little lunatics mad views. If anything it was pro frisbee! That simple plastic disk can warm even the cruellest of hearts! You should totally buy one! Facebook didn't see it that way, and I was banned for thirty days, which is a little excessive. If we decide to ban pictures of people just because they're morally shit, they'd have to rename the website "Facelessbook."

My concern, of course, is where the line is drawn. I'm completely in favour of removing pro-Nazi stuff if its serious, but banning a photo of someone who once existed, even if nobody likes them, is bordering on the erasure of history itself and that's dangerous territory. This is a period of history that needs to be remembered. Facebook don't see it that way, mostly because they listen too much to the armchair activists who get offended over anything and everything, but here's how I see it-

As a mild example, I don't like rap music. I'm aware that it exists and that if I search for it on the internet I will find it. But I don't search for it because I don't like it. But if someone posted a link, and I clicked it, and it took me to some rap music, I don't try to get it banned! I click away! And here's a little secret- everyone with internet access has the ability to do that with anything that they see online. It's easy! Even a chimpanzee could figure it out. It's so easy to do that at some point we have to just accept that these people want to have something to moan about. And if that's their pre-arranged outcome regardless of what they come across, then why even bother trying to reign ourselves in?

But enough about Facelessbook, Frisbees and Chimpanzees, let's take a look at this place!

A flak bunker is basically a defence facility that would have been protecting the U-Boat headquarters. The roof would have had a few anti-aircraft weapons, ready to open fire if the enemies got too close, and presumably there was a means for ground defence too. There were two flak bunkers here in total, both of which are little more than ruins now. However I did manage to hunt down an image of a building which is allegedly this one in an earlier time.

(Picture not mine, obviously)

It kinda looks like that one level of Lemmings.

It helps if you squint. It also helps if you remember Lemmings.


Anyway, construction began here in 1939, intending originally to be a Naval intelligence school, but when bombs started dropping on Berlin, they decided that keeping the Naval High Command in the city was strategically moronic, and in 1943 they decided to move it all out here, to the middle of nowhere, under the command of a chap named Karl Dönitz.

Karl Dönitz was a picture-book Nazi, as described by the man whose position in the kriegsmarine he'd just taken over, Erich Raeder. Raeder was pretty ruthless too. As head of the German navy he had ordered his men to fight until the end, either win or sink with their flags flying, but never retreat.  Retreat was a sackable off ence. But following the battle of the Barents sea, the German ships did so abysmally that Raeder offered his resignation in a futile attempt to make Hitler less angry. Raeder was out, Dönitz was in.

Dönitz wholeheartedly embraced Nazi ideology, and had a mad crush on Hitler. He had a bust statue of Hitler in his bedroom and everything. I'm serious! And like any picture-book Nazi, Dönitz hated Jews for some reason. But perhaps more surprisingly is that unlike your unable-to-even-spell racists of today, Dönitz was quite clever. He had an IQ of 138.

Dönitz is often credited for creating the German U-Boat fleet during World War 2, and that's a pretty big deal. Winston Churchill once said that the only thing that really frightened him during the war was the threat posed by the U-Boats.

Apart from the flak bunkers I'm currently climbing on, this facility was mostly underground, but allegedly these underground bits connected numerous surface buildings, all of which are now gone.

From what I understand, there's been three attempts to destroy the facility, the first two in 1945 and then a third attempt by the Russians in 1947. Quite why they waited two years before trying again is anyones guess, but since the Nazis loved their huge concrete structures, all these bombs really did was crack it all up and give us some wonderful climbing frames to scurry around.

I might be wrong, but I think that the octagon shape over there is an old weapons platform.

According to some old diagrams I found, this big square thing is an old ventilation shaft.

Someone has drawn a woman with no arms or head next to a giant penis. It's childish, but I'm kinda relieved that there's graffiti out here. If the rumours are true that there are live munitions still in these woods, it's quite reassuring to see evidence of human presence but no human remains.
Unless the bombs had Reverse-Penny-Crayon powers that turned human remains into wall drawings. Now there's a plot twist.

So Karl Dönitz, who ran this facility, was born in 1891. He joined the German Navy in 1910, and married a nurse in 1916, spawning with her three tiny humans, Ursula, Claus and Peter. During World War One, he steadily climbed naval ranks, but was captured by the British. It was during his time as a prisoner of war that he pondered war strategy, and had an idea involving a whole bunch of submarines ganging up on one enemy vessel. He called this the wolfpack tactic, but at that time submarine communications technology was too primitive to make it feasible. For Dönitz it was simply a dream. He returned to Germany in 1920, and to the navy.

The Versailles Treaty had ensured that the size of the naval fleet was to remain at 35% that of the British Navy. This was purely so that the British could regulate German expansion. Little did anyone realise, the Germans were breaking the rules from day one.

At the time, the submarines were always accompanied by surface fleets, but Dönitz said "Fuck that. Lets do it entirely with submarines."
Erich Raeder wasn't too thrilled with that idea, and the two clashed on the subject. Raeder saw the U-Boats as little more than an additional helping hand to the surface fleet. But what Raeder and Dönitz both agreed on was that they weren't ready for war yet. Raeder estimated it would take them another five years to reach sufficient numbers. Dönitz said they'd need at least three hundred U-Boats, and some suspect that Raeder was deliberately delaying their production to piss him off.
There might be something to that. He made no secret of his dislike of Dönitz, admitting that he was a hard worker, but saying that he craved approval from his superiors a little too much. But Raeders arse was one which Dönitz wasn't kissing. Only one U-Boat was launched in 1937 and six more in 1938.Seeing as Dönitz saw them as a means to win the war, he was pretty infuriated.

In 1937 Dönitz argued that a fleet of submarines could target regular merchant vessels and deprive a country of resources. He revived his old "wolfpack" tactic that he'd thought up during world war one. Technology had improved and it was now totally feasable. Dönitz claimed that a pack of U-boats swarming British oil tankers would starve the British navy of the fuel to run their ships and effectively force them out of a war. He also adopted a new tactic of shallow-submergence night attacks, too deep to be seen on the surface but too close to the surface to be detected by sonar.

But on the day the war broke out, he only had 57 U-Boats, and only 27 of those were capable of making it from their base to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a bit pitiful given that Dönitz had asked for 300, and he was understandably horrified, given that commanding them all to work effectively was his responsibility. According to witnesses, he had to leave the room for five minutes, to compose himself. He came back in and just said "We'll just have to make the most out of a hopeless situation."

He asked for more U-Boats, and he got about two a month. It wasn't enough so he asked for more, but nobody took him seriously. He decided that what he needed to do was amaze them all with an amazing display of U-Boat potential. In October 1939, he sent a U-Boat to the British naval base at Scapa Flow, where it entered completely undetected, sank an entire British battleship, killed 833 people, and got away. The element of surprise was theirs. The British certain'y weren't expecting it!
It was regarded as the most extraordinary feat of the war so far. Finally Dönitz had the recognition he craved, and now they were finally listening to him. U-Boat production was up, and in typical Nazi style they were all built by forced Jewish labour.

Here's a couple more of the flak bunkers weapon platforms.

There's some stairs here but it's impossible to get to them now. At first I assumed that the connecting stairs had collapsed, but I've seen a few pictures of similar bases that show external ladders leading up to stairways, so maybe this was something like that.

Here scribbled on the wall was a familiar sight. It's Erik Rotheim, the cartoon bear created by the street artist, Tobo. Tobo's work tends to consist of the cartoon bear named after the inventor of the spray can, offering words of wisdom on the walls of Germany. I spoke about him in my blog about Teufelsberg, where I first found his work.

Here, it's been defaced. It's a pretty precise defacement too. Someone has actually crossed out the bear and his words, but what he was saying is "Stay positive, work hard, make it happen."
Why would anyone cross that out?

My sister pointed out this spider web, which is the work of a Funnel Spider. They weave their webs in a tunnel and eat any insects that are stupid enough to go in. Now I was quite shocked when I started researching them because according to the internet, the Funnel Spider is native to Australia and one of the most venomous arachnids in the world, a fact that was quite contrasting to my sisters calm attitude about finding one here in Germany. But I found out that there is a European Funnel Spider too, and it's harmless to humans.

Under Dönitz leadership the U-Boat fleet sank 199 British ships over a six month period. The German navy referred to this period as "The First Happy Time." Presumably it was just known simply as "The Happy Time" up until the Second Happy Time, which came in 1942. America was now involved, and Dönitz turned his U-Boat fleet to them, sinking around 500 of them between January and July.
There's something kinda messed up about such whimsical names for what was basically an undersea bloodbath. 

Dönitz was a very hands-on commander, frequently contacting his fleets up to 70 times a day just to question their position, fuel supply and other details. This micro managing actually helped the British, who had gotten lucky, having captured a U-Boat and cracked its "Enigma" machine, finally gaining the ability to translate Nazi codes and eavesdrop on their messages. Thanks to Dönitz they had plenty to work with! Because of his incessant calls, they were able to locate the U-Boats and move their ships away from them, denying them a victory, and occasionally sink them. Dönitz, ironically, had favoured the U-Boats for their superiority but was becoming their own downfall. He was actually really puzzled by what was going on, and didn't find out exactly how the British were doing it until the 1970s, long after his retirement.

Now, back to that hatch!

Finally, after checking out two flak bunkers, and climbing two old fences, we finally located the hatch, inconspicuous amongst the woodland.

Amazingly, it opened. It sure was heavy though! If you want someone to suffer, just wait until they climb up this ladder and then drop the hatch on their head.

The access shaft is ten metres, straight down into the dark. If you've followed this blog, you'll have seen me post about bunkers before, but they're all tiny. This place is gigantic by comparison.

At the bottom of the ten metre ladder was a stairway leading to another ladder and another hatch. The interesting thing about this hatch is I couldn't get it to open, nor could I find any trace of it on the surface in spite of it being only a few feet away. I think maybe the one I'd entered through was always external, and served as an exit from a building that once stood next to it, which this hatch had led down from. After all, numerous surface buildings were linked underground, but it seems that most of the old entrances have been closed off or buried when the surface buildings were destroyed.

Also at the bottom of the ladder and the stairway is this door leading deeper into the facility. Someone has also drawn a stick figure spanning most of the length of the ladder, and labeled it "Tall Man."

As we enter the first room facility, we see a pile of rubble and another ladder leading upwards to a blocked hatch. Also, through the door one can see next to the entry ladder a tiny stick figure labeled "Small Man" to go with the "Tall Man" graffiti. Other spray-happy guests have written more ominous messages, and surprisingly they're all in English. The metal door next to the new ladder was once attached to the doorway. Some of the urbex photos I've seen of this location show it still attached, so it's been broken off by vandals at some point.

The facility was labyrinthian from here onwards, with doors leading in all directions to various different hallways. It was pitch black down here, and easy to get lost. Luckily some kind soul has drawn arrows on the walls pointing towards the exit, which is reassuring, but also testament to just how big this place is. 

So this is the facility where Karl Dönitz worked, along with a bunch of Nazis. The facility had a barracks, communications equipment, and even a casino for the Nazi officers downtime.

As of 1943, it was from here that every communication with the U-Boat fleet was sent. Every example of U-Boat usage during world war 2 was orchestrated from within this complex. It was from here that Karl Dönitz called them up 70 times a day to check on their progress and accidentally give their locations away to the British. And here I am, walking around it. Even now, there's a dark, serious vibe down here. It still carries with it the authorative atmosphere of its past.

The same year that Dönitz moved the naval high command out here, his son Peter, similarly in the navy, went down with a U-Boat in the north Atlantic. Dönitz sought to protect his remaining son, by sending him away from the military to become a doctor. But on his 24th birthday he persuaded his friends in the navy to let him ride on their boat for a raid on Selsey on the coast of England. They were all taken out by a French Destroyer named "La Combattante."

So to put it simply, Karl Dönitz was pissed off. His one surviving child was his daughter, Ursula. She was actually staying here when she learned of her brothers death. She was in bed, recovering from angina. Dönitz apparently entered her room, and unable to articulate his thoughts, he just sat beside her and held her hand in silence.

Now, onto the best part of any abandoned place- the toilets. 

Check this out! Nazis urinated here! Here's where Karl Dönitz got his cock out.

There's a shower down here too. Here's where Karl Dönitz was naked!

I love this huge military door, still numbered, and still bearing the circular opening mechanism.
And what's that on the wall?

Ah, accordion lessons. Of course.

Some of the rooms are missing their floors entirely, allowing a glimpse downstairs. As if being underground wasn't cool enough, there's a whole lower floor to check out. How cool is this???

Presumably when the Russians came along, they stripped it of all the communications equipment and U-Boat paraphrenalia. Likewise, any Nazi-specific stuff, like swastikas and whatnot, were likely removed during Russian occupation.

The graffiti here reads "Smile, you're alive... for now."
It's lovely and creepy, and someone has spoiled it all by writing something dumb like "I've seen Hell."
I've seen Love Island too, bro. It's nothing to brag about.

While Karl Dönitz is a notable figure in Nazi history, the barracks here were also the place of residence of another notable German, the naval officer Berthold Grag Schenk von Stauffenberg. What a fucking mouthful. I'm just going to call him Bert.

Bert plotted to assassinate Hitler with his brother Claus in 1944, using a bomb. The plan failed, and Claus was killed by a firing squad.
Bert was arrested and interrogated. He went on record saying that believing in racial superiority is fine, but the holocaust was a little excessive and exagerated.
His captors said "Oh we'll show you excessive and exagerated." 
They hung him repeatedly, and each time he lost consciousness, they cut him down, resuscitated him, and then hung him again! It went on multiple times. His torture was his own execution on repeat, and the entire ordeal was actually filmed for Hitler to watch at his leisure.

He probably has an extra large gravestone, just to make sure his name fits on it.

Check out this gorgeous generator!

I do wonder, with a little TLC would this still work?

This place also featured in a book by German author and war correspondent, Lothar Gunther Bucheim called "The Fortress." Apparently the ninth chapter takes place here. Bucheim also wrote "Das Boot," or "The Boat," which has been made into a movie. It basically follows the crew of a U-Boat but shows a much more human side to the war, showing the crew as ordinary individuals just trying to do their best with the hand they've been dealt.
Bucheim also knew Dönitz and described him in post-war interviews as a "Harbinger of death who could not have been more contemptible."

The U-Boat fleet was eventually outmatched by the Allied forces. New models of U-Boats were created, but Dönitz was a bit of a traditionalist, rather indifferent and often hostile to new technology, prefering to focus more on the mass production of the classic U-Boat, which was less and less effective with each passing year as enemy technology improved.

By April 1945, with Berlin surrounded by the Russians, Dönitz had ordered U-Boat operations to be controlled from a base near Denmark, and he wasn't present when the bombs dropped, although his house was nearby and it somehow survived. This facility was left for the Russians.

This deep into the facility, graffiti is scarce. Something about a subterranean labyrinth with only one hatch for entry must give people the willies. Tobo has made it down here though, and as has his tenacious little antagonist crossing out his work. Why does this person hate Tobo? Nothing he says is particularly offensive.

Okay so it's 2019, and you can't even say "It's a wonderful day," or "Water is wet" without someone somehow finding a way to call you a bigot. But none of Tobos stuff is offensive in the real, actually-offensive way.

So in April 1945 with his former base of operations bombed and taken by the Russians, Dönitz had seemingly lost everything. That was until just over a week later on the 30th, when Hitler died. His last will and testament had been written beforehand, taking into consideration a variety of factors. Namely, who would be his successor.

Herman Göring had been the first choice, but he was disgraced and dismissed after he called Hitler in Berlin to ask permission to resume leadership. Presumably Hitler resented his overeagerness and considered it an act of treason.
Heinrich Himmler stepped up to the task. He was actually quite close to Dönitz, and they met up two days before Hitlers death, where Himmler asked Dönitz  if he'd be interested in serving in a successor government once Hitler was gone.
Himmlers hopes were dashed when the British and Americans revealed that he'd been in secret talks with them, the sneaky bastard, and he was arrested for treason. On the day Hitler died, Dönitz actually confronted Himmler to express his disgust, but Himmler denied it all as propaganda against him. Suddenly news arrived that Dönitz was Hitlers chosen successor, but somehow they missed the part where Hitler died, so the first thing Dönitz did was order a team to enter Berlin to rescue him. Needless to say, without a time machine they were doomed to fail.

With Hitler dead, Dönitz found himself the new ruler of the Third Reich. His ascention up the ranks was finally complete. His reign lasted about three weeks, but it wasn't for lack of effort! Berlin was lost, and Hitler with it. Dönitz still had Joseph Goebbels by his side, at least until his suicide on May 1st. Dönitz hastilly retreated to North Germany, to a town called Flensburg, from which he organised a new government.

This place was  kept by the Russians briefly, but eventually abandoned. Decades of decay has reduced it to what we see today.

In this room, someone has actually taken precautions to stop people walking into the rooms that no longer have floors, which is pretty considerate. But I do wonder who did this. Surely if anyone with real authority was concerned about the safety of those venturing down here, they'd simply lock the hatch.

The sight of stairs leading further down both excited me and made me nervous. My survival instinct was whispering in my brain "You're deep underground, and getting deeper, and the only way out is through a hatch at the top of a ten metre ladder that is getting further and further away with every step you take." There's no sunlight, there's no fresh air, just the hardened atmosphere of a Nazi U-Boat HQ. Down here, one starts to hear things too. Both my sister and I each thought we caught snippets of voices in the facility. Was it our imaginations? Were we not the only adventurers down here?

Regardless, here I was planning on going deeper still. 

Behind this door I found a spiral staircase. Evidently this was once one of the entrances from the surface buildings.

Presumably this door was on, or near the surface. It was sealed shut and strangely I could find no trace of it on the surface. The spiral staircase also led downwards but its entrance onto the lower floor was also sealed. I would just have to take the hallways main staircase down.

Here's the old doorway from the spiral staircase, now sealed shut.

Down here is in a slight bit of additional decay compared to upstairs. There's about an inch of flood water in one of the hallways, but someone has kindly put some blocks down to step on. They added to my height and being six foot two already, I had quite a few hilarious moments where I whacked my head.

There's not much to see in the flooded areas.

It seems that someone has attempted to breathe some fresh Nazism into this place, only to have it crossed out by someone else, which is great.

And here we find ourselves beneath the rooms that no longer had flooring. Curiously, there's no floor wreckage on the ground, which indicates that it was ripped up rather than falling due to natural decay.
But who would steal the floorboards of a Nazi base?

At the far end of the Nazi facility, stairs lead up, presumably to what was once another surface structure. However the fact that an arrow on the wall points in the opposite direction indicates that this is no exit.

At the end of the small stairway I came across this room with a huge ladder leading back up to the surface. The thing is, it's evem taller than the ladder we used to get in, and in far worse condition.

Would you climb this ladder? Because in a surprising twist my survival instinct kicked in, and I decided not to. But then my survival instinct had been jabbering away in the back of my mind for some time, which I guess is what happens when the human organism is deep underground with no phone signal and the only means of exit is a hatch in the middle of dense unfamiliar woodland that has gradually become further and further away. I was actually feeling pretty uncomfortable, and I've been to hundreds of places. But even this is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and being so deep underground, I was a little outside mein kampfort zone. My sister had never done any forbidden tourism before, and I'd thrown her in the deep end, so she was feeling uneasy too.

In regards to this hatch, I have no idea if it still opens, and I have no idea where it would be on the surface because I'd traversed so much area underground. Finally, we decided that we'd seen it all, and headed back to the surface, to fresh air and sunlight.

I'll finish up on one more ruined external flak bunker nearby.

Here Tobo has been defaced again, by the same person who defaced him last time, which I think indicates that this is some personal dislike of Tobo on behalf of the Yellow X person. This time the bear says "My mother says I'm cool."

It's actually possible to get inside some of this old flak bunker, which is pretty cool, although not quite as cool as the underground bit.

So what happened to Dönitz? Well after his ill-fated rise to power, he'd established his new government and deliberately avoided including prominent Nazi leaders, in a desperate attempt to appeal to the British and American forces with a reassuring face of  "We aren't the ones you've been fighting against."
Those alongside him weren't exactly fresh faces though. Sure, they weren't as prominent as the likes of Heinrich Himmler, but their hands weren't exactly clean.
Among them was Herbert Backe, whose "Hunger Plan" of 1941 involved stealing the food from the conquered Soviet territores and giving it to the German troops, deliberately letting the conquered Russian populations starve. Also present was Otto Ohlendorf who had personally directed the murder of hundreds of civilians in conquered Soviet territory, and Wilhelm Stuckart who had been present during the meetings of 1942 to discuss the "final solution to the Jewish problem."
And we all know what this "final solution" involved. So yeah, these weren't exactly pleasant people.
Dönitz himself said that he didn't care if those alongside him had blood on their hands, so long as the blood was Jewish, Russian or Eastern European.

As for what his government did, there wasn't really much left to do. Albert Speer eventually persuaded Dönitz to part with the tradition of saying "Heil Hitler," which Dönitz reluctantly agreed to do. He kept a bust of Hitler in his bedroom though, worshiping the nutcase until the bitter end. Seemingly having a soft spot for old Heinrich Himmler, Dönitz dismissed him of his posts, offered him false papers and a new identity and said "Run away, Simba, and never return." Himmler was gone by morning, but eventually killed himself.
Dönitz initially wanted to continue the war, but there was nothing much else to do but surrender. He dragged out the surrender negotiations for as long as possible, not out of an unwillingness to give up, but a surprisingly selfless desire to stay in power long enough to reposition the troops away from the Russians, and surrender to the West instead, rightfully fearing what the Russians would do to German prisoners. He had moderate success, repositioning his troops to places where they would evade Soviet capture and saving some 1.8 million German soldiers in the process. But Dwight Einsenhower, a military general and not yet US president, was getting impatient and a little worried that Stalin would figure out what was going on. He told Dönitz to cease his stalling. Shortly after, Dönitz surrendered to the allies. The war was over, and Dönitz was arrested for war crimes.

During the Nuremberg trials, he was accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression, and crimes against the laws of war. He made it quite clear that he found it all ridiculous.

In regards to the holocaust, Dönitz was outraged by the accusations, claiming that as naval commander he was responsible only for the deaths of people in naval warfare, and had absolutely no say over what happened to the Jews in the concentration camps. He said "each man should take care of his own business, and mine was just U-Boats and the Navy."

Of his conduct in the navy, in particular his submarine warfare against merchant ships, he found an unlikely defence from US admiral Chester Nimitz who mentioned that the British navy had similarly given the order to sink all German ships on sight, even if they weren't war ships, and the US had also waged unrestricted submarine warfare from the moment they entered the war. Nimitz said that unrestricted submarine warfare was fine, and that in the grand scheme of things Dönitz was just doing his duty and had conducted himself admirably.  It was a lucky break for Dönitz, who was quite possibly heading for a death sentence. Instead he got a measley ten years behind bars, which he spent insisting that he did nothing wrong, and that he acted entirely on duty to his nation.

Upon release and retirement there was one final battle for him to fight, and that was for his pension. The German government claimed that the only reason he rose beyond the rank of Captain was because he kissed Hitlers arse so much, and not because had had any actual skill. Dönitz took this to court and won, finally getting his full pension. He died in 1980 of a heart attack. Other war veterans were not allowed to wear uniforms to his funeral.

Now this is pretty cool. It's basically a "No loitering" sign, and it's a genuine remnant from the buildings time as a German military base. It's amazing that its survived.

Here we find the inevitable pentagram, a common piece of graffiti no matter where I go. At least on this occasion they got the symbol right though! Usually in the UK, people mistake the pentagram for the star of David. The irony of someone mistaking the pentagram for the Jewish symbol in a Nazi base would be pretty tragic, but the graffiti folks around these parts aren't that dumb.

I don't understand why it says "333" though. I get that "666" is the number of the devil, but what's "333" supposed to mean? Is someone trying to summon just one and a half Satans?

Over here the same person has drawn a circle made up of pentragrams and unfinished games of Hang Man. I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. I asked someone who knows about Witchcraft, and she described it as "Teenage Muggle Shit."

Barely visible near the ceiling is some really old graffiti, the beginning of which I can't make out. The sentence ends in "Ist ein doofer hund." So I guess it says that someone is a goofy dog.

Well, that's it for the flak bunkers and the underground U-Boat base where Dönitz worked before his three weeks of control over the third reich.

 And with Nazism vanquished the human race learned... well, let's just say there's room for improvement. We have made massive leaps since the 1940s, but humans continue to let themselves be divided for the crime of being somehow different. But given how many people on social media do spend each day finding new things to be offended by, it's nice to look back on the Nazi era and be thankful that in the 21st Century, petty shit on the internet is the worst that some people have to worry about.

But I want to end of a high note, so I went to my friend, Ouija LeMay, who once singlehandedly took on the Welsh Mafia and didn't die. I presented her with my dilema.
"I've written a blog about an abandoned Nazi base," I told her. "I don't know how I could possibly beat that."
"The answer is simple," she said. "Don't try. Next time, go somewhere terrible."
My heart dropped. I was hoping she was going to tell me to do another blog where I climb up Wakeman College or something. What did she have in mind?
Then Ouija LeMay, too scary to disobey, asked me "Where in the world do you least want to visit?"

And I gave it some thought... my next blog post is an abandoned house in Telford. It'll be on my Shropshire blog. After that, I'll be blogging about some kind of factory. In the meantime, share this blog, and don't forget to stay in the loop by following my Instagram, liking my Facebook and following my Twitter.
Thanks for reading!