Cashing in on the Nazi leader’s brand name, authorities in Ukraine have decided to open up one of Hitler’s Eastern Front military headquarters and run it as a tourist attraction. Situated in a pine forest just north of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, Führerhauptquartier Wehrwolf – and no, that’s not a spelling mistake but a portmanteau of werewolf and wehr, the German word for defence – was, in its heyday, a self-sufficient secret installation, replete with all of the modern amenities of the era. Of the 11,000 or so prisoners of war and local civilians who constructed the facilitates, over half died – either during the works or immediately after completion at the hands of firing squads.
Today, a nearby memorial pays homage to those labourers, but little, other than lumps of concrete and a swimming pool, which there’s no record of Hitler ever having used, remains of the Führerhauptquartier itself, the Nazis having destroyed what they could when they abandoned it, and the Soviets having completed the task by sealing off the underground bunker later. Mykola Djiga, who heads the provincial administration, has said that “it is time to make the Wehrwolf headquarters a tourist destination, a memorial to the victims of fascism”. Sounds good, but as a memorial already exists, is a museum – even one that’s to symbolically open on the anniversary of the Victory Day over Fascism (May the 9th) – also needed?
Alas, as anyone who’s done the rounds of former war sites and concentration camps knows, Nazis and the Holocaust sell – as the coach loads of frightful, generally ignorant and schadenfreude-enriched package tourists who visit such locations on sightseeing daytrips pay testament to. One can’t blame the Ukrainian authorities though, I suppose, as they have to top up their depleted coffers somehow. At least it’s not Chernobyl they’re planning to turn into a tourist attraction. Oh, hang on . . . .
I have been to this place…… spoke to the locals. Heard stories of what lay underground, things so far fetched, I can’t imagine they are true and things so secret it is said the KGB was prompted to seal it for good, or so they thought.
A few years back we had an intern here from Vinnytsia, he spent a year with a directional boring crew here in the States. When he returned to Vinnytsia he did a boring (just a straight boring, he had no directinal eqpt.)
He had been warned of unexploded demolition ordinance left by the Germans and the Russians, but he proceeded anyway. I believe he said they bored through several floors, never hitting water and brought up some metal and some very polished black wall or floor marble about 3/8″ thick.
What sort of stories, Patrick?