Hitlers last secret: In the cave of the evil

Surely Hitler could not have dreamed of this for his most secret secret project. In the middle of no man's land on the Polish-Czech border, the European Union has built a welcome palace made of glass and stainless steel for what was planned and built 80 years ago under the code name "Project Giant".

Built on the outskirts of Gluszyca Gorna, the information centre for Hitler's possibly last headquarters reminds us of the "Palace of the Republic" in the former GDR. Anyone who wants to visit the "Project Giant", a plan in Hitler's empire that was not allowed to be talked about, will be greeted by a large modern building that looks like the information center of a zoo or an American national park. Behind it, the door opens into a dark time, about which, according to tourist guide Jacek, very little is known to this day.

Why was building here, bigger and more elaborate than anywhere else in the Third Reich? What was built? For what purpose? Jacek says nobody knows. "No documents were found, even those involved in the construction knew very little." It was supposed to remain a secret, what was hammered into the rock here under the code name "Giant" under the supervision of the Silesian Industrial Society specially founded for this purpose. A factory complex deep underground? The Führer's headquarters? Storage rooms for stolen state treasures?

In November 1943, work began on the underground fortress in the Owl Mountains, which was to consist of six individual and partly underground interconnected bunkers. In the opinion of the hobby historian Jürgen Heckenthaler, "Riese" was to become a Fuehrer Headquarters. Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect and last Minister of Armaments, and Nikolaus von Below, Hitler's air force adjutant, also mention the underground facilities as a planned alternative location for the Fuehrer Headquarters.

But actually, the corridors, some of them tunnels as large as railway station halls, are much too large for that. As a production plant for Hitler's V2 rocket, however, which Jacek points out, they are too small. One of the winged rockets is displayed in a corridor. However, she cannot be transported out from here as she stands there, because the corridors, they were carved into the rock by concentration camp inmates under inhuman conditions, are too narrow.

At "Osowka", in german "Säuferhöhen", english "Drunks water", another area of the planned cave network, eight or nine metres wide corridors stretch along, some of them already boarded up, some still in an adit. The ceiling is completely rounded, but on both sides of the corridor there are still rock steps that were needed to work on the ceiling. "Some parts were probably intended for industrial production", believes Heckenthaler, whose calculations show that "Riese" extends over an gigantic area of about 25 by eight kilometers.

There are no exact figures. Even the Polish documentation centre is only guessing about the sense and purpose of the construction, which claimed thousands of prisoners. Plans and documents have disappeared without exception, it is said, one is dependent on suppositions.

The individual facilities, as far as the state of knowledge after eight decades is, are arranged in a star shape, but are usually not connected to each other. "If one part had been stormed, the opponents could have marched through to the next," says Jacek. The "Riese"-system is partly multi-storey, partly already completely walled in. On every entrance you see a system of deadly embrasures, machine guns and angled corridors. Any unauthorized intruder would have been shot here immediately.

It´s use as an aircraft factory or for the production of "secret weapons", as the Polish giant researcher Dariusz Garba suspects, would have encountered major problems: There is no airfield nearby, and the railway lines that had been specially built up to this point could have been attacked from the air at any time, so that the transport of materials and finished products to and from the site would hardly have been smooth. Nevertheless: "There are three elevator shafts that have been started, which reach 48 meters deep," Heckenthaler counted.

15,000 workers from the Groß-Rosen concentration camp had to dig "giants" into the ground, 5,000 of them died. Even Albert Speer doubted the sense of the enterprise, which robbed valuable resources from its efforts to achieve total armament. "Project Riese consumed more concrete than could be granted to the entire population for air-raid shelters in 1944," he wrote in his memoirs.

Nevertheless, "Riese" never finished. Hitler's assistant Nikolaus von Below states in his memoirs that he was able to "finally stop" the construction work during a last inspection visit in winter 1945. According to other sources, however, work continued on the "special construction project" later, which, according to a letter from Speer to Hitler, had already cost 150 million Reichsmarks by mid-1944. Four times as much as Hitlers famous headquarter "Wolfs Lair".

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