Zossen (Zepplin/Maybach)
Originally cleared as a firing range and infantry school, by 1914, the 60,000-acre area had become Europe’s largest military base, dotted with handsome buildings, some of which survive to this day. Bunker complexes called “Maybach” (a command center) and “Zeppelin” (communications) were built beginning in 1934 by the Nazi regime. The initial communications links constructed in 1934–1935 involved considerable redundancy to better withstand air attack. The Zossen bunker complex was well connected with subterranean links to the military commands in central Berlin, and to a trunk cable ring buried around the city. Priority construction of the Zeppelin bunker in 1937– 1939 involved installation of dozens of massive telephone and telegraph switchboards.
Most were operational by August 1939 in time for the German attack on Poland. Radio facilities were also added. Substantial battery backups guaranteed continued operation even with loss of the electric power grid due to air attack. The Allies never discovered the existence of these backups until after the war and bomb damage was largely superficial, indicating that the backups had not been targets.
Fast-moving Soviet forces occupied the virtually intact Zossen bunker facilities on 20 April 1945. Some German officers - with a view beyond Götterdämmerung - had the good sense to display large placards in Russian, in and around that telephone exchange saying This equipment is NOT to be destroyed or tampered with!A foresight that served postwar communications in the chaos very well. Most equipment was dismantled (often quickly and thus badly) and shipped back to the Soviet Union.
Twenty kilometres south of Berlin in the huge underground headquarters at Zossen there was a mood of profound anxiety. The day before, when the threat of Soviet tanks coming up from the south had arisen, General Krebs had sent off the OKH’s small defence detachment in reconnaissance vehicles to investigate. At 6 a.m. on 21 April, Krebs’s second aide, Captain Boldt, was woken by a telephone call. Senior Lieutenant Krankel, commanding the defence detachment, had just seen forty Soviet tanks coming up the Baruth road towards Zossen.
Late that afternoon, Soviet soldiers entered the concealed camp at Zossen with caution and amazement. The two complexes, known as Maybach I and Maybach II, lay side by side, hidden under trees and camouflage nets. It was not the mass of papers blowing about inside the low, zigzag-painted concrete buildings which surprised them, but the resident caretaker’s guided tour. He led them down into a maze of galleried underground bunkers, with generators, plotting maps, banks of telephones and teleprinters. Its chief wonder was the telephone exchange, which had linked the two supreme headquarters with Wehrmacht units in the days when the Third Reich had stretched from the Volga to the Pyrenees and from the North Cape to the Sahara. Apart from the caretaker, the only defenders left were four soldiers. Three of them had surrendered immediately. The fourth could not because he was dead drunk.
When a telephone suddenly rang, supposedly one of the Russian soldiers answered it. The caller was evidently a senior German officer asking what was happening. ‘Ivan is here,’ the soldier replied in Russian, and told him to go to hell.
The two Maybach bunkers were destroyed by 1946, but the Zeppelin communications center was retained, albeit empty of equipment. In the 1950s, new construction reactivated the surviving Zossen bunkers and by 1960 fear of a missile-based European war led to re-equipping of the Zeppelin bunker area as a communications center. It could be totally self-sufficient (including air circulation) for up to a month. At the height of the Cold War between 30,000 and 70,000 Russian soldiers and their dependents were based there in an extensive surface community. All of this was manned for more than three decades, ending only when Russian troops pulled out in 1994.
Most were operational by August 1939 in time for the German attack on Poland. Radio facilities were also added. Substantial battery backups guaranteed continued operation even with loss of the electric power grid due to air attack. The Allies never discovered the existence of these backups until after the war and bomb damage was largely superficial, indicating that the backups had not been targets.
Fast-moving Soviet forces occupied the virtually intact Zossen bunker facilities on 20 April 1945. Some German officers - with a view beyond Götterdämmerung - had the good sense to display large placards in Russian, in and around that telephone exchange saying This equipment is NOT to be destroyed or tampered with!A foresight that served postwar communications in the chaos very well. Most equipment was dismantled (often quickly and thus badly) and shipped back to the Soviet Union.
Twenty kilometres south of Berlin in the huge underground headquarters at Zossen there was a mood of profound anxiety. The day before, when the threat of Soviet tanks coming up from the south had arisen, General Krebs had sent off the OKH’s small defence detachment in reconnaissance vehicles to investigate. At 6 a.m. on 21 April, Krebs’s second aide, Captain Boldt, was woken by a telephone call. Senior Lieutenant Krankel, commanding the defence detachment, had just seen forty Soviet tanks coming up the Baruth road towards Zossen.
Late that afternoon, Soviet soldiers entered the concealed camp at Zossen with caution and amazement. The two complexes, known as Maybach I and Maybach II, lay side by side, hidden under trees and camouflage nets. It was not the mass of papers blowing about inside the low, zigzag-painted concrete buildings which surprised them, but the resident caretaker’s guided tour. He led them down into a maze of galleried underground bunkers, with generators, plotting maps, banks of telephones and teleprinters. Its chief wonder was the telephone exchange, which had linked the two supreme headquarters with Wehrmacht units in the days when the Third Reich had stretched from the Volga to the Pyrenees and from the North Cape to the Sahara. Apart from the caretaker, the only defenders left were four soldiers. Three of them had surrendered immediately. The fourth could not because he was dead drunk.
When a telephone suddenly rang, supposedly one of the Russian soldiers answered it. The caller was evidently a senior German officer asking what was happening. ‘Ivan is here,’ the soldier replied in Russian, and told him to go to hell.
The two Maybach bunkers were destroyed by 1946, but the Zeppelin communications center was retained, albeit empty of equipment. In the 1950s, new construction reactivated the surviving Zossen bunkers and by 1960 fear of a missile-based European war led to re-equipping of the Zeppelin bunker area as a communications center. It could be totally self-sufficient (including air circulation) for up to a month. At the height of the Cold War between 30,000 and 70,000 Russian soldiers and their dependents were based there in an extensive surface community. All of this was manned for more than three decades, ending only when Russian troops pulled out in 1994.