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NAZI ALBATROSS

What to Do with Hitler's Submarine Bunker?

By Michael Fröhlingsdorf

The submarine bunker is gigantic -- and expensive. A World War II-era military facility is slowly succumbing to the elements, and nobody seems willing to pay for its upkeep. In fact, the German armed forces has offered it up for sale.

By far the largest object in the rather odd real estate catalogue carries the number 220039 on the Web site of Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr. It is nestled about midway down the long list of property bargains, part of the Bundeswehr's project of shutting down hundreds of unneeded facilities. One can make offers on storage tanks, training camps, barracks and former weapons depots.

But number 220039 is different. The "Materiel Depot Wilhelmshaven -- TE Bremen" is a dark gray cement colossus -- 426 meters (1,398 feet) long, 97 meters wide and 25 meters high. The ceilings are up to 7 meters thick. Indeed, the structure is so cavernous that even an institution as large as the German armed forces is only able to occupy a third of it. The rest lies empty -- as it has since the end of World War II. The structure is left over from one of the most megalomaniacal projects of Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship: the submarine bunker named "Valentin."