when this sector of the forest was destroyed, a massive orange glow on the horizon.’
Penn nodded. ‘The twenty-fifth of April 1945, only hours after the camp was evacuated. A five-hundred- bomber Lancaster raid was diverted from Bremen to destroy the forest. The British 21st Army Group had been concerned that pockets of SS would stage a fanatical resistance there and hold up the Allied advance. The bombing obliterated the camp and buried the bunker under tons of earth and felled trees, which is why it remained unrecorded when the NATO airfield was built over the site after the war.’
‘Nobody in 21st Army Group knew about it?’
Penn shook his head. ‘Few of the SS camp guards survived. The British SAS who liberated the camp shot a number of them, and others who fled into the forest were hunted down by the more able-bodied inmates. I’ve seen the file with all the information that Jack and his daughter amassed last year from interviewing Captain Frazer, the British officer who was in the camp. So we know that his friend Major Mayne and an American officer, a Colonel Stein, had been here looking for stolen Nazi treasures, but that the two men disappeared. My assumption is that they went into the forest looking for the bunker and got caught out in the bombing raid, or fell foul of guards still stationed here. There’s no evidence for them in the bunker yet, but we’ve only cleared half of it. No word of its existence got back to 21st Army Group headquarters.’
‘How did it survive the bombing raid?’
‘It’s a remarkable piece of engineering,’ Penn enthused. ‘I’ll brief you as we go in. Construction was my speciality at the School of Military Engineering, but because there’s not much call for this kind of thing these days, I volunteered for the NBS clearance unit, now CBRN, which would at least give me a chance to examine these places. There’s a lot of redevelopment and construction work going on in Germany now, and a lot more underground sites are being found. I read that article you wrote last year about the archaeology of the Nazi period in Der Spiegel, and I completely agree with you about making these places scheduled monuments like any other archaeological site. It’s going to become a big political issue in Berlin, because major pipeline and utility works are planned in the centre around the Tiergarten, and there must be an enormous amount to be discovered there.’
‘An old friend of mine is a stalwart of the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, a voluntary organization that has been lobbying for more resources to do proper excavations there,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘There are also major refurbishments planned at the Berlin Zoo on the edge of the Tiergarten, on the site of the huge flak tower that was once there. That’s where the Schliemann treasures from the Berlin prehistory museum were stored, where the Russians found them. My friend believes there are tunnels from there to the site of Gestapo headquarters and the Reichstag. They’re actually doing some more exploring this week, and I’m hoping to go there after this for a quick visit.’
Penn looked at him intently. ‘Fascinating. I’d like to collaborate. There are a couple of sites in Berlin that need our expertise, possible chemical and biological production sites. It’s frightening how little is known about these places and what went on inside them. Many were deliberately hushed up, part of Allied policy. We cleared a newly discovered part of the Sarin II nerve-gas production bunker at Falkenhagen near Berlin a few months ago, a really grim place that looked as if it had been abandoned only days before.’
‘It must feel as if you’re still fighting the Second World War.’
Penn’s head briefly disappeared from view as he ducked into his suit and pushed through the rubber neck seal. He struggled out, shaking his head in a cloud of chalk powder, and then stretched his arms out to pull the flaps tight over his chest for the zipper to be shut. ‘Sergeant Jones here calls us bunker-busters.’ He staggered backwards as Jones yanked the zipper. ‘But we do real war too. We’re due to fly out to the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan in two weeks. We get called out every time they find a cave complex with weapons caches that might include the bad stuff. I mentioned it to Jack during our phone call, and was amazed to hear he’d been up the valley two years ago, at the site of the old lapis lazuli mines. Something about a shady Chinese mafia group who were after the same thing as he was. It must be more of a free-for-all in northern Afghanistan than we realize. Jack told me he’d been on the trail of a Royal Engineers ancestor of his, a colonel who died up there during the time of the Raj. Who’d have thought British sappers would be back there in the twenty-first century.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It was a big thing for Jack, finding that place. Unfortunately that mafia organization is still ticking over. You can emasculate them, but they grow back.’ Hiebermeyer remembered Saumerre, Rebecca’s kidnapping last year, the eyes that would be somewhere on them now, watching for any hint of a discovery that might bring the worst of those groups back to haunt not just IMU but the entire world. He glanced at Penn. ‘The security here is pretty tight? I don’t mean the biological containment, but security against infiltration?’
Penn pulled sideways as the sergeant secured his zipper. ‘My sapper guard detachment go through special forces training. You saw the Bundeswehr military police outside, and there’s another cordon around the airfield perimeter. This place is well and truly locked down.’ He picked up his helmet, and Jones took Hiebermeyer’s. ‘You ready? We don our oxygen kit in the next room, immediately abutting the bunker wall. Then we wait for the previous pair to signal that they’re ready to come out, about ten minutes from now. There’s an overlap so four are inside at any one time. We run the shifts with military precision. We don’t want too many in there at once in case there’s a contamination incident.’
Penn walked through a hanging plastic partition and Hiebermeyer followed, with Jones behind. They were inside a polyurethane tunnel between the Portakabin and the bunker structure, a grey mass of concrete that had been partly dug out of the earth in front of them. Above it Hiebermeyer could see the dome of the bubble that encased the site, a strange, disconcerting scene, as if he were walking in a see-through tunnel through an aquarium, watching shapes appear and disappear in the polyurethane as the air movement inside the bubble flexed the plastic, creating a muted drumming noise as if someone were banging to get in from outside.
Immediately in front of them was a structure about the size of a portable toilet, sealed to the concrete surrounding the entrance to the bunker. ‘That’s the airlock,’ Penn said. ‘Beyond that we have no contact with the exterior atmosphere.’ Sergeant Jones picked up a compact backpack that Hiebermeyer recognized as an oxygen rebreather, with a cylinder protruding from the top and a hose on either side. Penn took another one, and glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘You’ll be familiar with these from Jack’s kit. We use rebreathers because they’re completely self- contained, with no chance of contamination through an exhaust valve.’ Hiebermeyer felt the sweat on his brow, and took a deep breath. He felt hemmed in and suddenly wanted to be outside. He closed his eyes and took another couple of deep breaths, wiping his brow with his hands.
‘You okay?’ Penn asked, shifting his shoulders to ease on the rebreather and tighten the straps, peering at him. ‘It’s normal to feel spooked. One of my corporals said it’s like a tunnel into a nightmare, as if the real history of this place is just beyond that plastic membrane and has never gone away. I know that’s hardly reassurance, but if you’re feeling something like that, you’re not the only one.’
Hiebermeyer tried to relax. ‘I’ve been down tunnels before in Egypt and come face to face with some pretty nightmarish apparitions. It’s wearing the suit and being inside this bubble that takes a little getting used to.’
Jones finished tightening Penn’s straps and lifted the rebreather on to Hiebermeyer’s back. ‘Before we put on our helmets, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the structure,’ Penn said. He glanced at the red light that was shining above the door, then at the watch strapped around his left arm. ‘We should be ready to go in five minutes.’ He pointed to a plan on a small clipboard hanging from his neck. It showed a long, rectangular building with an entrance passage lined by small rooms on either side, then a large central chamber and a further area at the far end of the bunker, shaded over in pencil. ‘It’s like a large Nissen hut, a massive corrugated-iron tunnel, a classic bomb-shelter design,’ Penn said. ‘You said your grandfather was a U-boat captain? Then you’ll be interested to know that the concrete outer shell is based on the design of U-boat pens. The roof is built using a Fangrost bomb trap, concrete beams about a metre apart laid over support beams on the roof, creating space where the blast from bombs detonating against the upper beams would dissipate sideways. That’s how the U-boat pens survived everything the Allies could throw at them, and that’s how this bunker survived the raid on the forest on 25 April 1945.’
‘It seems incredible overengineering, in an obscure place in a forest where they could hardly have expected an attack,’ Hiebermeyer said.
‘Some of the paperwork survived in the front office of the bunker. The place was built by Organisation Todt, the Nazi state construction agency run by Fritz Todt, and specifically by the naval construction department, the Marinebauwesens. The naval department had the greatest expertise in bombproof bunkers, as they built the huge U-boat pens at places like Brest and Lorient. The bunker would have been built using forced labour, of course, and the Organisation Todt had its own Polizei regiment as well as dedicated Schutzkommando who would have been perfectly at home supervising slave labour next to their fellow SS thugs in the camp. We think the labourers were
