Bunker reveals underworld of East German secret service

By Birgit Zimmermann Sep 14, 2011, 10:16 GMT

Machern, Germany - The grey-brown family home located near the ponds near the town of Machern in the eastern German state of Saxony has a picturesque setting.

Tall old oaks and birches surround the low building. The grass has run wild. 'This was the home of the bunker's commanding officer,' says Tobias Hollitzer, a member of a Leipzig-based citizens' organization.

The officer, a major in the defunct East German Stasi intelligence service, lived here with his wife at number 439 - an arbitrarily chosen street number.

This idyllic relic of East German communism, with its washing basin and wagon wheels adorning the outside walls, hid what began 100 metres further back: the inner zone around a secret Stasi bunker that would have provided refuge for Leipzig's Stasi boss, Manfred Hummitzsch, and his staff if war broke out.

All East German regions had similar refuges for the Stasi leaders, Hollitzer says. The Stasi bunker in Machern, 30 kilometres east of Leipzig, is however the last that remains largely intact.

It has served as a museum for the past 15 years, financed by Hollitzer's organization. Some 5,000 visitors annually find their way to this Stasi refuge, which lies well off the beaten track on the edge of a neatly laid out residential estate near a forest.

The expanse in the inner zone appears just as harmless as the commanding officer's house. There are a couple of garages and three light blue holiday bungalows that have seen better days.

Officially, the site was a holiday resort for the water supply and sewage cooperative. A grey workshop hall concealed what the outside world was not supposed to know: the underground bunker covering almost 4,000 square metres.

From here, in the event of war, the Stasi would have controlled the interning of opposition figures in line with precise plans.

Museum guide Jana Bleyl presses a button in the workshop hall, and a large metal plate shifts laboriously to one side, opening up a passage to a stairway into the Stasi underworld. The air smells stale.

The visitor passes several airtight doors and chambers with showers for decontamination before reaching the command centre. Space is limited here, and the ceilings low.

The rooms of the senior Stasi officers lead off a long corridor carpeted in red. Hummitzsch's room is decorated in the conservative style of East Germany with typical brown wood imitation veneers. It was completed in 1972.

A local priest, Gottfried Suess, discovered the bunker in December 1989, just after the communist regime finally collapsed. There had long been rumours surrounding the site in the forest.

Hollitzer, a civil rights activist, gained access for the first time in January 1990. He was little surprised at his discovery, as he had spent four weeks previously engaged in occupying the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig.

'After that, nothing seemed impossible to me,' Hollitzer says.

The bunker was never really used, according to Hollitzer. Hummitzsch came once to inspect it, and Stasi technicians kept it all in working order to the end.

The building is now a national monument, but bunker enthusiasts and those pining for the old East Germany have come to the wrong address in Machern.

'We did not want a kind of technical museum and also not a military museum. For us, the point is to reveal the way the Stasi operated and the entire East German mobilization plans,' Hollitzer says.