Tour Report: The City in the Woods

For the second day of our urbex tour through the Northeastern part of Germany back in November of 2017, my wife and I had planned something big. Well, for us it was. We were going to explore one of the largest Soviet garrisons in Eastern Germany. During the Cold War, more than 15.000 Soviet soldiers and civilian personnel were stationed here, so the place is actually way too large to be explored on one day in late November.
But we wanted to at least check it out; it had been on our list too long!

We got picked up early by our friend Torsten from North Urbex. The ride took a little more than two hours, and we arrived at our destination a few minutes before ten in the morning.
Our parking place was near the outer perimeter of the oold garrison, and we had to walk the rest of the way - about three kilometers on a straight road right into the woods.
It took us about twenty-five minutes to walk to the first buildings. We had a map of the garrison, so we were able to find certain buildings that we wanted to visit first without having to search for a long time - very valuable if you only have a few hours of sunlight.

We made a plan to cover as much ground as possible in the time we had and started out at the kindergarten/school of the garrison. From there, we made our way to the theater, the large gymnasium and the mess hall.
We checked out the laundry house, went past the water works and the storage bunkers for nuclear weapons that were stored here in the late 1950s/early 1960s and in the 1980s, until we got to a very large communications bunker that we also had on our list. This bunker wasn't part of the garrison, so I'll be covering it in my next post here.

As the sun started to set, we began walking back toward the car. After all, you don't want to meet a sounder of wild boars in a forest when it's dark.
We had done everything right - as we arrived at the car, it was pitch dark. We checked the GPS, and we had walked about sixteen kilometers during the few hours we were there - and there still was a large part of the area that we hadn't covered.
I do hope that we'll get the chance to go there again soon - before more parts are demolished and renaturated.
It was an amazing explore - a very interesting historical location, perfect weather and great company. And in addition, we didn't meet another soul. Being alone in a place like this is always a very special feeling for me.
Below you'll find a few photos from the garrison; I'll show the large bunker in the next post, so stay tuned!!


To check out all the photos from this amazing place and to find out about its history, click the button below.