Tour Report: Soviet Airfield "Hypericum"

During our summer vacation in 2018, we had planned a day of touring together with our dear friend Torsten from North Urbex. Due to the distance (he lives about 250 kilometers away) and frequent on-call-duty on his side, we rarely get the chance for a meeting - but in this case, it all worked out really nicely, although Torsten had to drive a bit farther to meet up with us.

At the time, we were staying in a nice little hotel south of Berlin, and we had planned to explore some of the Soviet relics in the area, so we met with Torsten in the morning after breakfast to plan our exploration. The first spot that we had on our list was an abandoned nuclear weapons depot that had been used by the Soviet Army until the early 1990s. We drove for about an hour to get there. 

The depot is located near a former Soviet airfield and couldn't be reached by car, so we had to park somewhere on the abandoned airfield. We found a place near one of the airplane shelters, and we had to walk a few kilometers to get to the weapons storage bunkers. The path that we had chosen led us right across the airfield's garrison, so we decided to take a quick peek in one or two of the buildings. It was only a short stop on the way, as we were on a relatively tight timetable for the other location that we had planned to visit, so we only took a few photos of the airplane shelters and inside one of the buildings before following the path towards the nuclear weapons depot.

Here are a few photos we took of the airfield's/garrison's remains. To find out about the history of this airfield, click the button below.

Tour Report: Soviet Communications Bunker

As I've announced in my last post, there was more to the Soviet garrison than the garrison itself. A bit detached from the main area we discovered a rather large bunker.
It was a communications bunker that had nothing to do with the main garrison, but was a completely different location.
The Soviets had their bases separated into various sectors with different secrecy and security levels. The system was so effective that soldiers working in one sector never knew what was going on in the other sectors. This enabled the Soviets to have facilities of different security clearance in relative proximity to each other and using the same infrastructure.
This particular bunker was one of the main hubs for communication of the Soviet army in Germany with the command in Moscow and has an effective surface area of almost 800 square meters.

To reach the bunker, we had to stray a bit off course and walk for a while until we reached the main entrance. It had been filled in with sand to seal it at some point, but of course, someone had burrowed through and made a way in.
We had to crawl a little, but we found the bunker in pretty good condition. Of course, copper thieves had been at work here, but the overall state of the bunker really was okay. It was a really cool place to explore, and I do hope for the opportunity of a revisit sometime soon!


To find out more about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.

Here's a short video we made during our explore of this interesting relic from the cold war:

And here are some of the photos I took. Remember, it was completely dark so we had to work with flashlights :)