Tour Report: "The Red M*A*S*H"

The final location that my friend Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" and I visited during our spontaneous tour in February of 2019, was a truly unique place - as far as I know, it's the only location of its kind in Germany.

It is an abandoned field hospital that used to be a Soviet project for reusable command posts and field hospitals called Type SKT (сооружение каркассно-тканевое = Frame-Fabric-Structure). This particular object is actually made up of two structures of this type. It was used as a training object for field care for wounded soldiers.

We drove for about an hour, and we arrived sometime around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It was February, so the sun was already low, and it was beginning to get colder. Near the coordinates, we found a public parking space, and we assembled our gear. We had to walk a bit to get to the little forest where the field hospital was located under about two or three feet of earth. We waited for the people that were walking along the street to disappear so that we could walk into the forest unnoticed. After all - the facility was near a residential area. One of the access points was even right in someone's backyard, so to speak.

As we approached the field hospital, we only saw a small mound of earth, but as we came closer, we saw the top of the fortified access that had been filled up with earth but re-opened at some point. There was a small hole that we could climb through to get in.

This wasn't a huge place with tons of stuff - but it was a very interesting location - not only because it was a rare thing to find and explore, but also because there was a lot of special stuff still left, such as parts of a mobile x-ray machine, liquids for intravenous infusions and even some medicine. A few tables, stretchers and parts of the ventilation system were to be found as well.

We took our time to photograph the place and all the details that we were able to find, before we made our way out and went back to the car.

Looking back, we got really lucky to have seen the place in this condition, because we were there during a phase before the "tourism" began and tourists started stealing things and decorators moved the stuff around to get the "better" photo.

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

Tour Report: Rest Home "Wasted Years"

From the abandoned chapel, it was only a few hundred meters to the abandoned retirement home, so it was only a short drive. There was a public parking lot right across the street, so that's where we parked the car and got our gear together for a longer exploration. The chapel was small, but being a former military facility, the rest home was a pretty big place, so we took a little more stuff with us.

There was a boom gate at the main driveway, but it was open. There were no fences and no signs that the access was prohibited, which is probably the reason that this place appears to be frequently visited by lots of different people - but I'll get to that.

Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" and I didn't really have a plan where to go first, so we just went from one building to the next and checked if it was worthwhile to explore. We found the kitchen and a dining hall, a water bunker for fighting fires, a heating plant - and of course, a lot of rooms where the senior citizens lived.

Especially the residential buildings offered a few memorable sights: Right behind the main doors, we found beautiful tile mosaics which depicted cities in the area that the individual houses were named after. These houses looked like large bungalows and had probably been built sometime in the 1970s. The flat roofs predestined these buildings for water damage - and the water damage took care of the decay. It was beautiful!

As I've mentioned, the area was far from being fenced off, and since it was a beautiful sunny Sunday, there were a lot of people around. We saw other urbexers, graffiti sprayers "working" on the walls of the heating plant, people walking their dogs or just taking a stroll and a lot of families with small children - the place must be like an adventure playground for kids... One of the families had decided to make the theater their playground. This theater is one of the most beautiful rooms in the entire place, but they didn't think to move; the children kept running around, so we decided to go on without taking photos there and check out the small indoor pool before leaving for our final location.

That summer, I returned together with my wife and managed to check out the rooms that Toeppi and I had missed this time - we even found the air-raid shelter in the basement, but that's a story for another blog post :)

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

Tour Report: Chapel of the Last Rites

It was still morning, when Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" and I left the World War II air-raid shelter in Berlin to go check out three more locations - an abandoned chapel, an old retirement home and a field hospital. The two first spots are almost right next to each other; only a few hundred meters separate them from each other. It took us about 45 minutes to get there. There was plenty of parking space, and we decided to check out the chapel first. It was built together with a cemetery during the final days of World War II to bury soldiers and refugees that had died in the nearby military hospital that was operated by the Luftwaffe.

As we walked up to the chapel, the low winter sun painted shadows on the walls. There was no wind, and an eerie silence lay over the place.

The main door was locked, but as we walked around the old building, we found an open door that led into the basement.

It was not just the basement stairs, but also an "coffin elevator" that was used to transport coffins to and from the basement before and after the body had been prepared for laying out. As we went down the stairs and looked around in the rooms below the chapel, we could see that this place was also a place for thanatopraxy. I had seen photos of the rooms before, and obviously, there was much more to see in earlier years, and much stuff had been stolen, but there were still many things to be seen that pointed to the former use of the chapel.

Of course, many people had been here over the years who liked to redecorate rather than just photograph the place in its original state, but there were still a few nice shots to be taken.

All in all, it was a small place, but it was also a place that you don't get to see very often, so it was well worth the trip - and we hadn't even seen the retirement home next door...

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