100 Places You Will Never Visit (16 page)

With some 10,000 scientists from 40 countries involved in the project and huge attendant media coverage, it may hardly be said that CERN has undertaken its work on the LHC on the quiet. One of the project’s chief aims is to detect the hitherto theoretical Higgs Boson, believed to be responsible for providing the mass to other subatomic particles. In late 2011, the LHC team tentatively suggested that the Higgs Boson may have been glimpsed for the first time, prompting a surge of excitement among the world’s physicists, scientific journalists and interested laymen.

But for some observers, the LHC poses frightening and largely unknowable risks. Almost as soon as the project was first approved, startling Doomsday scenarios were being prophesied. Principal among these was the suggestion that the collider might produce black holes that could swell and ultimately consume the Earth. However, most experts agree that even if a black hole was produced, it would pose no risk as it would be microscopic in scale and would evaporate almost immediately. Another theory warns of the creation of “strangelets,” prompting a runaway fusion process that could turn everything on the planet into “strange matter.” Still others suggest that “vacuum bubbles” will be created, stabilizing aspects of our universe that are inherently unstable and in the process rendering Earth uninhabitable for the human race.

Naturally, the safety of the LHC has been endorsed by numerous independent scientific authorities—and as you read this, the world has presumably not yet come to a premature end. But skeptics continue to argue that any experiment always involves some uncertainty over results—so why carry out an experiment that poses such large potential risks?

SUPER COLLIDER The tunnels and experimental chambers of the Large Hadron Collider are buried at depths of 50 to 175 meters (160 to 574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Particles are boosted to high speeds by the LINAC and SPS accelerators before they are injected into the LHC itself.

54 Swiss Fort Knox

LOCATION Bern Canton, Switzerland

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Bern

SECRECY OVERVIEW High-security location: a secret bunker used to store confidential documents and data.

There are, in fact, two Swiss Fort Knoxes. Both are high-security secret bunkers built deep into the mountains of the Swiss Alps near the high-class ski resort of Gstaad. Run by a company called MOUNT10, which specializes in the secure storage of both physical and electronic information, Swiss Fort Knox I opened in 1996, while its companion entered operation some seven years later.

The company leases the bunkers from the Swiss military, which oversees a network of some 26,000 fortresses and bunkers throughout the Alps. While these defenses were essential to protecting Swiss neutrality during the Second World War and then the Cold War, in more recent years they have become a drain on the public purse. But MOUNT10 has given at least these two sites a new lease of life.

The two bunkers are guarded 24 hours a day and protected by constant CCTV surveillance and motion sensors. Entry is strictly limited—visitors must be verified by advanced retina-scan technology and accompanied by security personnel at all times. Access in the first instance is past bullet-proof gates, and via camouflaged 3.5-ton doors.

The company claims the bunkers are “resistant against any military and civil threat” and offer the highest possible protection against chemical, biological or nuclear attack, as well as safeguarding computer servers from the potentially devastating effects of electromagnetic pulses. Meanwhile, unique access to subterranean glacial waters is used to maintain strict climate control within the depositories.

Among the most important information stored here is a “digital genome”—a store of information brought together by a group of academics, designed to ensure that future generations will be able to read data on technological formats (such as USB sticks or floppy disks) that might by then be obsolete. The project has been described as a 21st-century version of the Rosetta Stone, the archaeological discovery that made it possible to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Harry Lime in The Third Man once famously concluded that Switzerland’s chief contribution to the world after 500 years of democracy and peace was the cuckoo clock. We might now add the protection of a key so that the people of the future might better understand our present.

HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING The impregnable Swiss Fort Knox complex at Saanen is designed to preserve valuable data and artifacts against all disasters up to and including nuclear war.

55 Bavarian Erdställe

LOCATION Bavaria, Germany

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Munich

SECRECY OVERVIEW Site of historic mystery: an ancient complex of mysterious underground tunnels.

Southern Germany is home to a labyrinth of over 700 subterranean passages and chambers, known as Erdställe and believed to date from between the 10th and 13th centuries. Entrances into the network have been found in disparate locations, within churches, graveyards and private houses, as well as among woodland. However, answers to the questions of who built them and why remain as elusive as ever.

Similar underground networks are evident elsewhere in Europe, notably in Austria, Hungary, Ireland and Spain. A priest by the name of Lambert Karner was the first to extensively explore the Bavarian tunnels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The passages vary greatly in size—some are so small that they can only be entered on hands and knees while others are relatively spacious and stretch in excess of 100 meters (330 ft). In Germany, the passages have also traditionally been referred to as “goblin holes” (Schrazelloch), reflecting a once widely held belief that they were supernatural in nature.

Others have speculated that they were built for religious purposes, perhaps by druids or to serve as places of healing. Yet further theories suggest they were used as routes to escape marauding raiders, or as dungeons, hiding places for treasure or winter quarters for itinerant tribes or groups of monks.

Curiously, the historical record makes no reference to the construction of any such subterranean networks. A few caverns show evidence of doorways and rudimentary building materials, while a plowshare and millstones have also been recovered. However, barely any chambers are large enough to have realistically hosted people for any length of time. There is also a notable lack of evidence of food remains, feces (human or animal) or sources of light and heat.

So the mystery endures. It is probable that at some stages of their history, the passages were used for storage, but all the clues suggest that this underground world was not designed to support human existence to any great extent or for very long. A group of academics have come together as the Working Group for Erdstall Research to probe the tunnels further, and perhaps one day they will come up with an explanation as to their origins. In the meantime, we are left to ponder whether the folk who spoke of goblin holes in times past knew what they were talking about after all.

1 WIDESPREAD MYSTERY This map shows the distribution of Erdställe tunnels in southern Germany and the neighboring region. The tunnels appear to be particularly common around the borders with the Czech Republic and Austria

2 HIDDEN ENTRANCES Erdställe are frequently accessed through church crypts and other subterranean spaces. The people of the region have a long history of using underground vaults for shelter and storage.

56 The Amber Room

LOCATION Purportedly in an underground cavern on the German-Czech border

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Chemnitz, Germany

SECRECY OVERVIEW Site of historic mystery: an ornate room seized by the Nazis and later lost.

Sometimes described as the “eighth wonder of the world,” the Amber Room was constructed using 6 tons of amber backed with gold leaf. Once given by Prussia to Russia as a symbol of peace, it was stolen from the USSR by Nazi forces during the Second World War. In the chaos that accompanied Germany’s defeat in 1945, the location of the room was lost, sparking an enduring quest to recover it.

A woman of unerringly expensive tastes, Queen Sophia Charlotte of Hanover persuaded her husband, Friedrich I of Prussia, to commission the Amber Room for Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Designed in the baroque style by Andreas Schlüter, it was crafted under the supervision of a Dane, Gottfried Wolfram, between 1701 and 1709.

By the time it was finished, Sophia Charlotte had been dead for four years, and Friedrich would die, too, in 1713. He was succeeded by his son, Friedrich Wilhelm I. Keen to consolidate good relations with Peter the Great of Russia, Friedrich Wilhelm made him a gift of the room in 1716. It was packed into 18 large crates and sent to St. Petersburg, where it was installed in the Winter Palace. In 1755 the Tsarina Elizabeth had it moved once more, this time to the Catherine Palace in Tsarkoye Selo (now part of Pushkin, a suburb of St. Petersburg).

FIT FOR A TSAR The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg became the official residence of Russia’s rulers from 1732. The Amber Room’s journey from Berlin in 1716 took six arduous weeks, and the panels are believed to have been left unassembled in a palace wing for several years.

An Italian designer called Bartolemeo Francesco Rastrelli oversaw a redesign for this new space, importing yet more amber from Berlin for the job. After subsequent renovations, the room covered 55 square meters (590 sq ft) and is estimated to have been worth something approaching US$150 million in today’s money.

The room remained at Tsarkoye Selo until 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, sending 3 million German troops into what was now the Soviet Union. Among the many crimes committed at this time, looting of art treasures was widespread. Officials at the Catherine Palace hurriedly set about dismantling the Amber Room to put into safe storage, but as they began their work, they found the antique amber crumbled. They decided instead to cover the room in conventional wallpaper, in the hope that the Germans would fail to realize what lay behind it, but the plan was an utter failure.

Within 36 hours of the arrival of German troops at the Palace, they had taken the room apart and stored it in 27 boxes that were soon transferred to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on the Baltic coast. Here, it was put back together again in the city’s castle museum. When the tide of the war turned against Germany after 1943, the museum director was charged with once again disassembling the room and moving it to a safe place. However, in 1944 Königsberg was bombed by British forces and much of the city, including its museum, burned. The fate of the Amber Room is unknown.

Over the subsequent years, theories have abounded. Some believe that it perished in the fires or was destroyed by a direct hit. Others say it was burned by Russian soldiers who captured the city in 1945, while another theory suggests that the room was dismantled and put to sea on a German ship that was then torpedoed and sunk. It has even been suggested (though not very credibly) that after his suicide Hitler’s body was not burned in Berlin, but was buried in this legendary room.

But for many, the paths lead inextricably to the town of Deutschneudorf, near the border of Saxony and the Czech Republic. In 1997, a single panel from the original room was found during a raid by German police. It belonged to the family of a soldier who was allegedly present when the room was dismantled during the war. In 2008, a team of excavators claimed that they had found a man-made chamber 20 meters (66 ft) below ground near Deutschneudorf and that, after conducting electromagnetic tests on the site, they were convinced it contained some 2 tons of Nazi gold. The mayor of Deutschneudorf, Heinz-Peter Haustein, said that the area is home to a vast network of underground storage rooms from the period, and that he was “90 percent sure” that the Amber Room lies somewhere within the complex. Indeed, the area is honeycombed by old silver, tin and copper mines, so there is no shortage of hiding places. But to date, the Amber Room’s location remains a mystery.

In the meantime, a reconstruction of the room may now be seen at Tsarskoye Selo in the Catherine Palace. It opened in 2003, having taken 24 years to complete. Much of the US$11 million funding for the project was donated by German companies—perhaps one day it will be possible to compare it with the original.

57 The Führerbunker

LOCATION Beneath Berlin, Germany

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Berlin

SECRECY OVERVIEW Location uncertain: Hitler’s underground hideaway in the last days of the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler spent his final days and hours in an underground bunker beneath the very buildings he had hoped would serve as the command center for his Thousand Year Reich. Instead, the Führerbunker witnessed some of the most tawdry scenes in the story of history’s most tawdry regime. After the war, the remains of the bunker festered beneath Berlin, sealed from the public and left to fade in the memory.

The Führerbunker was situated beneath the formidable Old Chancellery buildings (located at 77 Wilhelmstraße, close to the New Reich Chancellery that he had his favorite architect, Albert Speer, build for him on one of Wilhelmstraße’s offshoots, Voßstraße). An entrance to the bunker led from the Chancellery gardens. The subterranean complex was built in two distinct phases, the first beginning in 1936 and the second in 1943. It was originally intended as a fairly standard air raid shelter, but as the tide of the war turned, Hitler envisaged it as an alternative command center.

In terms of architecture, the complex was built on a split-level connected by a staircase. Each section had a steel door and a bulkhead so that they could be closed off from each other if necessary. Hitler’s quarters were on the lower level, at a depth of about 15 meters (50 ft).

The bunker lay beneath a curtain of reinforced concrete, and was divided into around 18 rooms along a central corridor. Hitler and his lover (and, ultimately, wife), Eva Braun, shared a suite of six rooms decorated with furniture brought from the Chancellery. There was also a map room, a communications room and several guardrooms, as well as space for Martin Bormann (Hitler’s private secretary), the family of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and assorted other cohorts, all of whom lived out the last days of the war there.