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19 years later, East German nuclear bunker opens to the public
By The Associated Press
Tags: East Germany, nuclear bunker

Nearly 19 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the huge and elaborate bunker where communist East Germany's leadership would have sought shelter from a nuclear strike has opened to the public.

The bunker - known by the military code name 17/5001 - was built between 1978 and 1983 under a pine forest some 30 miles north of Berlin.

"At the time it was built, it was the most elaborate Warsaw Pact protective structure outside the Soviet Union," Hannes Hensel of the Berlin Bunker Network, a private group now in charge of the facility, said before the first public tours on Saturday.
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The divided Germany was on the front line of the Cold War between nuclear-armed Soviet bloc and Western powers.

The bunker has a concrete ceiling up to 12 1/2 feet thick and reaches as far as 98 feet (30 meters) underground. The three-story structure - designed to absorb the shock waves from a nuclear explosion - has about 300 rooms and was meant to take up to 400 people.

It contains working space for East German leader Erich Honecker, communications equipment now covered with mold, dormitories, a medical facility with a room for operations, and five large pressurized air tanks.

Behind the bunker's four heavy steel doors, the musty air of the bunker was cool - only about 50 degrees Fahrenheit - on a hot summer day this week.

The bunker, designed to accommodate the East German leadership for 14 days, is only a few minutes' drive from the top leaders' secluded Wandlitz residential compound.

Honecker saw the facility only once - making a two-hour visit when it was completed on Dec. 13, 1983.

Until the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, about 30 secret police employees kept the bunker running around the clock.

The reunified Germany's military used the communications equipment there until 1993. Hensel said the military, or Bundeswehr, walled up the entrance in the 1990s, but intruders reopened it in 2002 and took copper wiring and some of the remaining fittings after they explored the bunker.

Hensel's group, which has worked to secure and document the bunker over recent years, began offering two-hour tours for euro20 (US$31) on Saturday.

They will be available until the end of October, when the bunker is to be sealed up again - this time permanently - in an effort to protect it from further damage.
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