Germany plans new war bunkers

There are calls for the federal government to invest in civilian protection and revive the country's 2,000 Cold War-era bunkers.

There might be no better way to gauge a country's anxieties than by checking in on the companies building panic rooms and private bunkers. The business has been going worryingly well recently for BSSD Defense, the Berlin-based company that builds "protection room systems" for private, business, and military applications. As well as a range of home security equipment, the company offers everything from "pop-up panic rooms" for around €20,000 ($21,400) to full-scale bunkers for close to €200,000.

BSSD technical director Mario Piejde says the company has had more calls from private citizens, fire services, and local councils in recent years, an uptick that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and then was boosted again when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

"There's active demand and active interest because there aren't that many suppliers around," Piejde told DW. "No one could've expected that a conventional war could be waged in Europe again, but history keeps repeating itself, unfortunately. People who had been thinking about it before have now started to actually implement their plans."

No functioning bunkers

The feeling appears to have seeped into political circles recently: At an interior ministers' conference in Potsdam in early June, the Federal Interior Ministry presented its state counterparts with a "status report on the development of a modern shelter concept" for the German population.

That report emerged three months after the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, which represents the country's 14,000 local councils, called on the federal government to invest €10 billion over the next ten years in civilian protection — and use it to revive the country's 2,000 Cold War-era bunkers.

That would be no small undertaking. The Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) told DW that only 579 of those bunkers are still designated as public shelters, and they would have space for around 478,000 people (or 0.56% of the German population). And even these bunkers are "neither functional nor ready for use" after the previous shelter system was abandoned in 2007.

A new bunker concept, the BBK says, is in the course of being planned — but the federal government's report, leaked to various German media outlets, said that to protect the entire population of the country would require some 210,100 more bunkers to be built, which would take 25 years at a cost of €140.2 billion.

"Construction on population protection has certainly been neglected in the last 35 years," said Piejde, but reviving such shelters should be feasible: "Not much has changed in the construction in the past 50 decades. There's a certain strength of walls, the thickness of walls, and filter systems. All that has changed is the power supply and efficiency of batteries."

But how much protection is a bunker?

Hans-Walter Borries, director of the Institute for Economic and Security Studies FIRMITAS at the University of Witten, Germany, agrees that the issue of protecting the population has been sorely neglected.

But he questions how much use bunkers would actually be, given the scale of military firepower available in a war between NATO and Russia (if that is indeed the scenario being prepared for): Russia, for example, now has hypersonic missiles that could reach virtually any European city from Kaliningrad in two to five minutes. "It's not like in World War II, when warnings of bombers flying over Hannover towards Berlin gave people 15 or 20 minutes to find a bunker," Borries, also a colonel of the reserve in the Bundeswehr, told DW. "With the reaction times now, there's no way to warn the population."

The federal government does recognize this problem. In the case of war, the government report says, large central bunkers would be much less use than decentralized protected spaces inside residential buildings. For that reason, the government is planning to recommend that citizens should acquire cheap and easily available building materials to build safe rooms in their basements to protect themselves.

Money 'better spent elsewhere'

Borries is not convinced, especially given that such a conflict could quickly escalate into a nuclear war, and nuclear weapons are now unfathomably more destructive than the ones used by the US at the end of World War II. "The effect is no longer comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki," he said. "With modern weapons, the entire Federal Republic of Germany could be wiped out with nine to twelve rockets."

Bunkers that could withstand that kind of attack, he said, would need to be buried thousands of meters deep in the Swiss Alps. "And afterward you wouldn't want to come out anymore," he said.

Instead of investing billions in building a network of bunkers for the case of war, Borries argued that the governments would be better advised to invest in what he called "normal" population protection. This, he said, could be warning systems for disasters, especially natural ones like the floods that Germany has experienced recently, and creating better training for disaster relief organizations.

"That would mean money for training, exercises, and modern equipment," Borries concluded. "All that would make more sense than imagining these end-times scenarios in which you basically can't do anything anyway."

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

Author: Ben Knight