5 Secret Locations Built for the End of the World

Hidden away in a forest 30 miles northeast of Berlin lies a Cold War-era bunker, built to withstand atomic, chemical, and biological weapons if the conflict ever escalated.

In 1978, East German leader Erich Honecker commissioned Projekt 5000, the most sophisticated and state-of-the-art underground bunker of its time. It was built to house East Berlin’s top-tier government officials and military leaders.

The bunker was operational by 1983.

The Honecker Bunker was an outstanding achievement due to its size, and secrecy was needed to ensure its purpose. Locals were kept in the dark and told that the strange hollowed-out hillside which hid the bunker was just another missile silo.

The structure was surrounded by a 13.7-ft thick layer of concrete and steel plates to neutralize a nuclear weapon's electromagnetic pulse. It could withstand explosive forces 80 times more potent than the Hiroshima bomb.

Buried 79-feet underground, the shelter was built to operate independently from the outside world. It could house 400 people for up to 2 weeks. East Berlin’s top brass believed that this amount of time would be enough until danger passed. They would then move the people inside the bunker to another location in armored vehicles.

The highest-ranking occupants were to stay in cubes suspended by cables and weights that would swing in a pendulum-like motion if the site sustained a direct strike.

Honecker only visited the bunker once. After the Soviet Union fell, he escaped to South America. The secret site was then revealed to the world.

The reunified German army, the Bundeswehr, took over the Honecker bunker and decommissioned it in April of 1993.

Since 2003, the Bunker 5001 project, led by civilian Hannes Hensel, has been trying to raise money to buy the shelter, repair it, and open it for guided tours, but they haven't been successful.

After hundreds of urban explorers tried to enter the facilities over the years, they were sealed by the government in 2008.

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