A German developer has bought a Nazi bunker for one million euros. Now he wants to turn it into a “fortress” for the rich

Germany is still grappling with the legacy of the Nazis. Throughout the country there is an extensive network of bunkers of the Second World War with the capacity to accommodate almost half a million people. Some of those left have been redesigned to serve citiesbut there are those who want to recover them for something similar to their original purpose: to be a fortress for the richest in the face of fear of a World War III.

And they even have their own cryptocurrency: BunkerCoin.

The project. It all starts when a real estate developer is occurred the idea: convert a World War II tunnel system into a bunker for rich people who fear a Third World War breaking out. those tunnels 13 kilometers long are near the town of Halberstadt, about 200 kilometers southwest of Berlin and were built by prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In 2019, businessman Peter Karl Jugl purchased these tunnels through his company Global Project Management for 1.3 million euros. Now you want to make profits.

luxury bunker. Jugl’s idea is to create protected homes that also have all the facilities and comforts. “Similar to rooms on luxury yachts,” according to the project, with food to be obtained through agriculture and indoor mushroom cultivation. Among the amenities mentioned, we find a school, a workshop, a casino, hospital, workshop, gym and spa.

So that the circadian cycle is not lost (although without sunlight it is somewhat complicated), the installation will simulate sunrises and sunsets in something extremely similar to what we can see in the nuclear shelters from the ‘Fallout’ saga. It will also be proof of a nuclear war.

BunkerCoin. How is entry guaranteed? By purchasing a cryptocurrency, each one guaranteeing one cubic centimeter of space inside the bunker. It is estimated that a small room would cost around half a million dollars

Historical memory. It is estimated that nearly 7,000 Buchenwald camp inmates worked in the tunnels and more than half died while digging. The purpose of the facility in its day was the manufacture of aviation equipment during the final phase of the war and, evidently, the plan for the luxury bunker has not pleased the descendants of those one bit. slaves who built it.

Langenstein-Zwieberge is a memorial built in the vicinity of the prison camp that honors both victims and survivors and its director, Gero Fedtke, called the project “an inappropriate way of treating the historical heritage of the tunnel.”

Disbelief. Curiously, all this has caught Jugl on a different footing. In a telephone interview granted told AFP that he has been letting visitors to the memorial access a section of the tunnel where historical traces from the Nazi era still remain, but he wanted to separate the tunnels from the prison camp located about two kilometers away. In addition, he commented that he is “building a facility to save human lives in an emergency and I have been treated unfairly, insulted and threatened.”

An association of relatives of prisoners is not on that same page, pointing out that it is impossible to separate the tunnels from the camp, since the reason for the existence of that facility was to house the slave labor that would excavate the tunnels. Fedtke comments that, like the camp, the tunnels have historical relevance because in Buchenwald “hardly any historical traces of the Nazi era have been preserved and in the tunnel it is totally different.”

still there. With all this commotion, Jugl has offered the state of Saxony-Anhalt the possibility of buying back the tunnels. It must be said that your company specializes in the purchase of “properties the bigger the better” with the aim of making them profitable and, now, it is offering the repurchase of the tunnel network for eight million euros.

However, the state Ministry of Culture told AFP that they have not received any permit request for the construction of the bunker and that, “as it is a cultural monument, all structural or use changes require approval.” What they have received is the buyback proposal, something that has led some to think that Jugl’s plan was not to create any bunkers, but simply noise so that the state would give him more money than he originally paid for the tunnels and win. in the transaction.

Whatever it is, it is a curious way to play with something as sensitive as the historical memory of the victims of Nazism.

Images | Bunkercoin

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