Germany plans new war bunkers – DW – 01.07.2024

There is perhaps no better way to gauge a country’s fears than to look at the companies that build panic rooms and private bunkers. Business has been worryingly good lately for BSSD Defense, the Berlin-based company that builds “shelter systems” for private, commercial and military use. As well as a range of security equipment for private homes, the company offers everything from “pop-up panic rooms” for around €20,000 to full-fledged bunkers for almost €200,000.

BSSD technical director Mario Piejde says the company has received more calls from private citizens, fire departments and local councils in recent years. This increase began during the COVID-19 pandemic and was then amplified again when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“There is a lot of demand and interest because there are not so many suppliers,” Piejde told DW. “Nobody expected that a conventional war could be fought in Europe again, but unfortunately history repeats itself again and again. People who had already thought about it before have now started to actually implement their plans.”

No functioning bunkers

This feeling also seems to be spreading in politics recently: At a conference of interior ministers in Potsdam at the beginning of June, the Federal Ministry of the Interior presented its colleagues from the states with a “status report on the development of a modern accommodation concept” for the German population.

This report came three months after the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, which represents the country’s 14,000 municipalities, called on the federal government to invest ten billion euros in protecting the civilian population over the next ten years – and to use the money to revive the country’s 2,000 Cold War-era bunkers.

That would not be an easy undertaking. The Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) told DW that only 579 of these bunkers are still designated as public shelters. They have space for around 478,000 people (or 0.56 percent of the German population). And even these bunkers are “neither functional nor ready for use” after the previous protection system was abandoned in 2007.

A new bunker concept is currently being planned, according to the BBK. However, the federal government’s report, which was leaked to various German media outlets, states that in order to protect the entire population of the country, around 210,100 additional bunkers would have to be built. This would take 25 years and cost 140.2 billion euros.

“Civil protection has certainly been neglected over the last 35 years,” says Piejde, but a revival of such shelters is certainly possible: “Over the last 50 decades, not much has changed in terms of construction. There is a certain strength of the walls, wall thicknesses, filter systems. The only thing that has changed is the power supply and the efficiency of the batteries.”

But how much protection does a bunker offer?

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

However, he questions what use bunkers would actually have in a war between NATO and Russia (if that is indeed the scenario being prepared for), given the military firepower: 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 people had 15 or 20 minutes to find a bunker when there were warnings about bombers flying over Hanover towards Berlin,” Borries, also a colonel in the German army reserve, told DW. “With today’s reaction times, there is no way to warn the population.”

The German government certainly recognizes this problem. In the event of war, the government report says, large centralized bunkers would be far less useful than decentralized shelters in residential buildings. Therefore, the government plans to recommend that citizens obtain cheap and readily available building materials to build shelters in their basements that will provide them with protection.

Money “better spent elsewhere”

Borries is not convinced, especially since such a conflict could quickly escalate into a nuclear war and nuclear weapons today are unimaginably more destructive than those used by the USA at the end of World War II. “The effect is no longer comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” he says. “With modern weapons, the entire Federal Republic of Germany could be wiped out with nine to twelve missiles.”

Bunkers that could withstand such an attack would have to be buried thousands of meters deep in the Swiss Alps, he said. “And afterwards, you don’t want to come out,” he said.

Instead of investing billions in building a network of bunkers in case of war, Borries said governments would be better off investing in what he called “normal” civil protection. This could include warning systems for disasters, especially natural disasters like the floods Germany recently experienced, and better training for disaster relief organizations.

“That would mean money for training, exercises and modern equipment,” Borries concluded. “All of that would make more sense than imagining end-time scenarios in which you basically can’t do anything anyway.”

Edited by Rina Goldenberg