Germany - once the proud nation of high-tech industry and global-exporting factories - now finds itself fringed by tales of what might have been: abandoned innovation parks, ruined industrial halls, and ambitious visions lost to decay.
In the Oranienbaum Heath, Hitler had munitions produced for his wars; during the GDR era, mines for the border were manufactured, and next door the Soviet army trained for emergencies. Even today, countless ruins bear witness to a dreadful past about which little is known.
The Russian officer simply couldn't understand the sudden excitement that gripped the staff of the environmental office. Moments earlier, the delegation from Oranienbaum—the first Germans in the Kapen forest in over 40 years—had discovered a large oil puddle in the middle of the forest.
The captain assigned to look after the curious guests simply shrugged his shoulders. “Nu, he just said,” recalls a woman who was there at the time, in the early 1990s, “oil comes from earth, oil goes back into earth.”
A lot of oil has seeped away in Oranienbaum Heath, a wooded area east of the Mulde and south of the Elbe, and it’s not only oil. Since the Nazi regime decided in 1935 to set up a munitions plant just four kilometers from the health resort of Oranienbaum and five from the historic Wörlitz Garden Realm, the history of the 200-hectare mixed forest was strictly military.
Hitler had munitions and chemical warfare agents manufactured here. More than a thousand mostly foreign forced laborers had to fill grenades with the poison gas “Lost” at the plant known as “MUNA.” The gas was supplied by the Orgacid factory in Halle-Ammendorf. Large-caliber ammunition was also produced, with explosives from Schönebeck on the Elbe.
Poison Gas and Shells
At the end of the war, the Americans took over the site, shortly thereafter the Soviets. From one military facility, two were created. Until the mid-1950s, German and Soviet specialists cleared the stocks of munitions and poison gas stored in half a hundred bunkers.
Some of the 10,000 shells were burned, others dumped in the Baltic Sea. Then a fence was erected between the western and eastern parts. Under the code name VEB Chemiewerk Kapen, the GDR continued to operate Hitler’s munitions factory. The location of the Soviet forces in Germany (GSSD), with the Stasi code HL 637, was shrouded in secrecy.
Four decades without fresh air have turned the 160 hectares into a time capsule of trees, concrete, and dilapidated buildings. Bunkers stand along the paths like pearls on a string. Numbered steel doors, painted olive green and warning with faded red signs, cut through the undergrowth. Inside, it’s dark but swept clean. There’s no clue left as to what was once stored here.
“Stop! We Shoot!”
Three of these claustrophobic single-person bunkers can still be found on the garrison grounds.
HL 637, listed in the 1996 registry of military waste sites as a “filling, dismantling, and storage facility,” is as large as it is mysterious. In the secret world of the Soviet garrison, still surrounded by walls and rusty barbed wire bearing the faded warning “Stop! We shoot,” tanks once tore up the heath, which local residents could hear.
The stationed 1st Guards Tank Army included the 52nd Mobile Rocket Technical Base (RTB), a unit initially equipped with tactical R-5M rockets, NATO code SS-3. The historian Matthias Uhl from Halle has proven that the 72nd RTB, stationed in Brandenburg’s Vogelsang, possessed nuclear warheads from 1959 onward. In the Halle-Dölau garrison, nuclear weapons for Luna-M and SS-21 rockets were stored during the GDR years.
There are no traces left of such use in Kapen. However, other marks left by former residents have survived the 30 years since their departure. A tall wooden tower was used for urban combat training, next to the remains of a climbing wall. In the cultural center, the ceiling insulation has fallen down, but a blonde woman painted by soldiers still proudly presents a large cake on the wall.
The menu board remains, as does the bulletin marked “canteen supervisor,” and the large hall where “Lost” gas grenades were filled—later used by the GSSD as a vehicle workshop. Everywhere, graffiti from two millennia can be found: Russian farewell greetings from 1992 and the modern tags of young local sprayers.
There’s a multitude of lodgings, kitchens, garages, standing toilets, and boiler houses. Between these, single-person bunkers and guard telephone pillars stand in the forest. Cable ends protrude from the ground, and during the remediation of the area, now part of the biosphere reserve between 2003 and 2005, 750 tons of arsenic sludge were excavated.
The former forest of death isn’t entirely unused today. In a vehicle hall, hunters have built themselves a comfortable perch.
