At the turn of the twentieth century, Traben-Trarbach was a wine-trading hub second only to Bordeaux, and also a center of the Jugendstil movement, the German iteration of Art Nouveau many of its buildings reflect the wealth and the brio of that period. Only about six thousand people live there, but thousands of tourists arrive every summer to hike, drink the local Riesling, and take river cruises. The town, which is overlooked by a ruined fourteenth-century castle, is full of aesthetic quirks and highly caloric delicacies. Traben is on the north bank, Trarbach on the south. Traben-Trarbach is a fairy-tale town that straddles a bend in the wide, teal-blue Mosel River. The relocation of the Bundeswehr division was a blow to the local economy. The German government hoped that a technology business, or perhaps a hotel, might want the premises, but there were few prospective buyers. The Bundeswehr had employed twelve men, who worked in shifts around the clock, solely to insure that the bunker was properly ventilated and did not flood. The perimeter of the property was marked by ramparts and a fence, and aboveground the site contained several large structures, including a gatehouse, an office building, a tall aerial with satellite dishes, a helipad, and barracks constructed by the Nazis in 1933. The bunker sat beneath a plot of some thirty acres, in a forested area on a hill outside Traben-Trarbach, which is an hour east of the Belgian border. The low price reflected the unusual nature of the property and the expense of maintaining it. Germany’s federal real-estate agency, known as BImA, listed the bunker for three hundred and fifty thousand euros. In 2012, the Bundeswehr moved its meteorological division to another site. In winter, workers on day shifts arrived in the dark and left in the dark. On each level, the walls were painted a different color, to help people orient themselves-but the bunker was symmetrical, so one side looked much like another. Between 19, the bunker was the headquarters of the Bundeswehr’s meteorological division, and at any one time about three hundred and fifty civilian contractors worked there most of them focussed on predicting and plotting weather patterns wherever the German military was deployed. The rooms were soundproof and transmission-proof. The walls were concrete, thirty-one inches thick, and some were lined with copper. You entered the facility through an air lock the interior temperature was set to seventy degrees. Eighty days’ worth of survival provisions were stored inside, including an emergency power supply and more than a million litres of drinking water. It was five stories deep, had nearly sixty thousand square feet of floor space, and was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the West German military, the Bundeswehr, built a vast underground bunker near the town of Traben-Trarbach.
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