Wehrwolf (Werwolf): Hitler’s Headquarters in Ukraine
WHY A GREAT MANY COME TO ‘WOLFSSCHANZE’ (POLAND), AND VERY FEW GIVE CREDIT TO HITLER’S ‘WERWOLF’ HEADQUARTERS (UKRAINE)
The military headquarters of Adolf Hitler, known in German as ‘Führerhauptquartier’ (Führer’s main quarters), have historically been misappreciated as no less than an issue of political and territorial organization in Europe in the days of the Third Reich. It’s a secret to no one that the concentration of authority and centralization of power in the Third Reich, in Hitler’s hands at the disposal of his military and party environment, was personified in extreme form. In the context of geography, the center of Germany’s military-political life, as well as the fate and fortune of its allies and satellites, lay beyond the exclusive province of Berlin. At any point in time, Hitler was at his military headquarters distanced 10 kilometers from the heartstreets of the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where the surrounding area allocated the greater part of the party leaders, including members of Hitler’s intimate circle, the Führer’s adjutant, and chiefs of army staffs, than any other part of Europe, including Berlin.
The headquarters is variously spelled in sources as Werwolf, Werewolf, or Wehrwolf — the last spelling being the historically accurate German compound of “Wehr” (defense) and “Wolf.”
The extensive historiography of the Second World War, including numerous memoirs and scholarly research, has preserved hundreds of references to the WEREWOLF (Werwolf) or WEHRWOLF HQ. Anyhow, the history of this location, as well as many issues dealing with the Eastern front, is still at a low level of understanding by the majority of my Western readers (Ukraine is my heartland). At varying times, this very pinewood forest at a stone’s throw from Vinnytsia witnessed the visits of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. Albert Speer was the nominal architect of the state and later the Minister of Armaments.
HERMANN GOERING, nominally the second-in-line man in the Third Reich and the one-of-his-kind Reichsmarshal of the Air Forces (Luftwaffe). He came to Ukraine as early as July 20, 1942, and used to spend his time visiting the Vinnytsia theater, admiring the landscapes, and taking shots at pigeons. Already in September 1942, Hitler supported his OKW officers in an attempt to put pressure on Goering to delegate 200,000 soldiers from the Luftwaffe to the armed forces. This claim would later revolutionize the creation of 22 new divisions. The first phase of the construction in 1942 included the erection of the ‘ANLAGE STEINBRUCH’, 30 kilometers distance to the North and next to the airfield in Kalinovka. The complex of ‘Führungsstab der Luftwaffe’ (Air Force Command headquarters), surrounded by 5 km of wire-net fencing, included twelve barracks and a concrete bunker of 42.5 square meters. The Goering facilities were camouflaged even better than the Werwolf itself, with several thousand trees and bushes and 12,000 square meters of grass. The construction of the complex demanded 105,000 man-days of work, compared with 180,000 spent on Hitler’s HQ.
MARTIN BORMANN, Hitler’s private secretary and the ‘power behind the throne’ of the regime, was the only high-ranking member of Hitler’s inner circle who constantly spent his time close to the Führer within the Ukrainian headquarters. All while Herman Goering was more and more out of favor (in particular due to the Allied air raid on Cologne on May 30), Goebbels used to spend his routine back in Berlin, and Himmler had his own HQ sixty miles away, Borman shadowed Hitler on every possible occasion. The ‘grey cardinal’ capitalized on Hitler’s hatred of the Slavic nations. As early as July 22, 1942, Borman performed a tour around Vinnytsia and later expressed his frustration about the physical superiority of the Ukrainians to the Führer. At the same time, the secretary used to favor Erich Koch, Reichskommissar of Ukraine, openly compromising the authority of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, nominally Koch’s chief. Alfred Rosenberg, the ideological inspirator of the Nazi movement, was to become an unwanted visitor at Hitler’s HQ.
HEINRICH HIMMLER, the Reichsführer and the infamous chief of the SS, was a constant visitor to the Werwolf headquarters and had obtained his own HQ in Ukraine: codename Feldkommandostelle ‘Hegewald’, (should not be confused with the ‘Hegewaldheim’, East of Rastenburg. Initially, the Ukrainian HQ was named ‘Waldhof’, but Himmler renamed it upon arrival, south of Zhytomyr. The former military academy for the Soviet officers, with 21,000 square meters of space, was reconditioned and expanded due to the work of 410 laborers and totaled 27,000 man-days of work. It’s notorious that back in 1924, at the time of living without an income with his parents (before he was appointed the secretary of Gregor Strasser), he contacted the Russian embassy to find out if he could apply for a job in Ukraine. As late as October 4-5, 1942 (one year after the massacre in Babi Yar in Kyiv), the height of the German advance, Himmler visited Ukraine and addressed the Einsatzgruppe D officers to dismiss the local order not to kill those Jews who held the farmlands.
Himmler paid his first visit to his new Ukrainian headquarters as early as July 24, 1942, and would later order to forcibly remove 18 000 of the ‘non-Aryan’ locals and replace them with 10 000 ‘Germans’. The specially created sonderkommando would perform the task between mid-October and mid-November, and Himmler would visit ‘German villages’ on October 20, 1942 (at the end of 1943, the settlements would be abandoned). According to a post-war testimony of the high-ranking SS officer (Paul Scheer), on July 26, two days after the arrival, Himmler issued an oral order to destroy all the Ukrainian Jews. On August 11, Heinrich Müller and Adolf Eichmann visited the ‘Hegewald’ south of Zhytomyr to discuss the ‘progress’ of the final solution’. At the same time, the leader of the SS state-in-state paid less attention to the activities of the four Waffen-SS divisions during this period of war.
The headquarters in Ukraine was also attended by Ion Antonescu, the authoritarian ruler of Romania; Ante Pavelic, the man in dictator power in Croatia, as well as a cast of foreign ambassadors of Germany’s allies and even the neutral countries such as Turkey. All while Blondie, Hitler’s favorite sheepdog, was constantly (at the disposal of a personal veterinary officer) near the Führer in ‘WEHRWOLF’, Eva Braun had never visited Hitler in his military headquarters, in contrast with the yellow-press speculations you can find.
Traudl Junge, the personal secretary of Adolf Hitler, would recall in her memories sixty years later (the book would breathe inspiration into the creation of the acknowledged ‘Der Untergang’ (The Bunker 2004 movie), that the enormous stuffy heat and dampness inside the premises of the headquarters near Vinnytsia had damaged the health of young girl 22 years old. Rochus Misch, a former personal bodyguard of Hitler and the later-on witness of the agony within the Berlin bunker in spring 1945, would include his 2008 memoirs with details that he had practiced a kind of barter with the locals, an exchange of knitting needles sent by his wife from Germany for sunflower oil and goose, a gift to send back to his family. Walter Schellenberg, a deputy commander of the SD foreign intelligence at that time, would later write on his first flight over the occupied territory of the Eastern Front and the first-in-a-row visit to the ‘WEHRWOLF’. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, would ironize on four days on the way, that most diplomatic guests had to cover, from Berlin (evening train at 19:51 from the Charlottenburg station) to Warsaw (after 34 hours), then to Brest-Litovsk, then Kovel, Povno, Berdichev, then to Ribbentrop’s office and finally to Werewolf.
Albert Speer would fill his 1969 ‘Inside the Third Reich’ memoirs with recollections of his automobile rides around Vinnytsia without bodyguards, as well as on the pinewood boards, which had once covered the walls of the officers’ canteen, where Hitler used to share with his military advisers. The near-death reminiscences of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel would include the passage on the air conditioning system inside the ‘Führerhauptquartier’ in Ukraine, which had been of poor assistance to Hitler’s constant headaches back in the summer of 1942 and only deepened the Führer’s irritability and hard temper. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein would also recall the sickly look of the German supreme commander (Hitler) within his military headquarters close to Vinnytsia. Heinrich Hofmann, the personal photographer of Adolf Hitler, visited the Ukraine headquarters on several occasions and completed (with the help of his assistant) a series of photos. Years from that period, he would resurrect his recallings of Hitler’s reaction to the news of the capitulation of the 6th Army in Stalingrad. Walter Warlimont, deputy chief (next to Alfred Jodl) of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) Operations Staff, also had his career times back in Ukraine and later wrote about his free and easy swimming in the river of the Southern Bug and chatting with the local citizens.
Above and beyond the fact that OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres) staff were stationed in the city of Vinnytsia, the ‘WEHRWOLF’ headquarters had been visited by the commanders of one in every army group, including Friedrich Paulus, Günther von Kluge, Wilhelm List, Erwin Rommel, Erich Von Manstein, Maximillian von Weichs, Walter Model, and Heinz Guderian. Franz Halder, the chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH), used to make a car passage almost every single day to cover the distance between the University of Vinnytsia (staff of the OKH was stationed) and the ‘Führerhauptquartier’ in the woods to the North. On a mere day-to-day basis, the officers of different ranks had to make repeated air journeys to the ‘Werewolf’ for the relevant operational manuals and orders. Victor Lutze, a successor of Ernst Röhm as the formal leader of the SA since 1934, visited ‘Wehrwolf’ in July 1942 to make a report on the performance of his soldiers in the war. In August 1942, Otto Georg Thierack, the president of the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), made his way to the Ukrainian headquarters to be appointed as the Reich Minister of Justice (a man who would implement the legal term ‘Vernichtung Durch Arbeit, ‘the extermination through work).
On a personal commission from Hitler, the flights of the attendees were to be serviced by a separate air unit, known as the ‘Fliegerstaffel des Führers’ (The flying squadron of the Führer), quartered on a separate airfield 25 km from Vinnytsia and supervised by Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot. The old-timer Baur, who had previously accompanied Hitler to Italy, Poland, and France(particularly during the June 1940 visit to Paris), would recall, years from that period (in his ‘I was Hitler’s pilot’ memoirs), the high charge capacity of the airfield, as well as an exceptional taste of the Ukrainian noodles with eggs. Back in August 1942, Baur was commissioned to handle the widow of István Horthy and thus the daughter-in-law of Miklós Horthy, the authoritative dictator of Hungary, from the military hospital (the young woman who worked there) in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev to Werwolf.
While the ‘Wolfsschanze’ in Eastern Prussia is generally mentioned and recognized with a much greater frequency, ‘Wehrwolf’, for the most part, is of lower historical value for most ‘Western’ people. I have identified four main reasons why a great many come to ‘Wolfsschanze’ (Poland), and very few, at least give credit to ‘Werwolf’ (Ukraine).
1. In historical contrast with the fact that ‘Wehrwolf’ was once built to occupy the largest area among Hitler’s military headquarters (‘Führerhauptquartier’) in Europe, with 162 000 м2 of the main area, the German Führer spent only 118 full days in ‘Wehrwolf,’ unlike more than 800 days within ‘Wolfschanze’. At this rate, regardless of the importance of the decisions made in Ukraine in unequal periods between July 1942 and August 1943, the more important and long-ago stay of Hitler and the Reich’s political and military command in the woods of Rastenburg reveals the gap in ‘awareness’ at Hitler’s headquarters.
2. The 1944 ‘July plot’ has been historically attributed as one of the most discussed and get-to-hear episodes of the Second World War, with the natural emphasis on the events back at ‘Wolfsschanze’ in Eastern Prussia. Along with that, very few people who find their passion in history have cognizance of the fact that CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG had his career times as the OKH officer in Ukraine, too, back in the second part of 1942. Hans von Bittenfeld, the German diplomat, secretly revealed to Stauffenberg that the mass killings of the Jews, particularly in Ukraine, were carried out on a mass scale by the SS with the breathtaking details of digging their graves. No later than August 1942, Claus took an open objection among the OKH officers to the practice of mass killings of the Jews, as well as to the unfavorable tide of the war for Germany. Early that year, he (along with other officers) had visited Von Paulus, and now Stauffenberg was in doubt about Hitler’s overextension of the Wehrmacht forces in the East.
In a wider sense, this period in the woods of Ukraine, deep enough into the occupied territories on the Eastern front, was a starting point of Stauffenberg’s antipathy to the regime and Hitler in person, months before his service in North Africa, the well-known severe injury, and close to getting-to-know with the opposition. The photo below (right) depicts Claus Von Stauffenberg on his way to Vinnytsia back in the summer of 1942. On September 25, a day after Hitler had relieved Franz Halder from his duties, Stauffenberg fell into a rage in the presence of some OKH officers and shouted that Hitler had to be eliminated.
3. The overwhelming majority of the people who annually visit Hitler’s headquarters near Vinnytsia city in Ukraine take note that they find no more than grass and bricks on the site of former historical importance. Sure enough, while both famous ‘Führerhauptquartiers’ were intentionally devastated by the Germans and later occupied by the Soviet forces, ‘Wolfsschanze’ HQ has been preserved in relatively better condition.
4. Due to natural historical, geographical, and political reasons, Ukraine, unfortunately, is attributed as a direction beyond the tourist desire for the ‘Western’ people, regardless of its intensive historiography in the context of the Second World War and the Eastern Front. ‘Wolfsschanze’ was to be shaped as a tourist destination back in the 1990s and is currently visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. On the other side, Hitler’s headquarters near Vinnytsia in Ukraine has been preserved as no more than woods without footpaths or any historical signs, and it was not until 2011 that the situation was brought to light with the establishment of the memorial complex.
THE EASTERN FRONT AND HITLER’S HQ NEAR VINNYTSIA
Originating from the invasion of Poland (‘Weiß’ plan) back in 1939, Hitler’s main adjutant (Rudolf Schmundt, later Chief of the Army Personnel Department) used to choose the location for the military headquarters of the Führer on consideration of the proximity to the fighting front. For reasons that history could appreciate, Hitler and his military leaders were in a position to be on the warpath and to make the campaigns without leaving Berlin. Contrary to the logistic frame of the issue, such ‘home-minded’ practice would inevitably sophisticate and dramatize the contact between the high command and the commanders of the army groups. Hitler’s military headquarters, thus command centers, were once known as the ‘Führerhauptquartiere’.
The historical records show that no less than 19 facilities of that kind were scheduled for construction during WW2, with 14 of them finished to a greater or lesser degree. A number of the finished ‘Führerhauptquartiere’ were not visited by Hitler or used for the intended purpose. Relatedly, as many as 12.9 million man-days of work were put into operation during WW2 to erect Hitler’s ‘Führerhauptquartiere’ all over Europe. As early as 17 November 1942, at the time when Hitler had already left his Ukrainian HQ for the second time (after a September break), the FHQ ‘WASSERBURG’ 300 km, south-west of the sieged Leningrad, was put into construction, indeed never visited by Hitler, but later used as the headquarters for Army Group ‘North’.
With winter 1941 approaching and on account of the extended military advance of the German army to the East, a military demand rose to move Hitler’s military headquarters from the ‘Wolfschanze’ in East Prussia (now too distanced from the headquarters of the army groups ‘South’, ‘Center’ and ‘North’) further on to the East deep into the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. No sooner than in November 1941, in the course of the blitz advance to Moscow, General Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s key military adjutant, assigned (previously supplied with the inspection details from the ‘Todt’ organization) the construction of two military headquarters on the Eastern Front. The first one, codenamed ‘Bärenhöhle,’ was chosen to be built near Smolensk and would not be later used by Hitler. The second one, planned to be located closer to the Army Group ‘South’, was initially specified as the location close to the Ukrainian city of Lubny, at an almost equal distance to Kyiv, Poltava, and Cherkasy. On the very third day of the build-up, the Germans now gave appropriate consideration to the incompleteness of the transport system in the location. General Schmundt issued an order to move the construction to the reserved location close to the city of Vinnytsia, examined a week before. The new site was adequate to meet the requirements of the ‘Führerhauptquartiere’.
- The availability of a city of moderate significance with a sophisticated transport junction nearby. The Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia (93,000 inhabitants back in 1939) was now that kind of city. Later on, the OKH staff, altogether nearly 8000 people, would be allocated within the city. While the local university and the asylum were chosen to place the offices, the military personnel were to be quartered simply in the apartments of Vinnytsia city. Franz Halder would put the positive characterization of the offices and apartments on the pages of his war diary on July 16, 1942. In wider terms, the city of Vinnytsia was destined to provide the OKH headquarters and the residents of the ‘Werewolf’ HQ with the provision of electricity and a communication hub. In the autumn of 1942, the ‘Food and Agriculture Department’ in occupied Ukraine reported on the ‘successful’ collection of the harvest, leaving the peasants to starve after taking as much as 9 million tonnes of grain, meat, and fat, a hard perspective even for those who had previously survived Stalin’s Famine Genocide of 1932-1933. The Germans made their 1942 Christmas ‘more pleasant’ with another confiscation of the Ukrainian sunflower oil.
- The sophisticated transport options were in all cases the canonical issue when choosing the location for Hitler’s military headquarters as a means to deliver building materials under construction, as well as for the later purposes of logistics for the personnel and supplies. The city of Vinnytsia had one of the major railway junctions in the region, which was now accompanied by a narrow-gauge line directly to the construction site. Above and beyond the communication with the OKH headquarters in Vinnytsia (the code name ‘WINNIZA-STADT’), the transport system was considered to guarantee logistics with the Luftwaffe and Herman Goering’s headquarters (codename ‘Anlage Steinbuch’), as well as with Heinrich Himmler’s HQ (codename ‘Anlage Hegewald’). The facility also allocated the office of Joachim von Ribbentrop (most of the ambassadors had to come here first, being accepted by Ribbentrop, and later were taken to Hitler’s headquarters for a one-hour meeting, after a few days on the way) and Doctor Lammers (State Chancellery). During this period of war, the Germans also made enormous efforts to build the ‘IV Durchgangsstrasse’, the arterial road to supply the forces on the Eastern Front.
- The existence of the woodland on the site of the planned military headquarters was another crucial factor for the construction to the North of Vinnytsia. A few consider the fact that back in 1941, the location of the expected ‘Werwolf’ was beyond the forestry, located to the North. No sooner than the second phase of the construction and the put-in operations of the main objects, the open-field-like territory was planted with Apr. 800 trees, several thousand bushes, and 12,000 m2 of grass. On the other side, the woodline to the North was completely cleared until the open field. In addition to the forestry, the granite quarry to the North would become the key source of stone for the construction of the ‘Werwolf’ (Führerhauptquartier Werwolf).
The construction of the ‘WEHRWOLF’ military headquarters of Adolf Hitler near Vinnytsia could be nominally divided into two stages. The main phase was initiated on December 15, 1941, and would be endured up to July 16, 1942, and Hitler’s first day on the site. This initial phase of the construction witnessed the forced labor of Apr. 1200 Soviet prisoners of war, who would later be commissioned to conduct hard work on the construction of the ‘IV Durchgangsstrasse’ road. Contrary to the false historical belief (that Wehrwolf was constructed purely by the Soviet prisoners of war), the major share of the workforce was assigned to the ‘Todt’ organization, with merely 8000 workers at the height of the works in April 1942.In In
In January 1943, during the period Hitler was absent, the second building phase was initiated, which would be conducted until July 1943, and determined to create a new zone for the operating personnel, as well as to improve winterize the existing buildings. The second phase was put into operation with the hands of 1250 OT workers, and the Russian prisoners were no longer leveraged, mostly preserving the need for secrecy. At the same time, several additional guard posts were created to improve the security measures, carried out additionally by the SS ‘Begleitbataillon’ (Accompanying battalion) and field gendarmes. The total figure of the man-days of work within 1941-1943 could be measured as much as 332,000. The ‘average’ Organization Todt worker (80% of them were not German) was rationed 700 grams of bread, 40 grams of fat, and 30 grams of sugar a day.
The ‘WEHRWOLF’ military headquarters was destined to become the largest object of this kind in the history of the Second World War, with 162 000 square meters of total area size and 11 400 cubic meters of concrete put into the construction, and 3000 guarding personnel assigned to secure Adolf Hitler and the military command. Along with the construction of the HQ for Hitler, the Germans would build up the headquarters for Goering and Himmler, and the extended territories of Ukraine, up to the city of Zhytomyr to the North, were pre-planned to be turned into the land for the Volksdeutsche, after the never-completed mass evacuation of the locals. The collapse of the Third Reich would spell the death of the plans to create the so-called ‘Siedlungsgebiet Wehrwolf’ (‘Wehrwolf’ settlement area).
HITLER AND UKRAINIAN SUMMER HEAT AT WERWOLF
Every first reference to Adolf Hitler at the ‘WEHRWOLF’ alludes to the emphasis on the Ukrainian summer heat, which badly damaged the physical and maybe the mental state of the German dictator. The origin of the historical delicate gradation was not purely based on the post-war storytelling of Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s physician, who testified retrospectively that Hitler did suffer the brain fever between July 22nd and 29, of July 1942. As a means of attestation to Morell’s recallings, several memoirs of the former ‘Wehrwolf’ staff and attendees, written independently and at varying times, included references to the unbearable heat and dampness inside the wooden buildings of the military headquarters near Vinnytsia. One of the outdoorsy thermometers was put on a tree a few steps next to the entrance of Hitler’s house.
In this respect, Hitler, who had been prone to long walks, had an everyday routine of assuring himself of the severity of the Ukrainian climate, a country he had the vision to turn into a ‘breadbasket’ for the Reich. Even though the refrigerator was invented back in the first half of the 19th century, there were none in ‘Wehrwolf,’ and the Germans used to store provisions, including wine, inside the concrete bunker beyond the ‘Sperrkreis I’ main zone. Alan Bullock would use the pages of his legendary “Hitler: A Study in Tyranny’ book to make a statement that Hitler’s self-isolation within his military headquarters would later result in his poor health in general terms as well as his progressive divorcement from the reality of war. Paul Carrel would fill the pages of his famous ‘Hitler Moves East’ book with the semi-joke phrase that Hitler looked indeed like a werewolf within the hot summer days of July 1942.
Hitler’s fatigue back in the hot July days of 1942, after being troubled with constant headaches, is generally attributed to the decision that Hitler finally commissioned on July 23, 1942 (the second day of Hitler’s ‘brain flew’, according to Theodor Morell). On that day in the ‘Wehrwolf’, Adolf Hitler issued the order to apportion the German forces in their advance to the East into the Caucasus and the Volga River. This 23 July document would actually derail the reasonableness of the ‘BLAU’ plan, piecemeal the forces of the Wehrmacht, and finally lead to the tragedy of the 6th Army in Stalingrad within seven months. Hitler considered the Red Army to be one step from collapse.
A year before the historically controversial July 23 decision (the division of the Army Group ‘South’ into two groups), at a time when the Wehrmacht seemed to bring the Red Army to its knees, Adolf Hitler made his first visit to Ukraine. On August 6, 1941, the German Führer took a personal flight to the Ukrainian city of Berdichev. He was greeted by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the supreme commander of the Army Group ‘South’ at that period, and sometime later (September 23), Hitler conducted an arrangement with Ion Victor Antonescu, the Romanian ruler. It is worth mentioning that Hitler felt fatigued no later than the next day, August 7, and experienced weakness and lack of energy for the following week. Every second-claimed historian attributes this occasion to one of the reasons that would postpone the advance to Moscow. In wider means of the Holocaust, the same day, August 7, 1941, witnessed the mass action against the Jewish population of Berdichev. The Jews, who at that time formed 40% of the city’s demography, were commissioned to be put into the ghetto. The ‘Berdichev tragedy’ would later become one of the first actions of a mass slaughter of the Jewish population in the occupied territories of the USSR, and the post-war investigators would reveal the bodies of Apr. 20,000 former Jews from Berdichev.
On August 28, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini conducted a planned visit to the disposal of the German and Italian troops near the Ukrainian city of Uman. Only a few weeks before that visit, the German forces surrounded and captured Apr. 100,000 Soviet soldiers in a pocket near Uman, actually eliminating two armies. That flight to Uman was later memoired by Hans Baur, Hitler’s airman, who would recall the occasion when he delegated a few-minute control to the Italian dictator, and Mussolini was filled with enthusiasm on the German CONDOR. The Focke-Wulf 200 Condor was a much faster plane than the conventional JU-52 Hitler used. The air route included the flight over the city of Vinnytsia, the location Hitler would visit only 11 months later. In December 1941, Hitler visited the headquarters of the Army Group ‘South’ for the second time, this bout near Poltava. Historically speaking, Hitler’s migration to the ‘Wehrwolf’ in July 1942 was not his first visit to Ukraine, nor was it the only location that the German Führer had visited on the Eastern Front. Later on in March 1943, Hitler would visit Zaporizhzhia.
HITLER AND HIS 118 DAYS IN FÜHRERHAUPTQUARTIER WERWOLF
On July 16, 1942, at 8:15 a.m., the air procession of 16 planes, with Hitler as the key VIP on board his CONDOR, left the airfield of ‘Wilhelmsdorf’ near the ‘WOLFSSCHANZE’ in East Prussia to land on the airfield to the North of Vinnytsia three hours later. This very ‘Wilhelmsdorf’ air ground in Wolfsschanze would be later used by Claus Von Stauffenberg before and just after the famous attempt upon the life of Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. On the hot summer day of July 16, 1942, Hitler’s CONDOR was accompanied by 15 units of ‘JU-52’ and ‘ME-11’. As a mere matter of a short carriage inside the armored car, surrounded by his personal guards, the Führer finally reached his new field headquarters to the north of Vinnytsia.
The interior and passenger compartment of Hitler’s car included a niche for a hidden gun; the car body was designed to survive the machine-gun cannonade, and the bullet-proof glass was to withstand the rifle contact shot. The powerful headlight was aimed to blind the oncoming transport and people on the road. All the while, the lack of luxuriance and spartan living conditions were common for Hitler in any of his field headquarters, the Ukrainian 40 °C summer heat, and the swarm of forestry mosquitoes casually made Hitler’s military and political environment fall into nostalgia in East Prussia. Later on, Hitler followed Dr. Morell’s recommendations and issued an order for all residents of the headquarters to take the ‘Atibrin’ pill daily in the evening, as a preventive measure against malaria. The ‘Ukrainian period’ is also well-known due to some chapters of Hitler’s ‘Table Talks’.
Back in the times of the construction planning, the assigned territory between Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr, which had been previously determined to include Hitler’s new headquarters, as well as the OKH staff (WINNIZA-STADT), the HQ for Luftwaffe (STEINBRUCH, finally coasted as much as 2 million reichsmarks) and Himmler (HEGEWALD), was codenamed as ‘EICHENHAIN’ (Oakwood or ‘Oak grove’). The very location of Hitler’s military headquarters was codenamed ‘WALD’ (Forest). Although Hitler was not the initiator of the allocation near Vinnytsia (General Schmund’s decision), he entitled the place as ‘WEHRWOLF’ soon after the arrival, thus referring to the ‘Der Wehrwolf: Die Bauernchronik’ book of Hermann Löns, a German writer. The ‘Wehrwolf’ word was made up by this author and should not be confused with the word ‘Werwolf’ (Führerhauptquartier Werwolf). Many of the German officers, who were commissioned to move to the Ukrainian headquarters or to visit the location, were in intended ignorance of Hitler’s bibliography and used the linguistically correct ‘WERWOLF’ nomination. In this historical respect, we could find both variants of the nomination of Hitler’s HQ near Vinnytsia, each of which is in one way correct.
Regardless of some incorrect beliefs, A) Hitler was a resident of the WEHRWOLF headquarters for all days from July 1942 until August 1943. B) Hitler indeed spent only 118 full days at the location, which was almost seven times fewer than his presence within the ‘Wolfsschanze’. C) The making of one or another decision should not be limited to the location itself and include a myriad of factors behind it. It’s generally established to determine three periods of Hitler’s presence at the ‘Wehrwolf’, two of which were intermitted with trips to Berlin and ‘Wolfsschanze’ respectively.
- July 16 – September 27 and October 4 – November 1
This period is to be attributed as the most prolonged period of Hitler’s residency in ‘Wehrwolf’ HQ in Ukraine, two months of which the German dictator spent permanently on the site, up to his short-term journey to Berlin, to give a public speech. On the very day of his arrival at a new headquarters on July 16, 1942, the Vichy authorities initiated the infamous assault on the Jews in Paris, and less than a week later, the first cattle trucks, filled with people, would leave Warsaw in the direction of Treblinka extermination camp. The summer military campaign of the Wehrmacht, under the ‘BLAU’ operation, would bring a sense of triumph to Hitler (despite his July fatigue) no later than July 24, with the German forces entering the city of Rostov-na-Donu. This event, as I have stated above, was preceded by the infamous №45 directive a day before, which reinvented German priorities in the East (1. Seizing the Caucasus oilfields; 2. Capturing Stalingrad). During the same period, hundreds of people on the home front were used to send letters to the Nazi newspapers with the approval of the prerogatives and readiness to migrate to new territories in the East. The ‘Table talks’ on July 18 included Hitler’s dreams of connecting Berlin with the conquered East with the means of ‘autobahnen’. On July 22, Hitler ordered to send a handwritten letter to Seuss-Inquart on his fiftieth birthday.
On July 27, 1942, more than 400 British bomb carriers would devastate Hamburg and would dishearten all the residents of the ‘Wehrwolf’, and infuriate Hitler. The next day, July 28, he signed three decrees on domestic policy, including the restriction of trade, child care, and finally public health care. With the last one, Hitler assigned his physician Karl Brandt as ‘the Führer’s general commissar for the medical and public health services’. On July 29, 1942, Hitler sent a telegram to Benito Mussolini on the occasion of his 59th birthday, with the assurances that ‘their ally would secure the victory for the sake of European freedom‘. Five days later, he would write his doubts to Duce on the Axis’s ability to reach the Suez Canal. On August 17, Hitler would discuss the reformation of a Romanian Army to assist the German forces at Stalingrad, the infamously known ‘weak link’ in the upcoming encirclement in November.
On August 18, Hitler issued the infamous ‘Directive №46’, prescribing the most decisive methods against the partisans, and the decree on architectural issues in Vienna on the same day. On August 19, 1942, no more than a week after Churchill visited Moscow and his statement that the ‘Second Front’ would not be opened in Europe in 1942, Hitler experienced a wave of enthusiasm back in his accommodation near Vinnytsia on the failed British landing near the French city of Dieppe. On August 20, he sent a congratulatory telegram to Admiral Miklos Horthy on the occasion of the ‘State Foundation Day of Hungary’. As early as August 21, 1942, the German military unit raised a swastika flag on Elbrus, the highest peak of the Caucasus mountains, and the farthest point of the Wehrmacht offensive.
In the proximity of only four days (August 23), the German Luftwaffe undertook the first mass air raid on Stalingrad, a city that had been previously announced as conquered (Hitler had a draft of the press release on his table since mid-August), with a swastika banner on the top of a building in the center. With no tactical means, the air raids were the new chapter of the barbaric demolition of the European cities after Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Belgrade. As a result of the most massive air raid since the start of the ‘Barbarossa’, most of the wooden erections in Stalingrad were scorched, and the brick center of the city, in large part, was turned into ruins. September 24, a day after the visit of Mihai Antonescu, witnessed the visit of Ante Pavelic, the Croatian commander. On the same day, Hitler relieved Franz Halder, ‘Chef des Generalstabs’ (the chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH), from his duties and assigned General Kurt Zeitzler to take the post, simultaneously promoting Zeitzler to Colonel General. The last page of Halder’s war diary, undated, would include the frustration about Hitler’s attitude on issuing directives as the definite means to deliver orders without instructing the officers about the operational and tactical consequences of such directives.
On September 27, the anniversary of the Tripartite Pact was specified by Hitler’s telegrams from Wehrwolf to Mussolini, King Victor Emmanuel, the Japanese Emperor, and the Japanese Prime Minister. As soon as October 18, three days after a decree on abandoning the duels between the German officers, Hitler would commission the infamous ‘Commandos order’ while residing in ‘Wehrwolf’. An order that prescribed the immediate shooting of the captured commandos. Before he left Ukraine on November 1, Hitler discovered the start of the Second Battle of El Alamein, which would lead to the defeat of the Afrika Korps. Nevertheless, the Führer gave credence to his adjutant Schmundt and his advice to leave the headquarters for the sake of his health, as Hitler had spent most of his time since June 1941 within the ‘Führerhauptquartiere’ facilities in ‘Wolfsschanze’ and ‘Wehrwolf. Along with the advice of the adjutant, the hot Ukrainian summer and early Fall turned into freezing rains and snow in late October.
- February 19 – February 23 and February 26 – March 13, 1943
After three months of absence and a bit of a break in the security arrangements, Adolf Hitler chose the latter half of February 1943 to accommodate his Ukrainian field headquarters. At that moment in the WW2 timeline, the Allied forces had already landed in North Africa, pushing back the troops of the emotionally devastated Erwin Rommel. The German cities had been successively devastated by the ‘1000-bombers’ air raids. The 6th army under Friedrich von Paulus, actually what was left of it after three months of a siege, finally capitulated to the Soviet army in Stalingrad. It was this period that would be memoired (by Hitler’s political and military environment) after the war with the recallings of Hitler’s fatigue appearance, poor physical state, remoteness, and suspiciousness. The first 1943 visit of Hitler to ‘Wehrwolf’ would last only 4 days, and the second phase for another two weeks. On February 21, Hitler promoted General Heinz Guderian as the ‘Inspector General of the Panzer forces’. On March 5, 1943, the German counteroffensive nullified the previous military successes of the Soviet army near Kharkiv and would occupy the city once again in a span of the next six days. On March 7, Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments, took a flight to Ukraine to discuss a new plan for the expansion of the manpower of the industry by releasing 800,000 foreign workers to the needs of the munitions industry.
As soon as March 13, 1943, Hitler left the Ukrainian HQ once again to come back for as much as one day, almost half a year later. The day is historically known as the start of the mass deportation of the Jewish population from the Krakow Ghetto, generally recognized due to the scenes from the legendary ‘Schindler’s List’ movie by Steven Spielberg. On his flight back to Rastenburg, Hitler made a short stop at the headquarters of the ‘Army Group Center’ near Smolensk. This very day is well-known for the fact that Colonel von Tresckow succeeded in delivering a bomb to the plane, but later failed to detonate. On this very day, the OKH directive, signed by Hitler, included the preamble of the well-known ‘Citadel’ operation, the failed German advance of July 1943.
- August 27, 1943
As early as August 27, 1943, less than a month after the failure of the last grandiose advance of the Wehrmacht on the East (Operation Citadel), Hitler made another and last journey to the Eastern Front. By then, the Allied forces had already conquered the beaches of Sicily, now completely under German control. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arranged a political conference in Quebec, and no later than August 23, the Red Army liberated Kharkiv for the last and final time. On the day of his visit on August 27, Hitler attended the HQ of Erich Von Manstein, the commander of the Army Group South at that time, and later performed a short visit to his ‘Wehrwolf’ headquarters to leave it once and all at the same late hours. He would leave Werwolf headquarters for the ‘Wolfschanze’. As early as September 8, Hitler would once again visit the ‘Heeresgruppe Sud’ (Army Group South) HQ near Zaporizhzhia without a stop in Vinnytsa.
THE DESTRUCTION AND INEVITABILITY OF TIME
Regardless of the obvious fact that Adolf Hitler had never used the ‘Wehrwolf’ HQ after August 27, 1943, the predestination of the facility was to continue. Progressively, as the Soviet troops were advancing on the Eastern Front, Field Marshal von Manstein experienced the necessity to move his Army Group ‘South’ headquarters back to the West. No later than mid-September, the army staff left Zaporizhzhia to move to Kirovograd, until the early days of October brought Hitler’s admission to using the ‘Wehrwolf’ near Vinnytsia. Manstein would recall the infrastructure of the object, now guarded with no more than one reserve regiment, as ‘too exorbitant’. Over the next two months, the Fieldmarshal had been examining the threatening perspectives on his theater of war, as well as the rapid advance of the enemy forces toward Vinnytsia and his headquarters.
On December 28, 1943, Manstein was present at the military briefing back in ‘Wolfsschanze’ and secured Hitler’s personal approval of leaving the ‘Wehrwolf’ in Ukraine to move the HQ far to the West to the city of Proskurov (the modern city of Khmelnytskyi), 110 kilometers from the ‘Wehrwolf’. The logistic operation would be completed by January 6, 1944. Within the same briefing, General Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant and Alpha-and-Omega of the ‘Wehrwolf’, made his statement that the HQ near Vinnytsia had to be completely destroyed soon after the departure of Manstein. Hitler could not stand the horrifying visualization that his personal belongings would be later exhibited in a Moscow museum.
It is worth mentioning that Rudolf Schmundt, the man who had made decisions on placing Hitler’s military headquarters, was one of the closest associates among the Führer’s wartime entourage. Apart from his position as Hitler’s key military adjutant since January 1938, Schmundt was a dedicated nationalist and enjoyed the credibility of his supreme commander. As far back as 1 October 1942, at the time of visiting Berlin from Wehrwolf, Hitler relieved Bodewin Claus Eduard Keitel, the younger brother of Wilhelm Keitel, from his position of Heerespersonalamt (Army Personnel Department). Hitler appointed his trusted adjutant, Schmundt, to a new desk, one of the most unevident influentials in the Wehrmacht, with leverage on the personnel policy. The name of Rudolf Schmundt would later be associated with the 1944 ‘July plot’, the well-known failed attempt to kill Hitler and to seize power in Germany, brilliantly depicted in the ‘Operation Valkyrie‘ movie. Schmundt was less than a meter from the bomb, left by Claus von Stauffenberg, and was badly wounded.
Five days later, Hitler would visit his wounded adjutant to promote him to General of Infantry, which would make a little difference, as Schmundt would die on October 1, 1944. Summing up, the Alfa and Omega of Hitler’s headquarters had finally lost his life within one of the ‘Führerhauptquartier’ he had once chosen in the forestry of Rastenburg. The post of the ‘Chief of the Army Personnel Department’, as well as the privilege of being Hitler’s main adjutant, was succeeded by Wilhelm Emanuel Burgdorf, a man who would be assigned to come to Erwin Rommel in Herrlingern (On October 14, two days after his official designation) near Ulm to ensure the death of the Fieldmarchal. Burgdorf would also (as Schmundt did) perform his devoted duties for Hitler to the very end of both, as he would himself commit suicide in the early hours of May 2, 1945, two days after his Führer.
As soon as the last officers of the Army Group ‘South’ left the HQ to the North of Vinnytsia on January 6, 1944, the furniture and household objects, the commutator, and provisions were evacuated to the West within a column of trucks. The major part of the wooden construction within ‘Wehrwolf’ was scheduledly dismantled, and the special unit brought the air bombs to the site, delivered from the former airfield, which had been used by Hans Baur and his air unit. The charges were to be put into the concrete bunkers, and the upcoming explosions devastated both the buildings with their wall of 3 m thickness, as well as did significant harm to the landscape of the former headquarters, which had terminated hundreds of planted trees and bushes. Some of the fragments of the former concrete bunkers exploded up to 60 meters from the initial location. The special unit wrecked the communication, sewerage, and water pipe systems as well.
The city of Vinnytsia was finally liberated by the Soviet forces on March 20, 1944, two months after the evacuations of Manstein’s HQ and the devastation of the former facility. Soon after the liberation of the region, the site was visited and thoroughly examined by a special operational unit under NKGB (People’s Commissariat for State Security, a euphemism for the secret police). The investigators draw up a report on the remaining ruins, not evacuated belongings, and the lack of any important documentation. The commission performed a photographic coverage of the site as well as interrogated the population of the nearest inhabited localities to reveal the former collaborators. Alongside the mass burial grounds, a mere 10,000 bodies of the killed Jews (executed largely in the Autumn of 1941) were revealed near Vinnytsia. Fortunately, the greater proportion of the pre-war 36 000 Jewish population of Vinnytsa was evacuated before the Germans’ arrival. Regardless of unequaled access to the site, the NKGB report included superfruity of factual errors and mistakes, the greater part of which was at that time attributed to the time frames: periods of Hitler’s presence at ‘Wehrwolf’, the construction phases. The investigators failed to find any underground facilities, and the speculations about such premises are now more than myths. In Vinnytsa, the NKVD, of course, left unnoticed the mass graves of the victims of the Soviet regime, the result of the 1937-1938 purges. In the summer of 1943, the SS revealed 9432 bodies, including 169 females, the victims of the NKVD pre-war massacres.
Once the detailed investigation on the site was finished, the former Hitler’s headquarters were destined to lose the remains of its outlook in the upcoming decades. The investigative actions on their own post-damaged the initial geography and the erections. In the years to come, the locals took the chimneys, telephony lines, and the larger part of the drainage and pipe systems to pieces. With the hands of time, even the wooden boards of the former wooden erections were looted and reused. The kilometers of the wired fence around the ‘Wehrwolf’ were dismantled, as well as pretty much every tree, planted back in 1942, was later rooted up. During the next quarter of a century, the territory of the ‘Wehrwolf’ had been no more than ruins, drowned in the grass, and the 1970s witnessed the setting of new pinewood forestry, which we can see nowadays. Summarizing the above facts, the modern pine forest on the site has little in common with the pre-war forest to the North, and only a few of the trees can indeed be traced to the times of the ‘Wehrwolf’ and the German presence. It was as soon as the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fresh mass interest in the historiography of the Second World War, that Hitler’s former headquarters near Vinnytsia (for decades had been used by the locals as a place for outsiders and barbecue, choked with trash) became a site of interest. It would take another two decades until 2011 to witness the creation of the Museum.
THE WROWOLF RUINS TODAY: WHAT REMAINS NEAR VINNYTSIA. A VISITOR’S GUIDE TO WERWOLF TODAY
The vast majority of the people who make the beyond-touristic journey to the ‘Wehrwolf’ find nothing but disappointment in the pinewood forestry and the concrete fragments, which are uninteresting for a history admirer without thorough preliminary research. The administration of the Memorial complex has once erected several informational boards with a general history of Ukraine in the Second World War and the region of Vinnytsia, yet with minor facts on the wartime geography of the site and the lapsed erections. The ‘Sperrkreis I’ area (The main area, infrastructured for Hitler and military command) alone included 19 wooden structures and two concrete bunkers, yet only a few of the buildings can still make historical sense for the visitors. For this reason, I would like to touch upon the sites of the former compounds, which have preserved a kind of historical interest and could still be distinguished among the overall green landscape of the territory, which is now more like an under-maintained park for dog walking.
THE PRIVATE WW2 MUSEUM
On your way next to the Vinnytsia-Zhytomyr highway exit, regardless of whether you cover the distance by car or bus+walking, you would inevitably pass the private museum, devoted to the history of the Vinnytsia region during the Second World War, which has little in common (in fact, nothing factual) with the ‘Wehrwolf’ military headquarters. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a large part of Hitler’s former HQ, Sperrkreis II (Zone II), was privatized by private individuals. The very museum you face on the way to ‘Wehrwolf’ was fenced to capitalize on the proximity to the famous site and to take advantage of the associations. The traditionally modest Ukrainian museum fee of 1$ would allow you to see the open-air collection of vehicles of different periods, as well as the indoor exhibition of weapons, communication equipment, banners, and uniforms, including the WW2 period and some modern conflicts. Any of these items comes under the ‘Werwolf’ and has been bought and brought here from different parts of the country. Considering the pure nominal relationship to the ‘Wehrwolf’, the museum is worth a short stop, including a purpose to feed the local dogs.
VISITING WERWOLF MUSEUM, ENTRANCE & PRACTICAL GUIDE
10 minutes of walking or 2 minutes of a car ride along the former Soviet children’s holiday camp (also once part of the territory of the former Hitler’s headquarters) would lead you to the main (only) entrance to the site, which is now attributed as ‘WERWOLF Historical and Memorial Complex In Memory of the Victims of the Nazis’. The front-side information board is worth a minute of your attention before the ticket office and a paper booklet for 0.2$. The first panorama inside the fenced territory includes the open field with minor trees, a temporary exhibition of modern vehicles, and the portrait sculptures of the Soviet period. The one-room museum to the left allocates a tiny exposition on the History of Ukraine during the Second World War with the general-topic items and a few indeed excavated on the site of the former ‘Wehrwolf’.
THE RUINS OF THE BOMB-SHELTER
Once we find ourselves beyond the fence of the Memorial complex, we make it into the former Zone 2 (Sperrkreis II), the largest of three zones in ‘Wehrwolf’, which once accommodated the administrative personnel and the guards of the headquarters. The area was a location home for the largest of three concrete bunkers within ‘Wehrwolf’. The now-vanished erection was an air-raid shelter of one of the conventional types used in the Wehrmacht, known as ‘DOPPELGRUPPENUNTERSTAND REGELBAU 102’, which can be translated as ‘The shelter with two sections of 102 building standard’. The bunker was 15 meters in length and 11.5 meters in width, with walls 2.5 meters in thickness and two proven premises with a ventilation system. The building-up (winter-spring 1942) of the shelter demanded no less than 795 cubic meters of concrete, and it was later used to store provisions and alcohol during the hot Ukrainian summer in the context of the close-to-minimum probability of air raids, equally far from the frontlines on the East and West. The ratio of Apr. 60 meters of cubic concrete for every square meter of useful space made the bunkers of ‘Wehrwolf’ the most spacious among Hitler’s headquarters.
The large fragments of reinforced concrete spread across the open field in the center of the former ‘Sperrkreis II’ (Zone 2) in our days are nothing more than the ruins of the former concrete bunker. The intended detonation of a giant air bomb inside one of the premises had been so devastating that the explosion not only terminated the erection but also diffused the multitone fragments dozens of meters from the initial foundation. Soon after the demolition of the bunker back in January 1944 by the Germans, the Soviet NKGB commission made failed efforts to reveal the elusive underground premises under the bunker, and the modern pit along the foundation of the former shelter is no more than a reminder of that poor detective work. Indeed, the large concrete fragment within the foundation site is the former reinforced roof. On the other hand, the largest and heaviest piece can be found 50 meters distant from the foundation and identified as a part of the front wall, which still includes the remains of the former ventilation system.
THE FOUNDATION OF THE SHELTER IN ZONE I
The walking trail to the East (practically on the left hand) from the remains of the bunker takes the visitor to the territory, which was once constructed and assigned as the main zone within ‘Wehrwolf’, destined to accommodate Adolf Hitler, the highest-ranking officers of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), Hitler’s closest social environment, and the personal security units. These days, nothing reminds the former extraordinary security measures with the additional fenced cordon between Sperrkreis II (Zone 2) and Sperrkreis I (Zone 1). Once you come to the curve of the trail (in fact fit to the road of the ‘Wehrwolf’ times), a pit and ruins to the left can be identified as the second concrete bunker within the former headquarters of Hitler near Vinnytsia.
It was built to serve the air security of the officers, who were appointed to work inside the main zone. This air shelter of the ‘REGELBAU’ type had one entrance, which was smaller than the one in Sperrkreis II, with 590 cubic meters of concrete, invested in its construction back in 1942. As a measure to preserve the high levels of air-defense safety precautions, the roof of this bunker was once planted with bushes and trees to fit the landscape. The pit around the foundation, once again, is a historical reference to the failed excavations of the Soviet investigators soon after taking control of the site. The fragments of the shelter have also made their way after the explosion within dozens of meters in all directions.
KASINO / OFFICERS CLUB AT WERWOLF
It should be stated that the German word ‘CASINO’, in the context of the Wehrmacht and the Second World War, in particular, had little in common with gambling and roulette (yet also among leisure activities), and on the other hand, can be attributed as the officer’s club, a premise for the officers to spend their free time. Such a kind of establishment lies beyond the prerogative of ‘Wehrwolf’ or any of Hitler’s headquarters and could be found in the historiography of the German concentration camps, including the large wooden Casino next to the Auschwitz-1, which I covered early this year. The ‘Wehrwolf’ version of the Casino was the largest erection on the facility, made, as it was, of three connected wooden buildings.
In addition to the fact that the officers used to perform their leisure within these walls, Adolf Hitler used to have an everyday lunch with the military command inside the Casino (until the infamous dispute, the arrival of stenographers in September 1942). Every piece of the provision, served at the table inside the Casino, was thoroughly tested by an assigned officer and later pre-tested before being brought to Hitler. In a wider sense, the residents of Hitler’s Ukrainian HQ used to carry out a tasting of foods at the time, when Ukraine experienced the most severe forced food confiscation by the Germans in the Autumn of 1942. The summer terrace of the Casino once faced Hitler’s house and a bunker, distanced by a few dozen meters. The fragments and foundation of the former Casino are now covered with grass and trees, and the multiple small pits were no more than the post-war efforts of the locals to find some valuables and scrap metal.
HITLER’S HOME AND BUNKER AT WEHRWOLF
In no small way, the key construction of the former Wehrwolf facility was once located to the right of the South-East in-road, less than 50 meters from the Casino. Hitler’s residence was made as a wooden house 18.7 meters in length and 8.7 meters in width with a doorstep, a place for the Führer to talk with his surroundings (for instance, Gobels, Bormann, Hoffmann, or oversee his dog Blondie, being carried by a dog handler officer. Once tiding over the doorstep, one could enter either the personal accommodation of Adolf Hitler or his cabinet to the left. The history was spared to preserve the photos of Heinrich Hoffmann and his assistants, which once depicted Parwan Draganov (The Ambassador of Bulgaria), Saffet Arikan (Turkish Ambassador to Germany 1942-1944), Aldo Vidussoni (Secretary of the National Fascist Party of Italy), and Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani (The Former Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Iraq): all photos made within this building. Hitler’s house in ‘Wehrwolf’ was also made a part of history with the ceremonies of the inauguration of the German officers. On March 11, 1943, Erwin Rommel left Africa once and all and made a transit visit to Wehrwolf in Ukraine to receive ‘The oak leaves with swords and diamonds’ to his Knight’s Cross (Ritterkreuz). Albert Kesselring was another field marshal who was awarded the Swords to his Knight’s Cross in front of the same fireplace on July 18, 1942, for his success in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Hitler’s wooden residence was constructed with a concrete bunker of nearly square shape, 10.6 meters in length and 10 meters in width. The only entrance to the shelter was made within Hitler’s cabinet to secure the German leader against a potential air raid. Similar to the two concrete bunkers I have given the account of before, the fragments of the forced concrete walls were diffused over a distance of up to 50 meters.
FIRE POND / THE SO-CALLED HITLER’S SWIMMING POOL
Heedless of the confusion that this water pond is sometimes called no less than ‘Hitler’s swimming pool’, it used to have a more practical and grounded purpose, especially as Hitler had never used swimming pools and had been a ‘bath-user’ for all his life within any of his accommodation or field headquarters. The fire ponds could be generally identified within a great variety of German military facilities, as well as within the concentration camps (I have portrayed such a pond within Mauthausen). This ground cistern has been surprisingly preserved until nowadays as a pond of a 10*15 meters rectangular shape. The water was pipelined from the pond, using an underground utility system, to the fire hydrants in different parts of ‘Wehrwolf’. The fire unit of the headquarters was quartered within Zone 2 (Sperrkreis II) and used to maintain the training procedures regularly, with no less than three actual fire outbreaks in one and a half years of maintenance. The site once allocated a wooden depot used to store the firefighter equipment. The fire pond was covered with camouflage nets and concrete walls, as well as the absence of direct sunlight, resulting in the cool water even in the summer months, in fact, so cold that the idea of using the pond as a swimming pool was not taken seriously.
THE FORMER OKH HEADQUARTERS IN VINNYTSIA
In the midst of Hitler’s first and the most distant period of presence within the ‘Wehrwolf’ between July and September 1942, no less than 9200 officers, soldiers, and administrative personnel had been quartered in the city of Vinnytsia in a total space of 120 000 square meters. The area was codenamed ‘WINNIZA-STADT’ (City of Vinnytsia) and was assigned to accommodate the ambitious staff of the German OKH. The officers were generally accommodated within the former residents of the citizens, who had been previously disrooted from their homes, or presented with a reality to live along with the occupants. Soldiers and minor officers were quartered within the military barracks, which had been used by the Soviet army before the outbreak of the war. ‘Winniza-Stadt’ had minimum security protocols, practically taken for the high officers, such as Franz Halder, ‘Chef des Generalstabs’, who used to maintain an everyday car ride to ‘Wehrwolf’ up to his dismissal in September 1942. While the logistic departments of the OKH were allocated within the local asylum, the operational staff made the University of Vinnytsia the headquarters. The modern ‘Vinnytsia Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky State Pedagogical University’ has preserved pretty much the same look as it had at the time of the German OKH.
