I finally got to explore the Kindsbach Bunker located near Ramstein Air Base. It was really interesting to see and a lot of fun to explore something so historic in the area. Here’s some of the things I saw and some history I learned.
Kindsbach Bunker History
The bunker was originally built by there Germans in the 1930s as a munitions bunker. There were old pictures from parties inside the bunker showing drinks and people celebrating its completion. Eventually, the war took its toll and it became a command post during the French invasion of the western part of Germany. Finally, the Germans left the area and the French found it and used it for storage.
The Americans eventually moved into the area and took this French sector over and use the bunker as a command center. The American forces expanded some tunnels and improved some of the infrastructure inside, including building a new HVAC system to house a giant computer system. The Cold War eventually changed its course and the idea of having a shallow unfortified bunker near a major Allied base didn’t make sense and it was eventually closed, only being opened occasionally through the 80s.
The Bunker Tour
The Kindsbach Bunker tour is ran by the current land owner. He is the son of the original owner when the Germans confiscated the land for the war effort. The city also has a website that explains some history and has POC information if you want to email to coordinate a tour.
The tour started with a history talk and some interesting history of the bunker. It then goes right into the emergency exit door. The normal entrance is bricked up and now below the ground level so it isn’t used. The guide then takes you through several rooms and the tunnels of the bunker. The main attractions are the radar room, the computer cooling system, and the operations center room.
The Radar and Ops Center Rooms
There was one room that was used as a radar plotting command center. This room had a giant glass screen and people could manually mark what the radars were identifying all across the boarder between West and East Germany. It was a dark room with lots of screens, radar blips, and people monitoring screens.
The ops center room was the largest and tallest room on the tour. It was painted black and where the main leadership monitored the entire airspace of Germany.
The last main attraction was the cooling room for a fancy supercomputer from the time. It had an entire room dedicated to cool these hot computer. It was the 412L AWCS and used to plot the intercept courses for airplanes in the German airspace.
According to the city website, you can contact the owner by email at wwuermell@t-online.de or call +491729375410. My tour was organized by Culture Exchange Kaiserslautern.
The tour had about 45 minutes of a history talk then about 1 hour and 15 minutes of time inside the bunker. We were pretty close to 2 hours total time.
Yes, you can see the original entrance, air ports, and other concrete parts sticking out of the ground. The original entrance is about 50 meters west of the current entrance which is the old emergency exit. Be careful because time and construction have shifted the earth and there’s fencing around.
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