Something is hidden in the thick pine and beech forest. Just outside Świnoujście, a resort town on Poland’s Baltic coast, Wolin Island greets you with endless coastal dunes and seemingly untouched nature. But there’s a darker side to this idyllic-looking escape. Its sandy soil conceals an enormous, once top-secret bunker city.
The complex, known today as Wolin Underground City, and originally called Vineta Battery, was built by the Nazis in 1936 as a fortress to guard the coast. Later, it became a nuclear command center for the Polish army. At one point during the Cold War, it was the center of secret plans to launch an atomic attack on Scandinavia. Today, it’s open to all. Visitors who venture underground can take guided tours through the bunkers.
“In the 1930s, the Nazi command decided to build two coastal defense batteries,” says Kacper Stachula, who leads regular tours of the site and was born and raised in Świnoujście. Called Goeben and Vineta, the batteries were built between 1936 and 1939, in the lead-up to World War II.
It was an ambitious construction that included a network of bunkers: four that were topped with rotating cannons, plus another for command, ammunition, and utilities.
