Secrets Of The Flak Tower, With Video

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Flak towers were built across Germany and Austria. Many had secret escape tunnels. They were almost impossible to capture and occupants often had to be starved out. Now, many decades after World War II they are considered too expensive, costing millions and millions of dollars, to destroy and so they are left standing. Photo from Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

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SCORES OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS DIED HERE. WOULD WE BE THE LAST?


By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2010
By Edit International

We were in Germany in 1970 parked near Frankfurt, waiting in my motor-home-newsroom for stories to break out in Europe, when I turned on the American Armed Forces Radio Network.

Along came a story. In preparation for the upcoming 1972 Munich Olympics, workmen, who were installing electric cables in old buildings, would be opening a Nazi ‘Flak Tower’ for the first time since World War II.

My then girl friend Rosa and I drove all night down to Munich and parked across from a bunch of trucks and heavy machinery close to the black, evil-looking Tower.

It was a medieval designed structure, 12 stories high with walls 9 feet thick made of concrete reinforced with steel rods. It sat over a spring, supplying clean drinking water, and was big enough to hold almost 1,000 civilians and military during an air raid.

The Flak Tower was impregnable, nothing could hurt it. At the top high up,circling it during wartime were emplacements of anti-aircraft flak guns.

It was ugly. All around its round walls were little indentations made by Soviet cannon shells fired point blank with no effect by Russian tanks. The tower had been the last Bavarian Nazi headquarters for the fighting SS and its inhabitants had died horribly in May, 1945.

Finally the Russians sent in suicide teams of paratroopers who jumped onto the tower, dying by the dozens, until they finally overwhelmed its defenders.

Gas grenades were dropped through upper gunner entrances and panicked soldiers who ran out the front door were torched by flame-throwers. The tower had a cruel history.

We watched for hours as welders tackled the Towers single steel door. Finally, bulldozers, using a heavy steel cable, managed to pull it open.

Dirty clouds of dust billowed out. The workmen wore helmets and oxygen masks. The tower had been shut almost a quarter century and we anxiously waited to sneak inside.

Finally, our chance came. The workmen left for a break. Rosa and I had slipped into black running suits and sneakers. We didn’t take a camera. There was too much dust in the air. But we did take a small flashlight and tied small wet towels around our noses so we wouldn’t choke.

With the workmen gone we slipped through the partly-closed door and the first thing we saw was a wide black and filthy pond at the center.

We wanted to get in and out quickly before the workmen returned so we hurried up a giant concrete circular staircase.

The bottom steps were covered with decayed remains of old desks which fell apart when we touched them. Several old Nazi uniform jackets were there with empty shadows where their insignias had been ripped off by long ago Russian booty hunters.

We decided to go right to the top and work our way down. We had to be careful. There were no railings separating a long fall to the black pond. Walking closer to the inner steps brought us upwards faster but it was safer to stay at the outer edges which were much wider.

We passed mysterious open spaces leading into big dark rooms. My little flashlight was too weak to peek inside them and we finally reached the top, curious to see what we’d been passing on the climb up.

There was a large room on one side at the top. In its right side was a very large ping-pong type table, several feet wide. On it was a map of France, Germany, the English Channel and the English sea coast. There were little flat wooden cut-outs showing submarines, destroyers and other craft.

The table was broken at one end and leaning down. And there I saw a startling sight. Ranks of miniature Nazi soldiers, some still standing and in battle formation. Startling, because I knew Nazi miniature soldiers and regalia were totally forbidden in post-war Germany.

I opened my black gym jacket and scooped a bunch of them in. I zipped it back up and, just as I was reaching for more on the floor, Rosa and I were startled by a horrible sound. From far below we heard the big steel door of the flack tower being slammed shut.

We ran into the center hall and began running down the circular concrete stairs when suddenly I slipped and fell towards the center. I kept myself from falling but dropped the flashlight. It went over the edge and, after a brief pause, splashed into the water below.

Now we were in absolute darkness.

We descended as quickly as we could, keeping to the outside of the circular stairs and trying not to fall into the room openings that kept appearing.

It took a long time to get to the bottom and there we heard an even more terrible sound; the engines of several vehicles starting up and driving away.

We were alone now, trapped in the old flak tower. The workmen might not return for another year. We were entombed. About to die a slow and horrible death because of some miniature soldiers.

I nervously tried to joke. “Rosa,” I said, as we lay on the floor with our mouths trying to suck air from a tiny opening at the bottom of the steel door, “I’m going to be really thirsty in a couple of days. I hope you have lots of blood.”

She screamed, ran into the concrete wall and collapsed. Later, after she calmed down, we lay at the bottom of the door, our noes closest to the bit of cool air coming in from the free and silent world outside.

Some hours later we finally heard something on the other side. It was a quiet grinding, the squeak of a rusty bicycle chain. It came up to the door and someone tried a lock on the outside.

We jumped to our feet, grabbing bricks and stones around us and began banging on the door calling out, “Help!” over and over. Then we stopped to listen. Again the squeaking bicycle chain but this time it was going away.

We were really frightened now and facing the fact we might never get out alive. Hundreds of Germans and Russians had died in and around this tower. After all these years were we going to join them?

At the start of our ordeal all we could hear was the sounds of ourselves gasping for breath. As the hours slowly passed we could hear the beatings of our hearts.

Later in the silence was could hear strange noises from the upper floors of the flak tower and then little drips of water. There no sounds of scurrying feet, no rats inside - their was nothing to eat or drink. We were terrified, alone in blackness inside a giant coffin.

We fell asleep holding each other. But some hours later were awakened by the heavy sound of many engines. Then bright light appeared at the thin opening beneath the door.

The padlock was unlocked! The door was pulled open and we stepped out into a blaze of lights. We could just make out in the glare a couple of two-man motorcycles with machine guns on their side-cars – AIMING AT US!

We saw an armored car with its turret turning nervously from side to side and a bunch of Green and white German police cars.

Rosa and I were too startled to speak but when a tinny voice over a megaphone ordered, “Hands Hocht! Hands Hocht,” we quickly put our hands up in the air.”

In those days I didn’t speak German but Rosa did. She turned to me. “The officer says an old watchman heard us and reported there were a bunch of old Nazi soldiers trying to come out of the tower. Everybody’s laughing.”

We made our way through the crowd, climbed into our mobile office, kept our driving lights off, and quickly drove away.

And I forgot all about the flak tower until some twenty years later when my sister Renee, in Cleveland, called me and said I’d mailed her a small box from Frankfurt years ago that was still down in her basement and that she was mailing it back to me.

Inside were old German newspapers wrapped around thirteen Nazi miniature soldiers.

I took them to an international exhibition of miniature soldiers at Fort Lauderdale‘s War Memorial Stadium and everyone left their booths unattended and swarmed the table holding our display. I was told there may be no others like them in the world today.

I learned my miniatures were handcrafted by Jewish concentration camp artists who kept alive by carving the units entirely out of wood before they, themselves, were executed.

They could have been roughly fashioned, but the soon to die craftsmen took pride in their work. These miniatures are not just ‘toy soldiers'.

The moves they were put through by their Nazi war and battle planners resulted in thousands of deaths. In the end everybody, planners and artists, too, all died.

By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2010
Edit International





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