Inside Germany's secret Cold War cash bunker

AFP

For a long time, the residents of the town of Cochem in the German Rhineland didn't know they were living on a gold mine.

During the Cold War, the German central bank stored almost 15 billion marks worth of emergency currency in a 1,500 square-metre nuclear Bunker beneath the town.

If Germany was the target of an attack on its monetary system, the currency was intended for use.

The real estate fund and a regional cooperative bank took over after the Cold War. It was bought by a German couple in 2016 and turned into a museum.

With the fear of a nuclear conflict growing, interest in the Bunker is growing again.

Many people we know have pointed out that we have a safe Bunker and asked if there would be room for it in case of an emergency.

The current situation feels like a leap back in time, she said.

Behind a heavy iron door, there are corridors that lead to decontamination chambers and offices with typewriters and phones.

For almost 25 years, the main room had 12 cages where 18,300 boxes of 10, 20, 50 and 100 mark notes were kept up to the ceiling.

Hundreds of trucks.

The front and back of the notes were almost the same, but the back was different.

The notes were delivered by hundreds of trucks over a period of 10 years, with no one suspecting anything.

There was a training and development centre in a residential area of the town that was used to access the Bunker.

It was chosen because it was so far away from the Iron Curtain.

The citizens of the community were astonished to discover the treasure, which had been hidden for so long near their homes, according to Wolfgang Lambertz, the former mayor of the town.

The alternative currency was also stored in the vaults of the central bank in the city.

The total amount of cash circulating in the German economy in 1963 was 25 billion marks.

There is an operation called "Operation Bernhard".

The German authorities were guided by lessons from history, which may have been an extreme measure to ward off a merely hypothetical attack.

During World War II, prisoners in concentration camps were forced to make counterfeit pounds in order to flood England with them.

The most plausible explanation was that counterfeit money would be smuggled through the Iron Curtain in order to damage the West German economy.

Kaltenhaueser says that creating a backup currency wouldn't make sense because there are less counterfeit money and fewer cash payments.

The replacement currency did not meet Germany's security standards when the Cold War ended in the 1980s.

The notes were shredded and burned when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

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