81 years ago today, on the 20th of July 1944, the briefing hut at the Wolf’s Lair was destroyed when explosives smuggled into the room by Claus Von Stauffenberg detonated during an afternoon conference meeting.
Once the dust settled, many were injured, and 1 person had been killed outright (3 succumbed to their wounds in the days & weeks to follow).
But crucially, Hitler had only been slightly wounded by the blast.
The assassination attempt, along with the Operation Valkyrie coup, had failed.
***
A few weeks ago, the Berlin IC took a long road trip to the Wolf’s Lair complex, which is today located deep in the woods near Kętrzyn in northeast Poland.
And as you can see, the trip was well worth it!
The former Wolf’s Lair is now a bustling tourist site where easy access is provided to all of the former bunkers and buildings of the complex.
A handy footpath leads you around the complex allowing you to get up-close with the concrete monstrosities, and some bunkers have even been opened up for you to walk through – giving you an impression of what life must have been like working inside these epic structures.
What I loved most about the site was how the buildings seemed to be almost completely untouched since the Soviets captured the complex.
As the half-destroyed buildings show, the Wehrmacht tried to destroy the site in January 1945 as the Red Army approached, but given the mind-boggling amount of concrete used for the construction of the bunkers you can see that was no easy task.
In the years since, nature has started to reclaim the site, but the local tourist board clearly puts a lot of effort into maintaining the location for visitors.
I also really appreciated how as you come to the end of the complex there are two exhibitions – the first outlined the entire story of the war and its many theatres of operations around the world, and the second detailed the awful consequences the war had for the Polish people, covering the exploits of the Polish Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising.
Still, I wasn’t sure about the “Wolf’s Lair” branded t-shirts in the gift shop or the Stauffenberg & Hitler manikins…
1st photo: Deutsches Historisches Museum
This post is a repost from Instagram from the 20th of July 2025