The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history and brought about mass-militarisation on an unprecedented scale. Across the globe – but especially in Europe and Asia Pacific – armaments factories appeared from nowhere, trenches were dug, concrete pillboxes sprang up, and the world prepared for devastation unlike anything it had ever seen.
With the terror of aerial bombardments instilled in everyone, many of the factories at the time were built deep underground, where the enemy’s aerial armada couldn’t reach them. A number of abandoned underground factories of World War Two are still crumbling to dust some 70 years later, reminders of one of the darkest chapters in modern human history.
Abandoned Underground Factory Richard Complex, Litoměřice, Czech Republic
The Czech Republic (then part of Czechoslovakia) suffered terribly in World War Two. Annexed by the Third Reich in 1938, the territory’s citizens were forced by the millions into factories, the army, the concentration camps, sacrificing their liberty on the decaying altar of Nazi ambition. Nowhere can this bleak time be experienced perhaps as viscerally as in Litoměřice.
Here, at the abandoned underground factory “Richard”, thousands of concentration camp victims were forced to build tanks, motors, electronics and communications equipment for the German war effort. Sadly, they were the lucky ones. Nearby, the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp of Terezín worked tens of thousands of unluckier Nazi prisoners to death. Although the Richard factory seemingly wasn’t as deadly as other work at Terezin, the stench of misery and death still clings to its walls. Examining the abandoned limestone mine’s carved rock tunnels now, it’s easy to see how those dragged there must have felt like they’d been taken into hell itself.
Abandoned Underground Aircraft Factory at Rabštejn, Czech Republic
In the dying days of the war, Nazi high command became obsessed with building a “miracle weapon” that would destroy their enemies and turn the tide back in German favour. Rabštejn was one area they chose for their experiments. Rounding up some 6,000 prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp victims, German occupiers forced them to dig out a gigantic chamber deep beneath the town. Hundreds were worked to death or shot.
Eventually, 4.5 km of secret tunnels were completed and turned into 11 assembly halls for devastating new Nazi weapons. Explosives, cutting-edge aircraft and bombs were assembled here, all designed to rain death and annihilation down on the enemies of the Third Reich. It’s impossible to imagine the atmosphere of this place now. The heat, the clanking of machinery, the watchful eyes of German guards, terrified the Red Army might come sweeping in at any minute. After the war, the abandoned underground factories were used as a dumping ground by the Czech Army. Nowadays, they are open as a tourist attraction.
The Subterranean GKN Shadow Factory, Birmingham, UK
Britain’s shadow factories were the Allied riposte to Germany’s underground forced labour sweatshops. Like the secret Nazi factories, they were buried deep below ground, where bombs could not find them. Like the Nazi factories, they operated outside the social norms of the time. But while the Germans did so by using slave labour, in Britain, the workforce was comprised of something very different: many thousands of female volunteers.
At the time, the idea of women in factories was completely novel. Yet the Blitz spirit demanded everyone put in to save the nation. And that’s exactly what the women of the UK did. In never ending shifts, they toiled in Britain’s shadow factories, like this one beneath the old GKN Factory in Birmingham. Crowded into these tunnels, these ordinary workers provided the backbone for the British war effort. At its height, the GKN factory held 4,500 workers in its belly. Now it merely sits empty, its role in the nation’s history largely forgotten.
Longbridge Tunnels: Abandoned Underground Factory, UK
Not far from the GNK shadow factory sits another of the UK’s underground arms production plants. The Longbridge Tunnels were set up with the help of the founder of Austin Motors, Lord Austin, who had previously donated his factory space to the war effort in World War One. In these dark, eerie tunnels, Birmingham’s women ones worked assembling Rolls-Royce Merlin engines – the powerful engines that propelled the nation’s Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes and Lancaster bombers through the sky.
At its peak, the shadow factory network across the UK was producing one new aircraft every hour, and the now abandoned underground factory inside the Longbridge Tunnels was an integral part of this. It was thanks to subterranean factories like these that Britain managed to hold off the Nazi threat and stop the Third Reich from steamrollering mercilessly onward. Yet, sadly, Lord Austin didn’t live to see this. He died in 1941, when an Allied victory seemed far from assured, and the fate of Europe still hung in the balance.
Underground V-1 Flying Bomb/V-2 Rocket Factory at Mittelwerk, Germany
The remains of the site at Mittelwerk are today shrouded in misery. This was the place, in the tunnels beneath Kohnstein, where concentration camp victims were worked to death by the thousands to build Hitler’s flying ‘vengeance’ rockets. The V-1 and V-2 bombing campaign in the last months of the war struck fear into the heart of a Britain already shell-shocked by the Blitz. Pilotless V-1s fell from the sky with only a deafening silence, and V-2 rockets impacted with little warning. All in all, the vengeance rocket campaign killed 10,000 in Britain alone. To achieve this disturbing figure, 20,000 were worked to death at Mittelwerk.
Those who toiled in the subterranean factory at Mittelwerk were mostly from Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, a sub-camp of Buchenwald that recorded its own hideous death toll. One in three prisoners sent there died, many while constructing V-1 and V-2 rockets (the latter also known as ‘doodlebugs’).
As of 2016, much of the abandoned underground factory complex lies in ruins. Their hideous legacy, however, continues to live on in modern missile-based warfare.