Qualla: Maybach I and II

Maybach I and II: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit antoinevandermeer, Public domain. From the air it read as a quiet street. Twelve buildings with pitched roofs and ordinary domestic proportions, arranged in the Brandenburg pines about twenty kilometres south of Berlin, looking from above like housing for a small town. They were not houses. Each one was the visible top of a shaft leading into two floors of interlinked bunker with walls two feet thick, set as deep as twenty metres, and together the street was the headquarters from which the German army ran its war. The complex was code-named Maybach I, after a car engine. A second, Maybach II, went up alongside with eleven more of the same buildings. Between them, at the end of a tunnel, sat one of the largest communications hubs of the Second World War.

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Image: antoinevandermeer | Public domain

Maybach I and II: Houses That Were Not Houses

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jobakampe, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Construction began in 1937 near Wünsdorf, in the district of Zossen, on ground the army had used since imperial times. Maybach I was finished in 1939 and the Army High Command moved in on 26 August, a week before the invasion of Poland. Maybach II followed in the summer of 1940, ...

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Image: jobakampe | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Maybach I and II: Amt 500

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joachim Kampe /Nutzungstrechteinhaber, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The communications bunker was built by the Reichspost, the German post office, on orders from the armed forces high command between 1937 and 1939. Its cover name was Amt 500 - Post Office 500. The structure was a two-lane longitudinal building 117 metres by 22, with a three-store...

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Image: Joachim Kampe /Nutzungstrechteinhaber | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Maybach I and II: The Safe at Zossen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jobakampe, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. After the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, investigators opened a safe at Zossen and found what the conspirators had kept there. The papers included extracts from the diary of Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence; correspondence between Abwehr officers; material o...

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Image: jobakampe | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Maybach I and II: The Twentieth of April

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mehman Ibragimov, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 15 and 17 January 1945 the Army High Command moved back into Maybach I and the general staff into Maybach II. British and American bombers worked over the site repeatedly that spring; a raid on 15 March injured Hans Krebs, chief of the army general staff. On 20 April the ...

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Image: Mehman Ibragimov | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maybach I and II: Ranet, and the Book Town

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Late in 1946 Soviet engineers demolished most of both Maybach complexes, acting under the four-power agreement on occupied Germany and an Allied Control Council order. Zeppelin came through nearly intact and the Soviets simply kept using it, renamed Ranet, at the centre of what b...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0