One million shelters under study. How is Germany preparing for emergency and war scenarios?

Germany faces a strategic dilemma related to the readiness of its infrastructure for civil defense, at a time when official data revealed that there is not a single public shelter that is viable for immediate operation in the country, out of about 2,000 bunkers that existed during the Cold War era.

According to German sources,  the political dismantling decisions taken in 2007 caused most of them to go out of service and turn them into museums or warehouses, leaving only 580 facilities that have been left to wear and tear without maintenance of their water systems and ventilation since the late 1990s.

Civic initiatives to restore Berlin's old bunkers

In the face of this reality and repeated weather warnings in neighboring countries such as Lithuania, the Berliner Unterwelten association decided to take action on its own to rehabilitate two underground fortified facilities in the capital, Berlin, whose initial construction dates back to 1941.

Kai Heine, an official at the association, explained that volunteers have started preparing folding chairs and water bottles to shelter about 900 people for several hours, stressing that these thick concrete walls provide real protection against the spectrum of modern threats represented by medium- and small-sized suicide drones that threaten cities in Ukraine and the Middle East, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles that render traditional shelters useless.

The Minister of the Interior, Alexandre Dobrint, has announced a €10 billion emergency civil protection investment package that will extend until 2029, noting that the new security reality requires a complete abandonment of the centralized model of the 1980s, given that warning times have become shorter and the speed much higher, in the same context.

  The Federal Office for Population Protection and Disaster Relief (BBK) is working on a decentralized strategy based on the inventory and identification of existing buildings, such as rental buildings, underground parking lots, and metro stations, to reduce the distances of access to residents, in parallel with a plan developed by the Office Presidency to build one million protection points supported by a smart application that guides citizens to the nearest shelter.

Harsh criticism and skepticism of the "residential basements" plan

The government's vision has been sharply questioned by air protection experts, with Niels Brenecke, a civil defense expert and director of the German Shelter Museum in Schweinfurt and a recipient of the Federal Order of Merit, describing the move toward the use of ordinary vaults as "an attempt to calm public opinion that reflects a complete state of despair."

 The  walls of the 30-centimeter thick basements offer no real protection against today's weapons compared to historic bunkers (such as the A8 overhead bunker), which are between two and three meters thick.

Brenecke said the decision to freeze the maintenance of shelters after 2007 on the assumption that military threats were over was a "foolish and lenient act", calling for the rehabilitation of the remaining huge facilities and the education of society, especially as other European countries such as Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Finland are making progress by organizing regular field exercises with their residents.

The Doctrine of Peace and the Doctrine of War

The sudden shift in Germany's civil defense file is a stark example of the consequences of the "doctrine of peace" adopted by Western Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where conventional warfare was believed to have become a thing of the past, prompting successive governments to get rid of the financial burden of maintaining underground fortifications.

  Today, as the old continent enters the era of the "war economy" and the emergence of cheap and effective drone weapons, Berlin finds itself forced to reinvent a defense system from scratch, amid an engineering dilemma between slow-reaching fortified central bunkers and rapid decentralized solutions (cellars and parking lots) that are weakly resistant to direct bombardment.