By Pavlo Fedykovych, CNN
Masuria, Poland (CNN) — The narrow road through the Masurian countryside winds alongside shimmering lakes and mossy swamps. It passes through sleepy villages filled with steep-roofed houses that, even on a warm summer’s day, look ready for deepest winter.
This region of northeastern Poland is known for outdoor recreation. It’s a destination for hiking, horseback riding and other pursuits that thrive in clean air and boundless countryside. A peaceful escape.
Suddenly, the road dives into a thick forest. Birds chirp high in the branches of deciduous trees. The scene is bucolic, but the setting is deceptive.
An abandoned railway track appears first. Then, ruins begin to emerge from the foliage.
These peaceful country roads have led to somewhere dark: The Wolf’s Lair — a vast, secluded complex where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler planned major military campaigns of World War II, and where an assassination plot nearly altered the course of the war.
Choosing the forests and marshes of Masuria to establish a headquarters was a strategic calculation for the Nazis. Having invaded Poland at the outset of World War II in September 1939, Germany now claimed this region — part of East Prussia — as its own.
As he embarked on his aggressive strategy to push farther east with an invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler needed a nerve center close to the border with the USSR. Operation Barbarossa, one of the largest military invasions in history, would begin in summer 1941.
The area east of the small town of Kętrzyn, then known as Rastenburg, worked well. A railway line built decades earlier facilitated the construction, and the forest provided natural protection. More importantly, it was just 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, away from the Soviet border.
Charged with the momentum of the early days of conflict, the Nazis worked fast. The German Third Reich’s main military engineering contractor, Organisation Todt, deployed teams to the forests, aided by forced labor from prisoners of war — mainly from Poland and France.
In June 1941, with the planned invasion just days away, the Wolf’s Lair was completed, and Hitler moved in.
A forest fortress
The Wolf’s Lair was never intended to be just a military base — it was a well-developed stronghold that was also designed as a comfortable place to live for the German war machine’s senior figures. A forested retreat.
And it wasn’t only meant for Hitler. Once it was up and running, Nazi top brass, including Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Keitel, moved in to live alongside the dictator.
“The Wolf’s Lair became an unofficial capital of the Third Reich,” says Grzegorz Opala, a history enthusiast who now guides visitors around what remains of the facility.
The scale matched Hitler’s ambitions. In total, 50 bunkers and 70 barracks were constructed. The bunker walls were made of concrete, about 20 feet, or six meters, thick. The complex spanned almost one square mile and included two airfields and a railway station. Extravagant additions included a tea house, a casino and a cinema.
An elaborate system of natural camouflage — masking nets, trees and moss-covered bunker facades — protected the Wolf’s Lair from air raids. More than 50,000 landmines encircled the complex.
Its history as Hitler’s HQ ended on January 24, 1945, when the Germans detonated the bunkers while retreating from the advancing Red Army. Ironically, many structures survived the blast, proving the quality of construction.
Like many Nazi remnants on Polish territory, the Wolf’s Lair was left to rot. After the fall of communism, it was developed into a tourist site. In 2017, the Polish government took control and carried out major renovation work to preserve it as a place of historical significance.
Today, the Wolf