Recently, I visited a cold war bunker near Saarbrücken. It was a test bunker for West Germany, where they could try out all their new, fancy ideas on how to make the best bunker. To keep it secret, they build it in parallel to a new highway and it is hidden beneath the autobahn. As it was a place to try out new ideas and was built quite quickly, it had some flaws like not having enough food stored, air filters that would likely only have lasted for a few days and walls so thin that a nuclear explosion anywhere near it would have collapsed the whole thing (1). So, not really the place you would have chosen first to stay during a nuclear war. Still, the ideas tested in it helped West Germany to build around 2000 bunkers all over the country. During the visit, the tour guide also mentioned that Germany had recently taken stock of their bunkers. So, I started to search for any report around it. The actual report is classified, but luckily, there exists a summary of it in two answers to written parliamentary questions (Deutscher Bundestag, 2024, 2025, Drucksache 20/11895 and 20/14631).

The how and why of German bunkers

Most German bunkers weren’t really bunkers at all. Instead, the majority of them were civilian buildings like underground parking garages, train stations or subway stations, that were equipped to also work as a bunker in an emergency. This also means that the majority of bunkers were privately owned and usually the government had contracts which allowed the repurposing during emergencies. Besides those, there were also a smaller number of bunkers in old tunnel systems, and some explicit bunkers both above and below ground. The ones that the states have detailed information on are all in former West Germany. East Germany also had bunkers, but they were never incorporated into any unified German defense planning and just left to rot or sold after the re-unification. These bunkers were open to everyone in an emergency. They would simply let people in until they had reached their capacity. Everyone left outside after that would have to fend for themselves. And this would have been the vast majority of the population. Even at the height of available bunker space, there would only have been around 1.6 million shelter places available (so around 2.5 % of the population).

The majority of these bunkers were for basic protection, meaning that they were solidly built, protected against radioactive fallout, fires, as well as chemical and biological warfare agents. Some selected facilities also offered protection against intense nuclear radiation and the high overpressure to be experienced near ground zero of a nuclear explosion. All of those bunkers were intended to be used for several weeks, without the need to leave the bunker. This means they had an independent water supply, food storage and generator for electricity. There were also some legacy bunkers from the second world war, but these usually only offered very limited protection and were intended for stays of a few hours and not weeks.

The recent history of bunkers in Germany

In the second world war and the decades after, most shelters were just intended for cover during air raids. But as the danger of nuclear war rose, so did the sophistication of the bunkers constructed. Starting from the mid-1960s West Germany started to build or restore many bunkers to the protection level described above. After the end of the Cold War discussions started around the need to keep maintaining the bunkers. These accelerated after civil protection was reoriented around the threat of natural disasters, climate change and terrorism, all threats where a bunker is not that useful. This led to the decision in 2007 to stop the funding for the shelters and the program was formally abandoned. Over the next decade around 1400 facilities were released from their civil defense obligations and many were also dismantled.

The mood around keeping shelters shifted however in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. This triggered renewed discussions if shelters are needed again after all. Therefore, in 2022 and 2023 an assessment was made to get an overview of the remaining bunkers and their status. This showed that Germany currently has 579 shelters left, which theoretically could shelter around 480,000 people. However, of these 579 exactly 0 are currently in a state that would allow them to be used in an emergency. Restoring them to their intended level of protection would take years and cost billions. There might still be more shelters available that are in private hands and had civil defense obligations before, but no formal assessment was made of those. In addition, West Germany also had programs that helped finance household shelters, but at their high point, these protected only around 0.1 % of the population. The current German government has no information about where these are and in what state they are.

The new concept

As restoring the old shelters would likely be very expensive, the German government debated if it makes sense to reactivate them. Their conclusion was that it likely does not make much sense to invest this money, as while there are new threats emerging, they are likely different from the ones in the past. Past civil defense focussed on protection from nuclear attacks, which would require staying in a bunker for weeks at a time. However, the current threats are likely more focussed on targeted strikes on critical infrastructure. Also, the warning time for such attacks is quite short (minutes) and thus people would not have the time to go to a central shelter (2). Also, the shelters themselves could be seen as a high-value target for an attacker if they are filled with thousands of people in tight spaces.

This means the new concept of civil protection focuses on four elements:

• A systematic registration of public and private buildings and properties that could be used as public refuges.
• Creating a digital directory which allows citizens to see all shelters near them and an app to warn them and guide them to the nearest shelter.
• Guidance for private citizens to convert their cellars into protective spaces.
• General information distribution around civil defense and protection.

Most of this is still in the planning phase (3), but ultimately it seems a bit like a capitulation in front of the threat. This boils down to making a list, writing some brochures and if you are so inclined you can feel free to create your own fallout shelter, paying it out of your own pocket.

All these documents however were written by the previous German government. Since those were published, some further developments occurred. In June 2025 the president of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief announced that over the next decade it plans to invest 30 billion € in private and public shelters. Though this falls at least one magnitude short of the money that would be needed to create shelters for all citizens. The idea is that storage and maintenance should be covered by local municipalities, but they do not even have the money to maintain the infrastructure they already have. So, it seems questionable if they would be able to maintain the shelters. Finally, the shelters that are planned would only protect from shrapnels and debris, not from nuclear or biological threats. This makes them mainly useful if Germany would face a similar threat to Ukraine today, with regular bombing of cities, but would be mostly useless in other scenarios. All this means the classic fallout bunkers are a thing of the past in Germany and are unlikely to be resurrected.

Endnotes

(1) Did you know that there was a toilet paper brand called Wambo, exclusively produced for German civil defense bunkers? They looked like this. So, not all would have been bad after a nuclear war.

(2) This argument does not make much sense to me, as during the cold war, nuclear-tipped missiles also would take just a few minutes from Western Russia to Germany.

(3) And knowing Germany, it will remain there for years.

References

• Deutscher Bundestag. (2024). Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Fraktion der CDU/CSU: Fähigkeit zur Zivilen Verteidigung und insbesondere Zustand des Zivilschutzes in Deutschland im Jahr 2024 (Drucksache 20/11895). 20. Wahlperiode.
• Deutscher Bundestag. (2025). Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Dr. Thorsten Lieb, Christoph Meyer, Otto Fricke, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion der FDP: Öffentliche Schutzräume (Drucksache 20/14631). 20. Wahlperiode.