Government Bunker Museum

In an emergency, the West German chancellor, the federal president and around 3,000 people would have sat out a nuclear war here for 30 days behind sealed steel gates. The Government Bunker in the Ahr valley was one of the best-kept secrets of the old Federal Republic: 17.3 km of tunnels beneath the vineyards between Ahrweiler and Dernau. Almost all of it was stripped out after the Cold War. A 203 m section survived and is now the Government Bunker Museum (Dokumentationsstätte Regierungsbunker).

History: from railway tunnel to emergency seat of government

The bunker was built into two tunnels of a strategic railway line that was constructed before the First World War but never opened. In the 1930s mushrooms were grown inside; during the Second World War arms factories used the tunnels, and forced labourers from a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp had to build, among other things, vehicles for V2 rockets here.

From 1960 to 1972 the federal government converted the tunnels in great secrecy into an “emergency seat of the constitutional bodies”, under cover names such as “Rosengarten” (rose garden) and “Dienststelle Marienthal”. In the end it contained 936 bedrooms and 897 offices, around 3,300 steel doors, its own wells, generators, kitchens, a hospital and even a hairdresser. Costs are estimated at around three billion Deutschmarks; exact figures are still not known.

The bunker was used in NATO exercises, first in 1966 and last in March 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. An emergency parliament and an “exercise chancellor” practised governing underground for up to 30 days. In 1997 the government decided to give it up, and by 2006 it had been cleared. The surviving section has been a museum since 2008, and in 2009 the bunker received the European Heritage Label.

What to see

• MAN gates: Two rolling gates of steel and concrete, each weighing about 25 tonnes, could seal the bunker hermetically.
• Airlocks and decontamination: Bypass locks and rooms where arrivals would have been cleaned of radioactive dust.
• Working level: A series of rooms, with original fittings from the bunker and photographs, shows the sober everyday life underground.
• Sleeping quarters: Upstairs, spartan shared bedrooms; only the chancellor and the president would have had rooms of their own.
• Medical block: Part of the underground hospital is authentically furnished.
• Into the void: At the end of the museum section you look into the completely gutted tunnel that continues into the hill.

Good to know

Many documents in the exhibition come from East German Stasi files, because most West German records are still classified. In 2008 it emerged that the bunker would only have withstood a bomb of about 20 kilotons, comparable to Hiroshima. Reports had expected far stronger weapons as early as 1962, but construction went on anyway.

Visiting and tours (as of October 2026)

You can only see the bunker on a guided tour of about 90 minutes. For the regular public tours you must book a ticket online in advance.

• April to October: Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday and public holidays 10:00–16:00
• March and November: Saturday and Sunday at 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00
• December to February: Saturday and Sunday at 12:00 and 14:00
• Admission with tour: adults €15, teenagers aged 13 to 16 €8, children aged 8 to 12 €6; reduced €14 (pensioners, visitors with disabilities) or €10 (pupils, students)

Groups can book all year except Mondays, with tours available in English, French, Dutch and other languages. Families can join special tours with a case full of original objects.

Getting there and parking

The address is Am Silberberg 0, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; the museum sits in the woods above the Roman villa. There are 65 parking spaces at the museum; do not park along the access road, as cars there are towed away. By train, get off at “Ahrweiler Markt” or “Walporzheim”, each about 1.5 km on foot from the museum. A visit combines well with Ahrweiler's old town and a vineyard walk in the Ahr valley.