According to current thinking, Berlin has about four years to prepare for the end of the world. In May 2025, a federal working group tasked with reviving Germany’s civil defence released a plan to build a functioning, full-spectrum national preparedness architecture by 2029. Why 2029? Because, according to new threat assessments, that is when Russia will attack.
The reports suggest Russia has moved beyond merely waging war on Ukraine. It is rearming far beyond the needs of that front, expanding military production so rapidly that, in less than five years, it may have the capacity to strike NATO territory directly. An attack on any NATO member would likely trigger Article 5 of the treaty, meaning full-scale war: a Europe-wide conflict not seen in over 80 years. Perhaps even a nuclear exchange. And yet, we are nowhere near ready.
Since the end of the Cold War, Germany’s bunker system – once able to protect between three and five percent of the population – has fallen into disuse. Today the country has no functioning civil defence plan. Of the nearly 2,000 Cold War bunkers, only about 580 could be restored, and most would require renovations costing millions. The rest have been sold off, converted into nightclubs, loft apartments, shooting ranges, even contemporary art spaces. What other capital city can boast three separate art bunkers – the most famous being the Boros Collection, a former Reichsbahnbunker on Reinhardtstraße where advertising executive Christian Boros has filled 3,000 square metres with his personal stockpile of contemporary art?
Civil protection needs to be multi-purpose… One strategy to cover major disasters of any kind: floods, blackouts, and war.
To be clear, Germany’s claims of impending doom should be met with scepticism. Earlier this year, the country lifted its constitutional debt brake to pledge over €500 billion in new military and security spending – meaning that talk of Armageddon is suddenly big business. There will be many claimants to the spoils of military rearmament, with defence contractors, arms startups and consultants each presenting their slice of catastrophe; each offering to solve it – for a fee.
And yet, preparations are under way. Germany is drawing up plans to repurpose buildings, stockpile medical supplies and install early warning systems to shield its citizens from a large-scale attack. So what will Berlin do if missiles start to fall – and how seriously should we take these plans for the end of the world?
In early 2023, then-Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens was invited on a special tour of Finland’s bunker system during her visit to Helsinki. She was effusive in her praise. This “city under the city”, she commented, was “a role model for us all”. The Finns have built extensively: their citywide system of civil bunkers contains space for 900,000 people, which is a third more than the entire population of Helsinki (658,000). And, as evidenced by the proud display of their spacious caverns to German dignitaries, Finland’s status as bunker-builders-in-chief is an opportunity to showcase the expertise of their engineering firms in a global underground construction market expected to be worth €36 billion by 2030.
But what works for Helsinki won’t do for Berlin, neither demographically nor geographically. The Finnish capital has a much smaller population than Berlin’s 3.7 million, and sits on solid granodiorite bedrock while Berlin sits on notoriously unstable sandy, marshy ground. Berlin could not build such a bunker system even if it wanted to.
So what are the plans for the German capital? According to the May report, rather than investing in new bunkers, the country wants to develop a national Schutzraumkonzept, or “shelter concept”, which does not involve new construction. Rather, it envisions a database of all publicly accessible buildings that might be used as places of refuge: reinforcing and cataloguing existing basements, car parks and metro stations, and providing information to citizens about where to take shelter via an IT service available through smartphone apps. These plans are less concerned with trying to provide long-term refuge for Berlin’s entire population than they are with finding a safe place to stay during any attack, as well as preparing for the situation immediately afterwards.
In an official response, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance said that the first step for their national shelter concept was a nationwide survey to “enable the identification of suitable building structures”, which would be followed by the “integration of the digital directory into existing app applications”. Rather than Helsinki’s “city under the city”, then, the Berlin model is an app that will tell you where to hide. The most ambitious part of their plan is represented by a pilot project that would aim to equip “a total of 1,000,000 shelter places in the 2026 fiscal year” with “camp beds, mobile sanitary facilities, and the provision of water and food”. But funding for these places is not secured, and a full evaluation to determine the “security needs of the Federal Republic” is still forthcoming.
Alexander Fekete is a professor of risk and crisis management at the Technical University in Cologne. He has studied German civil protection systems, and argues that our conception of a nuclear attack itself is a little misguided. “Even if the bomb landed directly on a city, it’s a myth that the whole city is wiped out in an instant. Of course, if Berlin was hit by the really huge bombs, that’s feasible. But the most likely scenario, say from an aggressor in the east, would be something smaller.”
“There’s a tool on the internet – Nukemap – which tries to make this transparent. You see that the immediate circle of the major blast vaporising everything is small by comparison to large cities like Berlin. That means there would be massive casualties in the city centre. But if you’re not in that kilometre range and you’re not standing close to windows in a building, you’d have a good chance of survival,” Fekete says. “Mostly it would be similar to the people in Ukraine, who have a lot of experience with bomb blasts and attacks. Find something like your hallway that is not directly having a window and outfacing wall and stay there until it is over.”
And yet, if a nuclear attack represents the worst-case scenario, it is only the most extreme point on a spectrum of catastrophe which takes in blackouts, flooding, civil unrest, cyber attacks, pandemics, extreme weather events, terrorist incidents and supply chain collapses. Each disaster demands its own response, and developing a comprehensive civil defence strategy means accounting for this full range of threats, from the mundane failure of ageing infrastructure to deliberate sabotage or direct attack by hostile state actors.
How is the government going to protect us from all this? A glance at the May report suggests its primary focus may be protecting itself. The “total defence” framework divides responsibility into seven distinct pillars, only one of which concerns protecting the populace. The remaining six focus on “maintaining government function”, “supporting military operations” and “ensuring territorial defence”. What becomes clear is that these plans are not wholly defensive: this is a blueprint for Germany at war, which means facilitating the entire NATO fighting force, with protecting regular citizens relegated to a secondary concern.
The euphemism the report uses for the vision of Germany at war is that of a “hub”, although the German word Drehscheibe, or turntable, reveals the original meaning: the centre of a wheel. Germany’s position at the heart of Europe, linking east and west, means its remilitarisation would see all of NATO-aligned Europe’s armies pass through on their way to war. The plan must therefore strengthen bridges, facilitate logistics, guarantee provisions and resupply for this enormous fighting force. And it is precisely the hub of tomorrow’s war that would come under attack.
In February 19, 2019, at exactly 14:10, construction workers drilling on the Salvador-Allende Bridge in Köpenick accidentally severed two 110-kilovolt power cables. For the next 31 hours, around 30,000 households and 70,000 people fell into darkness – the largest and longest blackout Berlin has experienced since the end of World War II.
The cascade of failures that followed revealed the fragile interdependence of modern infrastructure. Shortly after the power went out, the mobile phone network collapsed, leaving battery-powered radios as the only reliable information source. Practically all shops and restaurants in the affected area closed. Schools and daycare centres were forced to shutter. Emergency numbers 110 and 112 stopped working. Even Köpenick Hospital became unreachable by phone. Fire stations could not operate, lacking emergency power supply. At-risk patients dependent on home ventilators or artificial hearts had to be identified and evacuated, and residents at nursing homes required emergency relocation.
But for all this, it could have been worse. Larger crises, triggered by sabotage or cyber weapons, could see all this and more. Köpenick’s experience also validated the need for something that was already being discussed in civil defence circles: Kat-Leuchttürme, or “catastrophe lighthouses”. These are not physical structures towering above the city, directing lost citizens to safety, but simply buildings with a reliable emergency power supply. They might only be a van, equipped with generators and a modem. According to Alexander Fekete, we should envision “information points in neighbourhoods. Both smaller ones, and bigger ‘lighthouses’ where you can recharge your phone, get food and supplies.
“Civil protection needs to be multi-purpose,” Fekete continues. “One strategy to cover major disasters of any kind: floods, blackouts, and war. Even with an attack, there are different steps of escalation. Maybe the first step is misinformation, elections being targeted. And the next level would be an event near the border of a NATO-aligned state, with Germany receiving 1,000 wounded people per day, while NATO troops march through Germany. Only the final stage would be attacks on the ground in Germany.
Companies selling private solutions for the apocalypse are nothing new.
If you don’t think measures like smartphone applications or vans equipped with backup generators offer sufficient protection, there is another solution – provided you have the means to afford it. A Berlin company called Bunker Protection System Germany (BSSD) offers private solutions from their headquarters, located in what is presumably quite a secure location: nestled between the Pergamon Museum, Humboldt University, and Angela Merkel’s Berlin apartment. Their B0 model – a 10-square-metre metal chamber that resembles an unusually-clean public toilet – costs €79,000. The B1 bunker costs €120,000 for 18 square metres, while the B2 – which comes with four beds, a reinforced door and explosion protection valves but looks like a large shipping container, or one of the enigmatic black monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey laid on its side – costs €198,000 for 36 square metres. Prices for anything larger or more customised are available on request.
Business is apparently booming for private bunkers, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and BSSD, which was founded in 2014 in response to the invasion of Crimea, has even taken out advertisements in catalogues from the discount supermarket chain Norma, offering air-filtration systems, security doors and “pop-up panic rooms” alongside pet food and paddling pools.
Companies selling private solutions for the apocalypse are nothing new. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Time magazine spoke with American citizens preparing their own solutions for nuclear exchange. “When I get my shelter finished,” one man from Chicago told the reporter, “I’m going to mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out if the bomb falls… If the stupid American public will not do what they have to do to save themselves, I’m not going to run the risk of not being able to use the shelter I’ve taken the trouble to provide to save my own family.”
According to Alexander Fekete, the competing ideologies of the Cold War extended even to their visions of the end: “There was quite a different mentality between the USA and Russia in the 1950s and 60s. Russia decided there was enough space for people to flee major cities and be safe in the countryside. But in the US, during the anti-communist period of the McCarthy era, anything that sounded like public coercion was deemed communist. This drove US private companies toward private bunkers for gardens and cellars.”
The ideology behind our visions of disaster is something that we might bear in mind while examining one final element of Germany’s planned defence. This one does not involve building any structure, fortifying any wall or stockpiling supplies. It can happen with the stroke of a pen.
In times of crisis, what is needed is not the undermining of democratic control, but its strengthening.
The recommendations of the working groups propose a change in legal status to better facilitate national defence. The argument they lay out goes like this: during the Cold War, military planners worked under the assumption that approximately two years would pass before a “state of tension” developed into a situation of actual military defence. Today, due to hybrid warfare, cyber attacks and drones, that window no longer exists: we need to be ready now. For this reason, the report recommends passing a new “advance deployment” law, allowing the Ministry of the Interior to assume emergency powers, surpassing the powers afforded to them in the constitution. But this begs the question: do we defend democracy by suspending it?
Some members of the German Bundestag take a critical view. Zada Salihović, the spokesperson for federal defence with Die Linke, expressed worry about the government granting itself emergency powers. “It is unacceptable,” she wrote in response to The Berliner’s inquiry, “to bypass constitutional restrictions. In times of crisis, what is needed is not the undermining of democratic control, but its strengthening. Parliaments, courts, and a critical public are not an obstacle to our country’s security; they are a prerequisite for it.”
Salihović is concerned about the political choices made in response to these apparent threats. “Fear of security threats such as a potential Russian attack must not lead to the normalisation of security-related states of emergency. Instead of pouring billions into military buildup, investments in civilian crisis preparedness, health, education, and social cohesion need to be prioritised.”
Ultimately, scepticism over the content of these plans does not mean we should fail to introduce new types of protections – but rather that overpreparation for one type of catastrophe can make us ignore the risks of another. On a larger scale, we see this with the lifting of the debt brake itself, where Germany elected to allocate €500 billion to the military and €100 billion to infrastructure, yet made no such commitment to fighting climate change. It is true that there are risks to understating the threats facing Germany, but there may also be a danger in committing too fully to one hypothesis. The nature of the threats addressed by “multi-purpose defence architecture” provides a glimpse into various ominous futures: war, cyber attacks, blackouts, flooding, riots and societal breakdown. Whatever plan we decide upon needs to account for all of this, or risk allowing those in power to choose the apocalypse that suits them best.
