11 x Discover Germany from below

This is how Hitler imagined the gigantic redesign of Berlin. The model can be seen in the museum of the "Berliner Unterwelten" association in the former shelter at the Gesundbrunnen railway station. The association also offers various historical underground tours, where you can experience the Cold War escape tunnels between East and West Berlin or Germany's first underground tunnel.

A fairy tale-like world in innumerable shades of color - this former mine was once used to mine alum slate. In the course of time, nature has transformed the resulting underground cavities into a fascinating stalactite world. The Saalfeld fairy grottoes are listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the "most colorful fairy-tale grottoes in the world".

In the past, this is how dock workers and shipyard workers got to work under the Elbe; today, the tunnel dating from 1911 is a tourist attraction. Elevators take pedestrians and cyclists down into the depths, cars use the hydraulically operated carriages. The light of the historical lamps gives the tiled tunnel its very own atmosphere.

Over the centuries, the citizens of Nuremberg dug vaults and corridors into the sandstone beneath their city. After all, everyone who wanted to brew and sell beer had to have their own beer cellar to store and ferment it. During the Second World War, many citizens of Nuremberg found protection from air raids in the widely branched underground labyrinth.

Prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp were forced to assemble the dreaded V2 rockets in the underground tunnels of the southern Harz region under inhuman conditions during World War II. 20,000 of the 60,000 prisoners died in the underground armaments factory. A guided tour of the Mittelbau-Dora memorial gallery is available.

This alternative seat government was created in 1959 in two former railway tunnels. It was an underground city, intended for several thousand inhabitants. Equipped with hundreds of sleeping chambers and offices, canteens, a church, television studio, and even a hairdressing salon. There were no culinary delicacies: In the event of a nuclear emergency, folks would have lived mainly on canned food.

The ancient Romans used to bathe here, but today only the remains of the large spa can be visited. The guided tours through the underground passages are particularly exciting. In the past, these led to the stoves that heated the water and the floors. Today the corridors occasionally serve as a romantic backdrop for readings and concerts.

The miners' clothing is a reminder of more than a thousand years of mining history in the Harz mountains: copper, silver and lead ores were mined on Rammelsberg as early as the Middle Ages. In 1992, UNESCO declared Rammelsberg a World Heritage Site, the first industrial monument in Germany. Guided tours take you deep into the old tunnels and the history of mining.

The Oppenheim Vault is the largest of its kind in Germany. Bones and skulls pile up to the ceiling. In earlier centuries, wars, famines and epidemics made cemetery space scarce. Therefore the remains of the dead, after a certain period, were dug up and moved here to be neatly stacked in rows.

You can of course book the classic underground tour in the former Merkers potash mine, which leads to a crystal grotto and to the largest underground bucket wheel excavator in the world. But there's more to the adventure mine than that: there are rock concerts and underground tours by mountain bike.

The fortress Königstein towers over the Elbe valley and hides its underground vaults, which were dug deep into the sandstone rocks: like the about 152 meters deep well shaft, which supplied the castle with water. Or the bomb-proof vaults of the powder storerooms. Or the cellar in which the giant wine barrel of August the Strong, King of Saxony, was once stored.