The Adzhimushkay quarries

Limestone workings outside Kerch where, from May to October 1942, a garrison of soldiers and civilians held out after the city fell and they went underground. The Germans blew in the roofs and pumped gas into the galleries. Of some thirteen thousand people, a few hundred survived. The diaries found in the workings afterwards are among the hardest documents of that war. Part of the quarries is a museum today; the rest is closed, because remains are still being found there.

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Teufelsberg

A hill in Berlin heaped from the rubble of the bombed city over an unfinished Nazi military-technical faculty that would not yield to explosives. The Americans built a listening station on top, white radomes that monitored the Eastern Bloc until 1992. The station is abandoned now, the domes tearing in the wind, and the acoustics inside carry a whisper the length of the hall.