There are countless stories and accounts of people wandering in some forest and randomly encountering some, often quite unassuming and inconspicuous, small concrete structure with a door or entrance, and if they get inside they often find some kind of long-abandoned bunker complex (sometimes relatively small, sometimes surprisingly huge). In the era of YouTube videos about these have become more and more abundant, with people finding and exploring these bunkers.
Almost invariably these bunkers have been completely cleared out and abandoned for many decades. Very rarely is there any furniture or machinery inside, with perhaps the exception of some decrepit tables, chairs, and so on.
What are these bunkers, and why are they completely unmarked, and why doesn't anybody know anything about them, before they are found?
The answer is in a way a bit boring, but also in other ways interesting.
It shouldn't be very surprising that these are military bunkers from the second World War and the subsequent Cold War era. For several decades after Word War II there was a real imminent threat and fear of a nuclear war or, at a minimum, some kind of invasion and war similar to and even worse than those.
The military forces in many countries, especially in the United States, in Europe and in the entirety of the Soviet Union, but also many other countries, prepared for such a nuclear war by building underground military bunkers at strategic locations, spread all through the country (so that nuclear blasts would only cripple a minimal part of the military forces).
The Soviet Union in particular, as well as some European countries, really loved to build these underground bunkers, for all kinds of purposes, which is why they are so common all around in former Soviet countries. These were not merely just underground command centers, but all kinds of bunkers were built for all sorts of purposes, such as storage of supplies and ammunition, shelter for troops and, most dangerously, nuclear waste storage (as nuclear research and nuclear power plants were extremely common in the Soviet Union, and all that waste material had to go somewhere.)
The interesting question is why there are so many bunkers (probably thousands of them) that have been completely abandoned and forgotten? Indeed, a good majority of these bunkers are completely unknown to authorities, and they have no idea that they are there, until someone randomly finds one. One would think that the government would know the location of all these bunkers, but they don't. It may seem unfathomable how the military can build a huge bunker, and then just forget about it so fundamentally that nobody even knows where the majority of these bunkers even are.
However, it's not that strange.
Most of these bunkers were built in high secrecy, for rather obvious reasons. The less likely that foreign enemies knew about the location and nature of these bunkers, the better. The construction and details of these bunkers were of course documented, so that they could be strategically used, but these documents were usually highly classified, and only a very limited amount of people had access to them.
Once a bunker was abandoned because there was no need for it anymore, the documents were sealed and archived in some secret archives somewhere, along thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, of other documents. Pretty much effectively all information about the bunker was buried where nobody would find it anymore.
How about the people who were in those bunkers? Rather obviously they were also bound to secrecy, and most of them wouldn't even remember the location and details of some random bunker somewhere in the middle of nowhere after twenty, thirty, fifty years. The people who built the bunker and those who were most intimately knowledgeable of it got old, they retired, they died. Only very few people alive today were connected to the construction and running of that random bunker in the middle of nowhere. And most of those few people wouldn't even remember where it was, even if they wanted to tell about it.
Thus, we have ended up in a world that has thousands and thousands of fortified underground abandoned military bunkers who nobody knows anything about, and any documentation about them is either deeply buried in some secret archive (alongside tens of thousands of other documents) or even completely destroyed (as many of these documents have been destroyed by the passage of time or even fires, water damage, mold, etc.)
It's likely that there are thousands of such bunkers out there that are still to be found, and literally nobody has visited in something like 50 years.
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