Schron kolejowy w Stępinie

In the summer of 1941, construction was completed on a reinforced-concrete railway shelter almost 400 metres long in the valley of the Stępinka stream. Work had begun in the summer of 1940 under the direction of Organisation Todt. Around 3,000-6,000 people worked on the construction, including forced labourers and prisoners of various nationalities. To conceal the site’s true purpose, the project was officially registered as an undertaking of the Berlin-based company Askania-Werke. In reality, it formed part of the forward command headquarters known as Anlage Süd, prepared, among other purposes, to receive a military staff train.

On 27 August 1941, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at the headquarters, leaving the site the following day. The shelter, curved at an angle of around 10 degrees and with walls more than 3 metres thick in places, was designed to reduce the risk of a direct hit from an aerial bomb. Nearby stands a technical support shelter with a machine room, connected to the railway shelter by an underground passage, as well as five smaller defensive shelters protecting the complex.

Towards the end of the war, the former headquarters buildings were used by a Soviet field hospital, which operated here for around four months and left the area after the beginning of the offensive in January 1945. After the war, the complex came under the supervision of the Polish military. In the 1960s, the railway and technical shelters were leased to the National Bank of Poland, which planned to use them as a storage facility. Eventually, the buildings were taken over by the Agricultural Production Cooperative in Stępina and adapted for mushroom cultivation, with equipment including air-conditioning systems. Production ended around 1990, and decades of use and maintenance helped preserve the shelters in good condition.

The railway shelter was transferred to the Frysztak municipality in 2000.