The Closet

Chapter 9

The west tunnel was big and wide and tall. If size meant anything, it had experienced more traffic in its history than the smaller tunnels they had spent the last two nights in.  It actually looked like a small vehicle could have been driven through it. They had plenty of room to walk and spread out a bit, walking two by two. They had walked about 15 minutes, or most of a mile by John’s reckoning when the tunnel split left and right. The left fork seemed to be the one that went on straight ahead while the right fork curved off.  A moment’s debate led them to explore the curve to the right. Because it curved, their headlamps could only illuminate the part of the tunnel they were walking through, but in short order they came to a large steel door. The tunnel then curved back to the left as if it would join up again with the main passage. They stood looking at the door. The hinges were on the left and were massive. The door had been painted gray, but had discolored and begun to rust in places. On the right there was a huge steel bolt that slid into a hole in the door frame and solid rock on the right side. A hasp welded to the bolt hinged down and joined with its mate which was welded to the steel door. Through the hasps passed the shackle of a secure-looking padlock. In large block letters near the top of the door read the words, “GEFAR” and on a second line, “Zugang für Unbefugte verboten!”

            They weren’t sure exactly what that meant, but they assumed that it was not an invitation to enter. John dug a pencil out of his backpack and carefully wrote the words on a scrap of paper he found there. Mechanically inclined Jarom immediately began examining the lock. 

            “The lock has German writing on and it opens with a key,” he said. 

Jarom had a fascination for locks, and had acquired through apparently nefarious means (ordered on the internet) a lock-pick set and a book titled, How to Pick Locks. He had practiced on all the doors and padlocks in their previous home and had begun to be somewhat successful. His dad drew the line when he tried to pick the automobile ignition lock and got his pick stuck in it. It was embarrassing to try to explain to the locksmith who removed the broken tool how it had found its way into the lock cylinder. He had lost some of his enthusiasm after that, but still had the pick tools in his closet at home. 

“If only I had brought my picks with us,” he lamented. “Tomorrow……..”

“Well I don’t think we can make any more progress here, “said John. “Let’s go on and see if this joins up with the main tunnel” 

In fact it did.  Once in the main tunnel, they continued ahead when they found a similar cut-out to the left. They took the left fork and again came to another massive door with an identical locking mechanism and writing. They looked it over closely, and finding nothing they could accomplish, continued again to the main tunnel and on. 

The tunnel went on for a short distance when they came to another fork, but this one was a 90 degree turn to the right. They followed it for 15 yards when they again came to a massive steel door. The hinges and bolt were somewhat different and the lock was different than the other two, but the effect was the same; they couldn’t enter. They noticed a rubber gasket around the door that had been missing in the previous two. The feeling here was completely different.  Bad different.  The writing on the door was different too.  It said,’ Geben Sie die Hoffnung, die ihr hier eingeben”. 

            They finally turned around and they couldn’t describe why, but they were relieved to walk away. Entering the main tunnel again, they continued walking away from their home.  John took a moment to review his map, but there were no kasernes in that direction and other than the Rhine River, he couldn’t see anything of consequence. The tunnel kept going and they were far beyond the distance they had traveled in any of the other passages, but the locked doors gave credence to the idea that this must be the most important of the corridors they had traveled. It showed no signs of ending, and they walked on.  And on.  And on. 

Close to 2 hours since they had left the last intersection, the floor of the tunnel seemed to be inclining upward. They soon came to a pair of steel-framed gates with heavy linked wire in the frame. They could see through the wire gate to a subterranean floor of a building’s foundation. Though the building appeared large, there was but one doorway through the foundation that led into the base of the building. The gates were locked and they effectively closed off all access.  A sign on the gate read, “Kein Eintritt”  and “IG Farben”.  Looking closely at the sign, he could tell that the sign that read IG Farben had been repainted. He traced the outline of the original letters and found that it read BASF.  John knew that IG Farben had something to do with manufacturing during World War II. It had been covered briefly in his social studies class, but he couldn’t remember any more. He was aware that BASF was a huge German industrial conglomerate. 

He said to the others, “I’ve heard of IG Farben, but I can’t remember what they were known for. See here though, the outline of the letters BASF shows through the paint.  I’ve heard of them.  They manufacture all sorts of things like chemicals and electronics. I guess they must be located in Mannheim too.  I wonder what the connection is.”

It seemed that whatever went on in this excavation was related to IG Farben or BASF, or at least at one time it had been. Again there was no way to pass the gates. They weren’t as solid as the steel doors they had come up against, but they were as effective at denying passage. Looking at the time, John realized that they had been gone for nearly four hours already, and it was a two hour walk back to their home. That would make it nearly 3 AM by the time they got there, so they turned around and reversed course. 

Once they had reached the ladder-shaft, Jarom threw the rock with the kite string over the first rung of the ladder. They pulled the rope over the rung, and then Allie, and then Jason hung on to the rope while the older boys hauled them aloft.  John then held the rope for Jarom to climb and Jarom wrapped one end of the rope around the ladder so John could climb up a single rope without it slipping. They all scrambled up the ladder and were soon in bed, not wanting to repeat the tardiness of the previous morning.

The beginning of a new day greeted the James children way too early. Going to bed after one AM all week and past three last night was taking its toll on them. It was Thursday, but they had lost track of the days of the week. An alarm clock helped them out of bed and they had breakfast and were out the door on their way to school by a few minutes after eight, but their feet were sore from the walking they had been doing and the dark circles under their eyes made them look more like prisoners than students. Once again, John and Jarom agreed to meet in front of the buffalo after school. There was some more research they needed to do.

The school day was brutal. John felt as if he had sand under his eyelids all day and Jarom was caught sleeping in class.  Allie fell asleep during lunch with her head on the lunch table. Meeting at the bovine statue, they walked to the library together. While John entered search terms into Google, Jarom looked on with half-hearted interest. John typed ‘BASF’ into the search engine and was rewarded with hundreds of results.  He settled on a Wikipedia entry in which its history, founders, and products were detailed.

The company’s main products were chemicals in the early days.  From its founding in 1865, it produced aniline dyes, soda, sulphuric acid, and ammonia, eventually adding fertilizers to its product line.  During World War I, the company produced explosives, rubber, fuels and coatings.  After the war, BASF and three lesser companies merged to become Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (Translated literally, community of interests of dye-making corporations).  IG Farben, as it was known more commonly, was notorious under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime for using slave labor from concentration camps in its manufacturing, and in producing Zyklon-B, the lethal gas the Nazis used to murder the Jews and others in its extermination camps. It also produced synthetic rubber and gasoline which were of vital importance to the Nazi war machine. During bombing and shelling in World War II, the IG Farben manufacturing plant in Mannheim-Ludwigshafen was completely destroyed and all production was stopped by the end of 1944. Several company directors and senior managers were tried for war crimes by the allies following the war, and IG Farben was dissolved. In 1952, the Badische Anilin-und Soda-Fabrik AG (BASF) was refounded and since that time,  the company had expanded world-wide producing chemicals, plastics, coatings, agricultural products and chemicals, oil and gas.  BASF is now the largest chemical company in the world.

The Wickimapia view of Mannheim ( http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=49.519999&lon=8.541827&z=15&m=b  )

showed BASF’s location on the west bank of the Rhine River exactly where the Rhine and Neckar rivers join, and less than 6 miles from their home, as the crow might fly.  The possibilities overwhelmed them. Knowing a little of the multinational conglomerate’s history suddenly made an underground passage from its headquarters and manufacturing plant to the various Army kasernes sound reasonable. The company may have had a need for troops from time to time, as well as the security of access unhampered by bombs and unseen by airplanes. If BASF manufactured explosives and ammunition, a tunnel to an Ammunition Storage Arsenal made a lot of sense.  The crazy thing was that there was so little sign of any activity. No tracks, no litter and no guards. Of course the war was a long time ago and the tunnel system may have been cleaned out and sealed up since then, but someone else….someone besides them, had gotten in somewhere and they had yet to see his entrance. The sealed up chambers were also a puzzle. What might they contain and who might know about them?

There was only one more tunnel to explore which they hoped to see that night, but  there still were the closed off chambers that they wanted badly to see the inside of.  Jarom’s lock picking skills were better than novice, but he certainly wasn’t an expert. He was worried that he might not be able to unlock the chambers and it was becoming clearer to both of them that they would have to tell their parents about what they had found. The American military had been in Mannheim on a permanent basis since the advance of the Allied forces in 1945, but what if they had never found these tunnels? Isn’t that a part of the history of the area that people should know about? 

They left the library, each silent with his own thoughts.  Finally Jarom spoke.

“I think we should go back to the doors tonight.  I want to try and pick those locks.  With a little time, I think I can, and if we don’t see what’s in them in the next two nights, we probably will never get to. Once we tell Dad, this will all become off-limits to us. We’ll probably be made to take a vow of silence. We might even be deported!”

“You’re getting too excited, Jarom. We haven’t seen anything that has to be kept quiet.  There are just a bunch of tunnels underneath the ground. I agree, though, that if we don’t see it all in the next two nights, we probably will never get the chance and that would be sad. We’ve come all this way and figured out so much; we just need the rest of the story. Do you really think you have a chance at unlocking the padlocks?  They must have used some really good padlocks that are hard to pick, and it’s almost too much to believe that a 14 year-old foreign juvenile could unlock doors that have stood closed and secured for more than half-a-century.” 

“I won’t know ‘til I try, but from the reading about locks that I’ve done, the big improvements they’ve made in security have happened in the last 30 years or so. If those locks have been there since 1948, I think I have a good chance.”

They arrived home to find Allie and Jason asleep, and they joined them promptly. They slept dreamlessly for two hours and woke thinking of food. It was Jason’s turn to fix dinner and he chose to prepare Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Again. They ate chatting about the night ahead, and despite Jarom’s insistence on going back to the steel doors, they voted to explore the northwest passage. By the time their mother called that evening, the tension in the air was almost visible, and they were uncharacteristically snapping at each other.

When the phone rang, John answered with, “Hello, Mom,” expecting to hear his mother’s voice. 

He wasn’t disappointed when she answered in her smooth and gentle cadence, “Well, hello John. It is so good to hear your voice. How is everything there?”

“Just fine, Mom, except Jason fixed Mac and Cheese again. I mean, I like it as well as anyone, but we just had it on Tuesday.” 

“School is going OK?  What about Allie?”

“School is fine, Mom.  And Allie is fine too.  With us boys here, she gets treated like royalty.”

“Dad and I got to go through Mad King Ludwig’s castle at Neuschwanstein, and it was amazing!  I’m so glad your father and I have gotten to do a little touring so we know where to take you kids on vacation this summer.“ 

“So you’re coming home Saturday then?”

“Yes, I think so. We plan to go to Baden-Baden tomorrow to see the ancient Roman baths and then visit one of the spas there.  We plan to drive home Saturday morning.”

“That sounds really great, Mom. Have a good time.” He handed the phone to Jason, the next in line.

“Hi, Mom. It sounds like you’re having fun.”

“Yes, Jason.  We are.  Have you been keeping busy?”

“Oh, yes. We’ve been so busy I’m almost exhausted,” he said as both of his brothers shushed him at once. “Homework and school and fixing dinner, you know?” 

“I’m glad you’re looking after your responsibilities,” she said encouragingly.

“Bye, Mom,” he said handing the phone off to Allie.

“Hello, Mom. I hope you’re having fun.”

“Oh, we are sweetheart. Have the boys been treating you well?”

“Just fine, Mom. Hurry home,” she said giving the phone to Jarom.

“Hi, Mom. We miss you, but I’m glad you’re having a good time”

“Thank you, Jarom. Help John with your younger brother and sister,” she admonished.

“I will.  We all love you and we’ll see you soon! Bye”

“Goodbye,” she said, and then turned to her husband and said, “I feel like they were trying to get rid of me. I hope they’re behaving.” 

“I guess they must be. We haven’t heard from the police yet,” he said thoughtfully.