In August 2024, a avalanche diverted a hiking trail near Zerat, Switzerland.
When rescue workers arrived to clear the debris, they found something that shouldn’t exist.
A concrete bunker entrance sealed beneath 80 years of ice and rock.
Inside the first chamber, investigators discovered laboratory equipment stamped with Third Reich Eagles and a leather briefcase containing documents signed by SS Overberman Furer Warner Hersh.
According to every official record, Hirs vanished in April 1945 near the Austrian border.
No one knew why an SS colonel specializing in experimental weapons had been operating a secret facility in neutral Switzerland.
That briefcase contained research notes that would force historians to rewrite what they thought they knew about the final days of the Nazi regime.
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Now, back to 1945 when Wernner Hirs was running operations no one was supposed to discover.
The trail to understanding this facility starts not in Switzerland, but in a castle laboratory 600 m away.
Wernern Hirs joined the SS in 1936 at age 28, already holding a doctorate in applied chemistry from the University of Munich.
Unlike many Nazi officers who climbed ranks through political connections, Hirs advanced because he delivered results.
By 1942, he commanded a research division operating from Wheelsburg Castle in North Rin West Failia.
tasked with developing what Himmler called alternative strategic capabilities, a deliberately vague term that covered everything from poison gas variants to experimental explosives.
Hirs ran a team of 47 scientists and technicians, many conscripted from occupied territories.
Survivors who worked under him described a methodical man obsessed with documentation, someone who logged every experiment in duplicate, filed every memo in chronological order.
He rarely socialized with other SS officers.
One colleague noted in a 1943 letter that Hirs treats the laboratory like a cathedral in science like religion.
By late 1944, Hersh’s division had produced several compounds tested on the Eastern Front, though records of their effectiveness were destroyed.
What survived in Allied intelligence files were intercepted references to Project Adal Vice, a program name that appeared in decoded signals between Wheelsburg and Berlin throughout January and February 1945.
The references were fragmentaryary shipment manifests, budget allocations, personnel transfers.
Nothing explained what Adovise actually was.
As a Red Army pushed westward and Allied forces crossed the Rine, the Nazi regime began evacuation protocols.
Valuable research materials moved south toward Alpine regions where the regime planned its mythical last stand.
Hirs received orders in March 1945 to relocate essential equipment and documentation.
His destination, according to a single surviving telegram, was listed only as facility 7 grid AH44.
No map showed what AH44 represented.
The last confirmed sighting of Wernernh came from a Wormach checkpoint near Innsbrook, Austria on April 18th, 1945.
He traveled with three trucks marked with red cross symbols, a common disguise for military convoys trying to avoid Allied air strikes.
The checkpoint guard noted the convoy heading southwest toward the Swiss border.
After that, nothing.
What investigators would later find in those Swiss mountains suggested that checkpoint guard had witnessed something far more significant than anyone realized at the time.
The convoy reached the Swiss border on April 19th, 1945, timing their crossing for the early morning hours when patrols were lightest.
Switzerland, officially neutral, maintained strict policies about belligerent nations using its territory.
But the Swiss German border in 1945 was porous in practice.
Smuggling routes crisscrossed the mountains and certain Swiss officials looked the other way for the right price or political pressure.
Hers had arranged access through an intermediary, a Swiss businessman named Claus Steiner, who owned mining rights in the Valley Alps.
Steiner’s company had legitimate excavation operations near Zerma, providing perfect cover for additional underground work.
Between February and April 1945, Steiner’s crews had carved out chambers beneath what they reported as expanded or storage.
The convoy traveled only at night, moving through mountain passes still choked with late winter snow.
On April 23rd, they reached the facility.
The entrance sat at 2743 m elevation, accessible only by a service roadiners company had built years earlier.
Hersha’s team began unloading immediately.
laboratory equipment, chemical stores in leadline containers, filing cabinets filled with documentation, and several wooden crates whose contents were never recorded in any manifest.
For the next 10 days, Hirsch worked inside those chambers.
A Swiss worker named Emil Rothman, employed by Steiner to help with equipment installation, later told investigators that Hirs operated with frantic precision.
He slept maybe 3 hours a night.
Rothman said in a 1947 deposition, “Everything had to be arranged exactly.
He would measure twice, three times before placing any instrument.
” On May 7th, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally.
News reached the facility by radio.
Rothman recalled Hirs listening to the broadcast in silence, then returning to his work as if nothing had changed.
“He didn’t seem surprised,” Rothman said.
It was like he’d been expecting it.
May 8th, 1945 0600 hours.
Rothman arrived for a shift to find the facility and transsealed with fresh concrete.
Hirsh and two of his assistants were gone.
The three trucks had vanished.
Steiner paid Rothman a substantial bonus and told him the project was complete.
The chambers would remain sealed as storage and he should never speak about what he’d seen.
Rothman kept quiet for 2 years.
When Allied investigators finally interviewed him in 1947 during broader Nazi war crimes investigations, he provided details about the location and construction.
But he’d never been allowed into the laboratory sections.
He only knew Hirs had sealed something inside those mountains.
What Hirs sealed away would remain hidden through decades of technological advancement, political change, and historical investigation until a natural disaster tore open the mountain itself.
Allied intelligence services identified Wernernh as a person of interest in June 1945 when they captured his administrative staff at Wsburg Castle under interrogation.
These subordinates revealed fragments of Project Adal Vice, but couldn’t explain its purpose.
They confirmed Hirs had evacuated research material south, but none knew his final destination.
The investigation file grew to 340 pages of dead ends.
The Hirsch family received no death notification because no death could be confirmed.
His wife, Maria, filed inquiries with the Red Cross in 1946 and 1948.
Both went unanswered.
She eventually moved to Argentina in 1952 where she died in 1967 without ever learning what happened to her husband.
Multiple theories circulated in intelligence circles.
Theory one, Hersh had been killed by partisans while fleeing, his convoy ambushed in the mountains.
His body never recovered.
Theory two, he’d escaped to South America like other SS officers, using Swiss banking connections to fund a new identity.
Theory three, he’d committed suicide rather than face war crimes prosecution.
His remains lost in Alpine wilderness.
The Swiss government conducted a prefuncter investigation in 1947 after the Rothman interview surfaced.
Swiss officials visited Steiner’s mining operation, found sealed storage chambers as described, and confirmed they contained industrial materials.
With Switzerland eager to move past uncomfortable questions about wartime neutrality, the investigation closed.
The official report stated, “No evidence of illegal activity requiring further action.
” Claus Steiner died of a heart attack in 1951, taking whatever additional knowledge he possessed with him.
His mining company operated until 1973 when declining or prices made the Zerat operation unprofitable.
The site was abandoned.
By 1980, maps showed the area as former industrial site no access.
Occasionally, historians researching Nazi evacuation routes would encounter references to Hirsch.
A 1989 book about SS war criminals included two paragraphs about him, noting he was presumed deceased, location unknown.
A 1998 documentary about Nazi gold in Switzerland mentioned project Adal Vice in passing, speculating it might have involved looted assets.
None connected Hirs to any specific Swiss location.
The file went cold, not because investigators stopped caring, but because every lead dissolved into contradictions and missing records.
After six decades, Wernernh had become just another name in the vast catalog of Nazi officers who vanished in the chaos of 1945.
Between 1945 and 2024, the sealed facility sat undisturbed at 2743 m, slowly disappearing under accumulating ice and rockfall.
Climate change was gradually altering the Swiss Alps, but the Zerat area had experienced relatively stable conditions until 2024 proved exceptional.
In the 1960s, Swiss authorities conducted general surveys of abandoned industrial sites for environmental purposes.
The former Steiner mining operation appeared on lists, but warranted no special attention.
Concrete bunkers were common in alpine regions built during World War II as defensive positions or storage.
One more sealed chamber attracted no curiosity.
A brief flurry of interest came in 1987 when a Swiss history student named Andreas Keller researched wartime mining operations for his thesis.
He found Rothman’s 1947 deposition in Cannel Archives and try to locate the facility Rothman described.
Poor recordkeeping in Steiner’s company’s bankruptcy meant precise coordinates were lost.
Keller spent two weeks hiking the Zerat Highlands before giving up.
His thesis mentioned the alleged SS laboratory in a footnote, suggesting it was likely exaggerated or misremembered.
The digital age brought new tools, but no breakthroughs.
Satellite imagery showed thousands of concrete structures throughout the Alps.
Without exact coordinates, finding one specific bunker among countless military and industrial remnants was impossible.
Historical researchers focused on facilities where documentation survived, not on ghost stories supported by one witness statement.
What kept the facility hidden wasn’t just bureaucratic indifference or lost records.
It was geology.
Between 1945 and 2024, several rock slides had buried the access road.
Dense alpine vegetation reclaimed the area.
By 2020, you could stand 50 m from the entrance and see nothing but rock face and mountain shrubs.
Then 2024 brought the warmest European summer on record.
Alpine glaciers retreated at unprecedented rates.
The Matterhorn region experienced temperature spikes that destabilized rock faces frozen solid for centuries.
On August 14th, 2024, a section of mountain above the old Steiner mining area gave way.
30,000 tons of rock and ice crashed down the slope, blocking a popular hiking trail and exposing a vertical rock face that hadn’t seen daylight in 80 years.
When rescue services arrived to assess the damage and reroute hikers, one crew member noticed something that would launch the largest historical investigation Switzerland had seen in decades.
Stephan Brand, a mountain rescue specialist with 15 years experience, was surveying the avalanche debris on August 16th when he spotted it.
A concrete edge protruding from the newly exposed rock face.
Too regular to be natural, too weathered to be recent.
He climbed closer and found a rectangular outline, a sealed entrance.
The Swiss protocol required reporting any discovered structures in case they contained unexloded ordinance or hazardous materials.
Brandt documented the location with GPS coordinates, 46.
0247° north, 7.
7458° east, and filed his report with Canton authorities.
A specialist team arrived 3 days later with ground penetrating radar equipment.
The GPR scans revealed a complex, a main chamber approximately 12 m by 8 m connected to three smaller rooms, all carved directly into the mountain.
Metal signatures suggested equipment inside.
Air samples taken through a drilled core showed no toxic gases, but chemical traces indicated the presence of laboratory solvents and preserved organic materials.
By August 25th, the investigation had escalated to federal level.
Switzerland’s federal office of culture took jurisdiction.
Recognizing potential historical significance, they assembled a team, structural engineers to assess stability, historians from the University of Burn and representatives from the Simon Weiszenthal Center, who suspected Nazi connections based on the location and time frame.
The concrete seal proved formidable.
analysis showed it was 60 cm thick, reinforced with steel rebar, professionally poured.
Someone had intended this to remain closed permanently.
Engineers spent 4 days carefully cutting through with diamond blade saws, working slowly to avoid damaging whatever lay inside.
On September 2nd, 2024, the seal breached.
The team entered with portable lighting and atmospheric monitors.
The main chamber was exactly as Rothman had described.
Laboratory benches along both walls.
Equipment still in place.
Everything covered in decades of dust, but remarkably preserved by the sealed climate stable environment.
The Third Reich Eagle was everywhere.
Stamped on microscope cases, etched into glassware, embossed on metal storage cabinets.
On the main workbench sat the leather briefcase, exactly where someone had placed it 79 years earlier.
Inside, investigators found 237 pages of research notes, equipment logs, and correspondence, all signed by SS Overman Furer Warner Hersh.
But the briefcase was only the beginning.
In a three connected chambers, the team found chemical storage with containers still sealed, a small library of technical manuals, and something no one expected.
Five wooden crates marked Adal vice primer.
Inside these crates were glass vials containing crystallin compounds.
each labeled with complex chemical formulas and numbered sequences.
The investigation team immediately sealed the facility again and called for specialists in chemical weapons because what those formulas described would explain why Hirs had gone to such lengths to hide his work.
The Swiss Federal Office of Culture established a secure facility in burn to examine the recovered materials.
Everything was photographed in SIDU before removal and every item was cataloged with precision that would have satisfied Hirs himself.
The briefcase documents went to historical analysts while the chemical compounds went to a military laboratory near SPE Switzerland Center for NBC nuclear biological chemical defense.
Dr.
Helena Zimmerman, a historian specializing in Nazi scientific programs, led the document analysis.
The papers revealed project adalvice in detail.
It wasn’t a weapons program in the conventional sense.
It was a preservation effort.
Hirs had been developing chemical compounds designed to remain stable for decades, possibly centuries, designed to preserve biological materials and documents in extreme conditions.
The research notes showed methodology that was advanced for 1945.
Experimental polymers, desicant compounds, inert gas mixtures.
Hirs had been creating time capsules, a way to store Nazi research through whatever came after the regime’s collapse, waiting for future national socialist revival.
His notes included projected timelines, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years.
The chemical analysis at SPE confirmed the compounds in those glass vials were preservation agents, not weapons.
They contained no toxic elements beyond what you’d find in any industrial laboratory.
Dr.
Anton Krebs, the chief analyst, reported, “These formulas represent sophisticated understanding of long-term chemical stability.
They’re essentially advanced versions of what museums use today to preserve artifacts, but developed 80 years ago.
What made historians nervous was what else they found in the facility, one chamber contained filing cabinets with cross references to other sites.
Facility 4, grid A841.
Facility 9 grid AH47 and so on.
Hersh’s operation wasn’t isolated.
It was part of a network.
The document suggested at least 12 other locations, all in neutral countries or remote areas where Nazi loyalists might hide materials.
DNA analysis attempted to determine if Hirs himself had died in the facility.
Forensic teams found no human remains, no evidence of suicide or violence.
What they did find were personal effects.
Hersh’s SS uniform hanging in a small side chamber.
His service pistol unloaded and cleaned and a handwritten letter dated May 10th, 1945.
The letter was addressed to whoever opens this facility.
Translated from German, it read, “I have completed my duty to preserve what must not be lost.
” The location of the primary repository is encoded in document series E subsection 47.
I depart knowing this work will survive.
The Reich may fall but knowledge is eternal.
W Hirs May 10th 1945.
The document series E subsection 47 referenced in the letter was missing.
Either Hirs took it with him or it was hidden in another location.
Investigators cross referenced the coordinates mentioned in the filing cabinets AH41, AH47 and others against wartime maps and modern geography.
The grid system appeared to be custom, possibly created specifically for this network to prevent casual discovery.
Forensic accountants traced Claus Steiner’s financial records from the 1940s.
They found payments from shell companies connected to SS financial networks, moneyaundering operations that had moved looted assets through Swiss banks.
Steiner had been paid 250,000 Swiss Franks between February and May 1945, equivalent to roughly $3.
5 million today.
He’d been well compensated for his silence.
The evidence assembled over three months of intensive investigation pointed to a conclusion that would fundamentally change how historians understood Nazi evacuation operations in 1945 and raised urgent questions about what else might still be hidden.
The evidence was conclusive.
Wernernh had established the Swiss facility as one node in a planned preservation network designed to outlast the Third Reich’s collapse and serve as a repository for Nazi research and ideology.
Project Adalvice wasn’t about weapons or gold.
It was about ensuring Nazi scientific work would survive for imagined future resurrection of the movement.
Hirs had chosen Switzerland specifically for its neutrality and geological stability.
Mountains don’t flood, don’t burn, don’t get plowed under for development.
A sealed chamber at high altitude, protected by rock and ice, could theoretically last centuries without human intervention.
The chemical preservation compounds would keep documents and biological samples stable indefinitely.
What happened to Hirs after May 10th, 1945 remains uncertain, but investigators developed a supported theory based on passport records and witness accounts.
A Swiss border crossing log from May 12th, 1945 shows a Dr.
Wilhelm Hartman entering Italy with papers identifying him as a chemical engineer from Zurich.
The physical description matched Hersh height, build, age.
Italian records show Hartman boarded a ship to Argentina on June 3rd, 1945.
Argentine immigration records from that period are incomplete.
But researchers found a Wilhelm Hartman living in Berilatch, a city known for its Nazi exile community who worked as an industrial chemist until his death in 1971.
Photographic analysis comparing a 1968 photo from a Barilatch chemical company newsletter to Hersh’s 1944 SS portrait showed strong facial similarities, though not definitive proof.
The official report released in December 2024 stated, “Warnerh likely survived the war, established the Swiss facility as part of a broader preservation network, and escaped to South America using false identity.
The facility represents a systematic attempt to create time capsules of Nazi research for future ideological use.
What the discovery changed was historians understanding of Nazi evacuation priorities.
Previously, researchers assumed the regime’s final weeks focused solely on escaping officers, saving themselves, and moving gold.
Project Adovvice showed calculated long-term planning, a belief that the ideology would rise again and would need its scientific foundation preserved.
The Swiss government announced continued investigation of the other grid coordinates referenced in Hersh’s documents.
As of January 2025, three other sites have been identified.
one in a cave system in Likenstein, one beneath a monastery in Austria, and one in a remote area of northern Italy.
All three contain similar preservation materials, though none as extensive as the Swiss facility.
The materials recovered pose an ethical question, what to do with them? The preservation compounds have legitimate modern applications in conservation science, but using research developed by Nazi scientists raises uncomfortable parallels to postwar use of Nazi rocket scientists and medical data.
Swiss authorities have stated all materials will be housed in the federal archives as historical evidence available for research, but not commercial use.
The Hirsch facility now appears in Swiss federal records as historical site AA44 sealed preservation.
Access is restricted to credentialed researchers.
The entrance has been resealed, but this time with a commemorative marker explaining what lies inside, not to honor it, but to ensure its purpose is never forgotten or repeated.
Emil Rothman’s 1947 testimony, dismissed for decades as unreliable, has been formally validated.
Swiss authorities issued aostumous acknowledgement of his cooperation with investigators.
His grandson attended the December 2024 press conference where findings were announced.
Wernernh spent his last years at the Argentina theory is correct as an ordinary chemist in a mountain town.
Never prosecuted, never famous, never exposed.
He preserved his project and vanished into comfortable obscurity.
One of thousands of Nazi officers who escaped justice through timing, money, and moral indifference.
The discovery matters because it reveals how fascist movements think about their own mortality.
They build monuments bury treasure.
Sealed documents in mountains, not accepting defeat, but preparing for resurrection.
Finding these time capsules doesn’t revive the ideology.
It exposes the pathetic hope that evil can hibernate and wake stronger.
It can’t.
What Hirsh sealed away for eternity lasted 79 years before being opened, examined, and filed as evidence of a failed regime’s final desperate acts.
