My curiosity on the subject of U-boat bunkers was aroused one cold December day in 1984. when Gus Britton and Commander Richard Compton-Hall at the Royal Navy's Submarine Museum in Gosport (England) asked me to help identify a U-boat from which a compass had been removed way back in 1948. This apparently innocuous investigation led me to make contact with Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Hamburg for permission to enter the ruins of the Elbe II bunker at low tide. The prominent historian and author of a unique diary. Wolfgang Hirschfeld. accompanied me on this fantastic tour, when we 'discovered' three U-boats lying side by side in the murky darkness under the collapsed roof. In many ways it was unbelievable. There they lay, on the surface, amid the biggest city in the Federal Republic. Herr Traband. who had worked w ith HDW for most of his life, had known of their existence for a long time; but the discovery by an 'outsider" was such a revelation at the time that the owners of the site asked us to keep the matter secret, to prevent a possible influx of sightseers and tourists into what was then a highly restricted part of their works...