# 2 Secret experimental laboratories
A strong smell of chemicals is in the air. It is seeped liquid propellants between the contiguous buildings that have survived the last 100 years of weathering. It calls up memories of childhood in me, where I recognise the smell of self-adhesive plaster for wounds.
I am on a former military high-security area hidden in a huge forest area in Brandenburg. In this wooded area are various remnants of a large laboratory for war weapons and missile research. Strictly guarded by the military at the time, today wild boars, wolves, ticks and above all mosquitoes guard the area.
Countless experimental laboratories, bunkered factory rooms, tunnel connections and rails that linked the individual research buildings with each other. Much of it was blown up by the Russian combat forces after the end of the war and thus rendered harmless.
Various engine test stands, launching ramps and bunkered production facilities, laboratories equipped with tunnels and railway tracks, give enough scope to imagine the dimensions of these industrial test procedures, at least to some extent.
It is one of many rocket test sites, set in a huge wooded area, well hidden by vegetation, that gives an impression of the massive rocket research efforts of the 1920s and 1930s.
