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The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers
- carsongross 10y agoThe swiss are an inspiration. I hope that the swiss spirit is not submerged in the ever-rising tide of internationalism.
- partycoder 10y agoSwiss bank secrecy is in part what allows criminals and dictators around the world to ruin and enslave entire nations for money.
- eli 10y agoIs that still the case? I thought Swiss secrecy isn't what it used to be. Anyway, some people would argue that strong privacy protections are a good thing even if they help bad guys.
- dominotw 10y agoDon't you think they can just wipe the slate clean of decades of money laundering with zero consequences? What about millions of lives that were lost/affected by this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money_in_Swiss_banks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money...
- zigzigzag 10y agoWhat about the people who actually did it or allowed it in those countries? Aren't they the ones to blame?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- microtherion 10y agoAccording to Swiss bankers, thanks to the FATCA agreement, the best place to do shady banking these days is… the US (specifically Delaware).
- magoon 10y agoYou could make the same invalid argument for encryption.
- dogma1138 10y agoNo you can't, encryption doesn't have awareness or morals. The Swiss made their fortune on the misfortune of others from Nazi gold to modern dictators they have an entire industry around cleaning effectively blood money.
- pif 10y ago> You could make the same invalid argument for encryption. You could make the same invalid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H argument for encryption. FTFY
- Kenji 10y agoAs someone who has worked at a Swiss bank: This might have applied a couple of decades ago. Especially in the last decade, Swiss banks introduced rules to overcome this problem with international customers. Smaller banks started to turn down US customers right away (like the one I worked at). It has become dangerous for bank employees and banks themselves to support criminals like you mention. There is zero tolerance for money laundering. While it is far from perfect, the financial sector has matured in that regard.
- ceejayoz 10y agoTo my knowledge, these rules came from intense diplomatic pressure from the US, not from some internal realization that it wasn't ethical. I wouldn't be at all shocked if subtler approaches to dealing with tainted money have been adopted.
- chmars 10y agoYeah, and now US banks and Delaware-based entities are in the same business … cui bono?
- dominotw 10y agoWhat about all the damage that has been done? Indian politicians used it for decades to hide their money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money_in_Swiss_banks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money...
- fdett 10y agoDid you even read the linked paragraph? The story has been debunked and the cited bank is HSBC. Not really what I would call a swiss bank...
- dominotw 10y agoI did, did you? denial != debunking > it can be seen that bank deposits of Indians in Swiss banks have decreased from ` 23,373 crore in year 2006 to ` 9,295 crore in year 2010. > the share of Indians in the total bank deposits of citizens of all countries in Swiss banks has reduced from 0.29 per cent in 2006 to 0.13 per cent in 2010. You think they not culpable for the past because money got move around? Or that they are not guilty because the numbers are not astronomical. Why do you think India is bent on AEOI with the swiss. Just to spite them?
- hkjgkjy 10y agoAnd taking over the torch of tax evasion/financial privacy (two sides of the same coin?) is Bitcoin etc. Who needs a bank in Switzerland when you can just have a 50 character long private key?
- zdkl 10y agoIn fact bitcoin makes it harder to conceal transactions from your peers. Wallets are pseudonymous and can be correlated to IRL identities if used similarly to traditional banking accounts/physical wallets. Just because you can't correlate identities doesn't mean you should expect the network to guard your "financial privacy".
- david927 10y agoI might have worked for the largest Swiss bank and was responsible for the software that ran their Financial Investigation Unit. This entire department had the mandate to investigate large deposits and accounts to ensure that there was no link to nefarious sources. The reasoning was that they would rather not have the income than be linked to any "criminal or dictator". I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and it definitely did happen, but Switzerland is no longer the place where dark money is hidden -- that's moved on.
- rbcgerard 10y agoThere are two side of that coin - take WW2 for example - some Swiss banks catered to Germany helping expropriate and conceal their loot, while others played a role in safeguarding assets from illegal/immoral expropriation...in a sense you can't have one without the other...
- london888 10y agoI think the opposite. I want an end to nationalities.
- hyperliner 10y agoWhy would you want such thing?
- fit2rule 10y agoBecause it serves no purpose but strife, hatred and intolerance of other human beings?
- hyperliner 10y agoAnd how would doing such thing stop those who hate and are intolerant?
- fit2rule 10y agoIt would reduce the justifications such people have for their heinous activities.
- dracht 10y agoThose things existed before and without nations. Civil wars happen despite the participants being of the same nationality. A country is (usually) simply a label for a group of people with a shared culture, language, mindset, etc. Removing those labels is a naive attempt at achieving some global utopia filled with uniform drones.
- dracht 10y agoDo you think there would be less conflict in the Middle East if everyone had the same (lack of) nationality? Unless you are willing to engage in mass genocide, eugenics and eternal subjugation to achieve your world of peace, there is little you can do about people that look like each other and live close to each other from identifying as a single unit. The idea of social constructivism has deluded people into believing that any human problem can be fixed by removing words from the dictionary. It's absurd.
- johansch 10y agoThis one in Stockholm, Sweden is also sized for 20k people. It also predated the Swiss one by about 20 years. (!) https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum Google translate link: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsv.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FKatarinabergets_skyddsrum&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev... In a typical Swedish utilitarian way it was designed with two uses in mind: a) peace-time: parking cars b) war-time: securing people Here's a sketch: http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-ritn.jpg http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-ritn.jpg
- Sami_Lehtinen 10y agoIt's totally normal to have peace-time usage for bunkers. Here's one underground bunker being used as swimming hall in Finland. http://mirstran.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg http://mirstran.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg Actually bunkers are plentiful in Finland because building those is mandatory. Not many countries build bunkers as much as Finland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Finland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Finland Also subway tunnels and underground parking halls, many (underground) sport halls are pre-equipped with massive blast doors. http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_4194.jpg http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_419...
- mprev 10y agoThere's a data centre deep in the heart of a former Swiss bunker near Zurich. You can get VMs there from Exoscale.ch
- legulere 10y agoAlso pionen in Stockholm: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-de...
- rvschuilenburg 10y agoThere's also one in The Netherlands, "CyberBunker". They have an interesting history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
- roel_v 10y agoEarly 2000's, Mercedes used to have (might still do, don't know) a data center near Munich that was housed in a former Nazi bunker. The Allies blew up most bunkers at the end of the war but they calculated that the walls on this one were so thick that blowing it up would cause damage over a 5 km radius (I was told). You had to go through a double door that fully fit within such a wall, 2m+ of reinforced concrete. Mighty impressive.
- jacquesm 10y agoHere is one in Amsterdam, hidden under a subway station (Weesperplein). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY
- finid 10y agoFrom the comments, it seems there are bunkers designed for the masses in many European countries, but none in the USA. There has to be at least one, right?
- chiph 10y agoNot sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it. "None" is the wrong answer for the US as well (but the number might be approaching it). In the 50's and 60's the Civil Defense group published books on how to convert a basement into a shelter, or dig one in the back yard. Faced with the immense cost of building community shelters, they instead went about identifying which buildings would be designated as shelters (with minimal-if-any engineering work to see if they'd hold up under the air pressure of a nearby blast). You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy. A few shelters were stocked with food, water, radios, Geiger counters, and so on. But even that expense was deemed too great. These days the signs are very rare. Oh, and lots of propaganda films were produced to assure people that nuclear war was survivable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoYou would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy. The approach to this in Manhattan in NYC was beyond farcical. Yes there were shelter signs at various buildings. Presumably their basements would be able to hold a few hundred people each. But consider: 1) what would an H-bomb or two do to Manhattan? 2) if alive, how do several million people survive in Manhattan if there is no water supply? 3) even if there is water, for how long will a few cases of moldy food feed them? 4) what about waste and hygiene? That many people will produce a lot of poop. Does it all stay in the basements if the sewage system isn't functional? 5) etc. As I said, the situation couldn't have been more absurd if it was deliberately written to be a farce. Manhattan wasn't the place to be hunkered down during a nuclear war. The movie Escape From New York depicted a Utopia when compared to what reality would have been. Thankfully we never had to use any of those shelters during a real war.
- thatrascaltiger 10y agoJohn McPhee's book "La Place de la Concorde Suisse" covers the history and culture of the Swiss army, and spends a bit of time talking about the bunkers in Switzerland, including the secrecy around them. Worth a read if this stuff interests.
- bkkk 10y agoThe cellar of my home in Switzerland also acts as a bunker and has massive concrete doors (0.5m thick). When I was a kid, inspectors came by to check that enough water and food was stocked and not too much stuff inside the cellar. There was also a list of which bunkerless neighbour you have to host in case of emergency.
- roel_v 10y agoI used to be a youth camp counselor when I was college-aged. I went to Switzerland many times; of which 4 or 5 times to a large 'hotel' that had several stories of bunker underneath. It was rumored to be a full hospital, fully equipped and ready to do surgery within 12 hours. Another rumor was that some kids (somewhere between 12 and 15) of a group of my organization once went on an 'exploration expedition' in the middle of the night, and then couldn't find their way out. One of them then did find a way out, and thought the best thing to do was to find a phone in one of the manager's offices and call his/her parents (1000 km away) with the story that 'he escaped from an underground abandoned hospital and his friends were still stuck' (in the middle of the night). Which (allegedly) then caused the parents to call the national emergency center, who called the Swiss emergency, who called the villages major (still in the middle of the night), who send in an emergency team (obviously the major would have known about this hospital but, as this rumor goes, the story of what was happening got worse and worse every time it was retold; Chinese whisper style). We also went on multi-day hikes, and we'd stay in some of these bunkers in the mountains (the whole of Switserland is mountains, but I mean far away from villages or houses - smack dead in the middle of the mountains). We got a tour once from the 'grounds keeper' as it were of the bunker we were at. In the kitchen was a hatch in the floor; it was an air tight hole to put bodies in, because it was quite likely that people would die while inside (either because of pre-existing wounds or due to the stay in there). It never made much sense to me that you'd put such a hole right where you'd normally be cooking (how would that work - 'hey guy peeling the onions, move other because we have another one here'?), but it was too deep to be a storage hole, didn't have anything that indicated being water storage like pump holes or so, so I just nodded and thought 'not sure if surviving a nuclear holocaust is worth it, if you have to spend 6 months in this place for it - and then go out and have to rebuild the world'.
- AlBentley 10y agoBelow the ski resort of Verbier (Swiss) there is bunker which has been converted into a hostel. I've stayed there for a week and it is very bad, and this is just sleeping there at night. Think tiny 3 story bunks, 10+ person dorms, 2 showers and almost no communal area. https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-Reviews-The_Bunker-Verbier_Canton_of_Valais_Swiss_Alps.html https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-...