Schlossberg Air-Raid Tunnels (Schlossbergstollen)
A network of more than six kilometres of tunnels driven into the hill above you, dug from 1943 onward by prisoners of war and forced labourers to shelter Graz from Allied bombs. Today people glide through the rock in a glass lift, but the stone remembers the hands that hewed it.
About this place
When the Allied bombing of Graz became a near certainty in the summer of 1943, the regime turned the Schlossberg itself into a refuge. Over roughly eighteen months a vast air-raid system of about 6.3 kilometres, with around twenty numbered entrances ringing the hill, was cut into the dolomite. The labour was anything but voluntary. Local construction crews and Wehrmacht units worked alongside British prisoners of war, Soviet and Polish civilian forced labourers, Italian workers, and inmates of the Karlau prison, blasting and shovelling in shifts through cold and dust. By the end of the war the tunnels could officially shelter around forty thousand people, though far more crowded in during the fifty-six raids that killed close to two thousand citizens. After 1945 the system fell quiet, until parts were reopened for peaceful uses, including the glass Schlossberg lift built into the rock in 2000 and the event hall called the Dom im Berg. Standing here on Schlossbergplatz, you are at the lower mouth of that wartime network, where comfort and catastrophe share the same stone.
Key facts
- 6.3 km of tunnels — Cut into the Schlossberg between 1943 and 1945 as air-raid shelters
- 20 entrances — Numbered access points ringed the hill, labelled with letters of the alphabet
- 40000 people sheltered — The official capacity of the system, with far more crowding in during raids
📍 Schloßbergplatz, 8010, Graz