This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Sitting cross-legged in meditation with a serene smile the Buddha is one of the most recognizable figures in the world But one doesn’t have to travel the banks of the Ganges River to dive into the Siddhartha story a small wine-producing village along another river is awash in fulfillment thanks to the Buddha Museum I wondered how impressive a Buddha attraction in Germany could really be The museum is in a castle-like building at the edge of the tranquil town on the Moselle As one might more readily expect from its surroundings a thought-provoking home for an ascetic sage pictures and pagodas from around the globe stretch across 43,000 square feet of exhibition floors as calming monk chants play softly from the speakers sculptures and pieces of art depicting the three main Buddhist branches: Theravada nobody really knows what Siddhartha really looked like color and design features artists chose in their renderings of this iconic figure through the ages The oldest displays on site are exhibits of four Gandhara Buddhas from the border region of what today are Afghanistan and Pakistan It was where artists first created statues of the Buddha in human form in a mix of Hellenic and Eastern style elements The museum does a good job explaining the stylistic features while others stand for wisdom or the moment of enlightenment One of the standout exhibits is what the museum bills as the world’s smallest Buddha statue It’s as tall as a matchhead and made the Guinness Book of World Records One character visitors will not find among the exhibits is the grinning rotund personage seen in restaurants and on T-shirts A museum display explains that this isn’t actually a Buddha He was a Buddhist monk and is called Budai in China and Hotei in Japan he wandered around with a cotton sack collecting and removing ailments or bringing joy and good fortune the museum features a small nook set aside as a meditation room where visitors can test their lotus position abilities and practice meditation my wife and I climbed a narrow set of stairs to arrive on the rooftop garden The open space offers further relaxation along with views of the winding Moselle River and surrounding town Founded in 2009 by husband-and-wife team Brigitte and Wolfgang Preuss the museum grew from a personal collection to the vast display today Casual visitors may be overwhelmed by the single-minded concentration on a lone subject enjoyed the peacefulness and spent nearly three hours there We concluded our visit with a pick-me-up at the nearby Namaste Shiva restaurant which offers affordable vegetarian treats from the Buddha’s home of India Adherents of Buddhism believe that Siddhartha achieved what was considered unattainable: a way of life that fosters calmness and freedom from suffering 8 euros for students with identification and 13 euros per person for groups of 10 or more Guided tours in English are available by appointment for groups of 10 or more for an additional fee of 5 euros per person Police said five people were able to get out of the building in the tourist region unhurt News | World Part of a hotel has collapsed in a winemaking town in western Germany leaving at least two people dead and several others trapped in the wreckage Four people were rescued hours after the incident in Kroev when a storey of the Reichsschenke Zum Ritter Götz hotel collapsed at about 11pm local time yesterday Fourteen people were in the hotel at the time Police said five were able to get out of the building unhurt emergency services established that one person had died but they were not immediately able to recover the body Germany media were later reporting that a second person had died Police said in a statement: “Eight people are still trapped in the building The emergency services have contact with some of them.” authorities said they had rescued two women Their conditions were not immediately clear Authorities reportedly said that one of the people trapped was a child who was physically unhurt and in contact with emergency workers Images from the scene showed the building’s gable roof slanted backwards as emergency personnel tended to the victims Footage showed a woman being carried out of the building by an emergency worker while in another a baby could be seen taken out of the damaged building A care centre has been set up for the injured and their relatives Regional public broadcaster SWR said witnesses reported hearing a bang and seeing a large cloud of dust at the time of the collapse Authorities evacuated 31 people from the area immediately around the damaged building There was no immediate word on what caused the collapse Police arrest 18 people after Greenpeace activists block Unilever's City HQ Police ‘awaiting direction’ after sending report on SNP probe to Crown Office FTSE 100 closes lower as global markets continue to wobble Save £20 per person on autumn and Christmas days out by steam Police said it was “an extremely demanding deployment because emergency personnel can only enter the building with the greatest caution” is on a picturesque section of the Mosel near the larger resort town of Traben-Trarbach Prince Louis steals the show at VE Day parade as he keeps dad William looking sharp and mimics brother George Prince Louis steals show with sweet antics at VE parade Ukraine 'launches stunning Kursk offensive' in major blow for Putin ahead of Victory Day celebrations Ukraine 'launches stunning Kursk offensive' in blow for Putin VE Day 2025 fashion: best looks from the day VE Day 2025 fashion: Princess of Wales to Lady Victoria Starmer New visa crackdown as Home Office plans to restrict applications from nationalities most likely to overstay New visa crackdown as Home Office plans to restrict applications worst and wackiest looks on the red carpet — Rihanna worst and wackiest looks on the red carpet The infamous "CyberBunker" data center in Traben-Trarbach potentiallly as either a wine or cheese cellar The bunker is reportedly a multi-story protective structure with four floors underground and a floor space of 5,500 sqm (59,202 sq ft) It has two adjacent office buildings with a total floor space of 4,300 sqm (46,285 sq ft) and is set on 13-hectares of land The bunker was previously being used as a data center that hosted illegal multi-million dollar deals on the darknet German investigators shut down the operation in 2019 the location was hosting sites that sold drugs Around 200 servers were seized during the raid CyberBunker itself claims to have "hosted services to any website except child pornography and anything related to terrorism." Ultimately seven people were convicted of 'membership of a criminal organization' by the Trier Regional Court in 2021 Ownership of the site was handed over to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in September 2023 Prior to its nefarious uses, the bunker was a NATO facility. According to a 2012 article in Immobilien Zeitung it was being used as a data center by the military it was acquired by an unidentified Dutchman from the Office for Geoinformation of the Bundeswehr it seems that the bunker is still piquing interest for commercial uses he has received inquiries from people looking to rent the site One is a Dutchman who hopes to store and mature cheese in the bunker Other proposals include using the site as a backup for a bank The site is currently being offered by the current owner the State of Rhineland-Palatinate as a facility to the public sector with discussions underway with Germany's Federal Agency for Real Estate An assessment of the facility is currently underway as it needs significant renovation for future use Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia built a vast underground bunker near the town of Traben-Trarbach had nearly sixty thousand square feet of floor space and was designed to withstand a nuclear attack Eighty days’ worth of survival provisions were stored inside including an emergency power supply and more than a million litres of drinking water You entered the facility through an air lock; the interior temperature was set to seventy degrees The rooms were soundproof and transmission-proof the bunker was the headquarters of the Bundeswehr’s meteorological division and at any one time about three hundred and fifty civilian contractors worked there; most of them focussed on predicting and plotting weather patterns wherever the German military was deployed to help people orient themselves—but the bunker was symmetrical workers on day shifts arrived in the dark and left in the dark the Bundeswehr moved its meteorological division to another site listed the bunker for three hundred and fifty thousand euros The low price reflected the unusual nature of the property and the expense of maintaining it The bunker sat beneath a plot of some thirty acres in a forested area on a hill outside Traben-Trarbach which is an hour east of the Belgian border The perimeter of the property was marked by ramparts and a fence and aboveground the site contained several large structures and barracks constructed by the Nazis in 1933 solely to insure that the bunker was properly ventilated and did not flood The German government hoped that a technology business The relocation of the Bundeswehr division was a blow to the local economy Traben-Trarbach is a fairy-tale town that straddles a bend in the wide which is overlooked by a ruined fourteenth-century castle is full of aesthetic quirks and highly caloric delicacies but thousands of tourists arrive every summer to hike Traben-Trarbach was a wine-trading hub second only to Bordeaux and also a center of the Jugendstil movement the German iteration of Art Nouveau; many of its buildings reflect the wealth and the brio of that period a Jugendstil relief of Rapunzel adorned the side of an apartment building Her gilded hair fell in wavy lines from the fourth floor to the second worked at the bunker complex for nearly thirty years and for eleven of them he operated its mainframe computer “not everybody could deal with working in a bunker,” adding a foundation controlled by a fifty-three-year-old Dutchman named Herman-Johan Xennt proposed to buy the bunker complex Xennt travelled to Traben-Trarbach to explain his plans to a closed session of the town council with a cascade of shoulder-length gray-blond hair Xennt told the council that he intended to set up a Web-hosting business at the bunker complex and promised to create as many as a hundred jobs for local people Several council members were concerned about Xennt’s credentials Although he said that he had been in the Web-hosting business for years the property was sold to Xennt’s foundation “I didn’t have the best feeling about it.” “The pear-shaped object approaching the house isn’t your father?”Cartoon by Frank CothamCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied I spoke to a former pornography distributor who used Xennt’s servers during this period as he now works in finance.) He told me that his business brought in about a million euros a year but that Xennt himself had relatively little money because he had imprudently bought hundreds of servers—an investment in infrastructure that took several years to pay off A curious mixture of adolescent-male fantasia and techno-anarchist utopia CyberBunker anticipated the current trend for apocalypse-ready hideaways owned by the rich and paranoid The pornographer visited the Goes facility several times Xennt’s taste in interior design had changed little since he had decorated his teen-age bedroom: the bunker was furnished with computer terminals The pornographer found the bunker’s atmosphere strange but “impressive”; its denizens were “alternative” people which is a popular snack in the Netherlands—along with an assortment of vitamins “Xennt was a mysterious guy,” the pornographer told me Two other former colleagues remember that the Goes bunker had a “porno room” where there were sometimes live sex shows involving Xennt’s girlfriends In 1999, a young programmer named Sven Kamphuis, who went by the online handle CB3ROB, joined the CyberBunker collective. Kamphuis worked a day job at the Dutch Internet firm XS4ALL. He had unruly black eyebrows and a crazy mop of black hair, and his colleagues at XS4ALL thought that he looked like Bert, from “Sesame Street.” They also remember him as rude But Kamphuis’s talent for programming was undeniable Xennt rented part of the bunker to another group and in the fire that ensued Xennt suffered burns on his hands and his face and in the charred ruins of the bunker they found the remnants of a laboratory for making Ecstasy He maintained that he had known nothing about the drug factory and that the subletting group had assured him it was a painting company CyberBunker’s servers were moved to aboveground facilities which said that “all people have the right to self-determination,” the Republic of CyberBunker—population six—seceded from the Netherlands CyberBunker declared as its sovereign territory the five hundred acres containing the ruined bunker The country’s official currencies would be gold and each resident would pay a flat tax of fifteen thousand dollars a year Its President was His Majesty King Xennt von CyberBunker and its minister of foreign affairs and telecommunications was His Royal Highness Prince Sven Olaf von CyberBunker-Kamphuis Several people told me that Xennt was not entirely sincere about his self-proclaimed regal status (He recently called CyberBunker’s declaration of independence “a joke.”) But Kamphuis was serious about it—and remains so he has more than once claimed to “enjoy personal and functional immunity” when faced with arrest on charges ranging from driving offenses to cybercrime told me that Xennt’s world view was more pragmatic than Kamphuis’s: he simply wanted the freedom to pursue his own projects without interference Xennt declined to be interviewed for this article but agreed to give written answers to a dozen questions I value privacy and I am against the ‘big brother’ policy of large corporations and governments.” helping to instigate what became known as the Public Root movement He and an international group of investors and programmers tried to create their own roster of top-level domains—the suffixes that follow an Internet address such as “.org,” “.com,” and “.edu.” They came up with various new domains—including “.schiphol,” the name of Amsterdam’s airport Top-level domains are controlled by an American nonprofit organization called ICANN At a time when the structure of the Internet still seemed to be in flux Xennt and others in the Public Root movement chafed at ICANN’s authority Xennt filed a patent application related to top-level domains “We state that each Internet user has the right to see all of the Internet.” The Public Root movement eventually fell apart because of internal arguments over control one of Xennt’s former partners in the project successfully sued Xennt for breach of contract Burger told me that Public Root was “ideological,” but added who now works in private health care in the Netherlands but he’s not a businessman.” Peter Olsthoorn a Dutch investigative journalist who has covered Xennt and CyberBunker ever since the Public Root contretemps said that Xennt was an “old-fashioned anarchist” with a specific gift: he understood “the Internet in its root in the core.” Scheepers told me that Xennt was an inspired designer who might have worked for Apple had he chosen a different path Although Xennt could code only in the rudimentary language BASIC he was prescient about the kinds of change that a connected world would bring Xennt had attempted to start his own online encrypted banking-transfer service It had failed because of Xennt’s greed and lack of business acumen first heard that Xennt’s foundation had bought the Traben-Trarbach bunker in the summer of 2013 after a council member conveyed his concerns to the local police is a lean and affable man with a shaved head and an unshaven face his office has specialized in prosecuting cybercrime Soon after he began researching Xennt and his company he concluded that some of CyberBunker’s clients were manifestly illegal But CyberBunker itself appeared to exist in a gray area between activism Despite this damning evidence, the MaxiDed case was not easy to prosecute. The company was shut down and two of its administrators were arrested. One was tried in the Netherlands but was convicted only on a single count of money laundering. On all other counts, the prosecutors failed to show that MaxiDed had been a knowing accessory to crime. “The case sort of fell apart,” van Eeten told me. “Do you have any more eggs I could borrow?”Cartoon by Justin SheenCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied knew that if he was going to bring down CyberBunker he needed both analog and digital evidence of wrongdoing local police officers started monitoring the property because Xennt had added taller fencing to the ramparts The officers also enlisted someone connected to CyberBunker as an informant a German cybercrime unit based in the city of Mainz began investigating Xennt’s activities In December, I travelled to Mainz, which is about an hour east of Traben-Trarbach, and met with the cybercrime team. Three police officers and two civilian contractors worked out of a crowded room in a quiet area of the city. The unit’s headquarters had the ambience of a nerdy frat house. Decorating one wall was a “Breaking Bad” poster featuring the show’s antihero Walter White—a disgruntled chemistry teacher who begins cooking enormous quantities of meth in a high-tech bunker The officers asked that I not use their names but they were happy to discuss their five-year investigation of CyberBunker None of the men looked old enough to have been doing anything professional for half a decade German authorities granted them permission to intercept the bunker’s Web traffic The officers tapped a cable going into the facility; the inflow and outflow were “mirrored,” or copied A small portion of the information they captured—around ten or fifteen per cent—was unencrypted the police could see links to illegal Web pages that sold drugs Although the police could not decode any of the encrypted data the size of the flow suggested that CyberBunker was offering bulletproof protection for a huge number of so-called dark-Web sites Tor is based on technology developed in the mid-nineties by employees of the U.S with the intention of protecting online communications government.) The first working version of the software was launched in 2002 The Internet works by sending packets of information from one computer to another The Tor browser routes all traffic through a network of relay nodes in such a way that the starting point cannot be detected by the destination encryption is stripped away like the layers of an onion Tor is an abbreviation of “the onion router.” the dark Web has become a haven for political activists Many journalists use Tor to send and receive information securely Some users like the fact that dark-Web pages are not subject to the same censorship as the regular Web where there are limits on what you can say Other users appreciate Tor because they can avoid offering up their private data to such giant corporations as Google and Facebook Yet a 2016 study by researchers at King’s College London found that sixty per cent of Tor sites contain illicit material. Between 2011 and 2013, the first truly successful dark-Web bazaar, the Silk Road processed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of illegal drug transactions Ross Ulbricht—an American who went by the online moniker Dread Pirate Roberts—is now serving a life sentence in an Arizona prison Ulbricht had espoused a libertarian outlook and had argued that the Silk Road was forging a path toward a world unfettered by repressive governments When Xennt bought the Traben-Trarbach property, he invited his sons, who were now young adults, to work there. Their mother, Angelique, came along, too, though she didn’t work at CyberBunker. According to a childhood friend of the sons, who visited the complex, the family didn’t fully reunite: Angelique and her sons stayed in the aboveground barracks with the other workers. “There was always this funny feeling—what was on those servers?” Langer told me. “And Xennt would say, ‘That’s my customers’ secret.’ ” When Frank Van der Loos, the Dutch programmer, first visited the bunker complex, in the fall of 2015, he was bowled over by how enormous the property was. He was on the site for two days, and saw “maybe a third of it.” Xennt told Van der Loos that he kept finding new rooms. Van der Loos was surprised to see that Xennt’s office was littered with phones—there were around thirty modified BlackBerrys on his desk alone. Xennt explained to Van der Loos that the phones were why he had been invited to Traben-Trarbach. He was expanding into an exciting new business. “I didn’t want to embarrass them by telling them I don’t work here so I told them it was a three-hour wait for a table instead.”Cartoon by Carolita JohnsonCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied Around the time of Van der Loos’s visit to the bunker an Irish crime reporter from the Sunday World she received a tip from a source that a major Irish drug dealer had moved from southern Spain to Traben-Trarbach in order to work on an encrypted-phone business with Xennt but a tourist town in the Mosel Valley is a curious headquarters for a crime boss Mitchell has a portly frame and a distinctive waddle he had become one of Ireland’s most successful importers of illegal drugs But he abruptly left for Amsterdam after he was linked to the attempted murder of a London gangster and to the creation of Ireland’s first Ecstasy factory Mitchell was arrested in the Netherlands after he was caught unloading a shipment of stolen computer parts According to a senior Irish police detective Mitchell’s drug-importation business thrived even after his Dutch jail term; in 2012 he facilitated the attempted shipment to Ireland of some four hundred kilograms of cocaine—an operation thwarted by the police The detective told me that Mitchell remained a major figure in the European drug trade until about six years ago we didn’t see much from Mitchell in terms of the importing of drugs,” he said “It may be that he branched out into other areas.” (In fact European police intelligence suggests that Mitchell continued to organize large shipments of drugs after 2014 Mitchell has denied any involvement in criminal activities.) Tallant had her own theory about the Penguin: he was approaching retirement age he was looking for a way to protect his dependents and his assets a drug supplier named Derek (Maradona) Dunne And around the time Mitchell arrived in Traben-Trarbach a dispute among Irish gangs had turned bloody an Irishman who had previously worked with Mitchell was killed by a rival group on the south coast of Spain wanted to leave Spain and the gang feud behind and to reinvest some of his money in a more legitimate-seeming enterprise at least from the time of Mitchell’s arrest for handling stolen computer parts (A person familiar with Xennt’s computer business told me that Xennt had bought stolen parts from Mitchell; Xennt declined to comment on this accusation.) Martijn Burger the businessman once involved in the Public Root movement remembers Xennt and Mitchell spending time together around the turn of the millennium Burger did not know of Mitchell’s status in the criminal world Burger recalled that Mitchell was often accompanied by glamorous young women and carried a small bag containing “ten to twelve” Nokia phones each with its phone number written on the back Mitchell had not been photographed in more than two decades She travelled to Traben-Trarbach twice in the fall of 2015 They watched his movements for several days He rarely left the apartment complex where he was staying But on some mornings Xennt picked up Mitchell and took him to breakfast The pair once ate lunch at a popular local restaurant the Historische Stadt-Mühle—the Historic Mill They remained there all afternoon as Mitchell ordered gin-and-tonics and Xennt drank hot chocolate Tallant was fascinated by Xennt’s appearance: he often wore a floor-length coat “I’ve never seen anyone as weird in all my life.” Tallant and the photographer eventually found their opportunity one morning as Mitchell was leaving a restaurant after having breakfast with Xennt and Xyonn The Penguin wore a navy suit and a black T-shirt; Xennt had on a long black puffer jacket; Xyonn had his hair in dreadlocks “Very good,” Mitchell replied instinctively he peered under the baseball cap that Tallant was wearing According to two people close to CyberBunker, George Mitchell was not the only investor interested in Xennt’s encrypted-phone business. Danny Manupassa, the former boss of Ennetcom, also travelled to Traben-Trarbach to see Xennt. According to the sources, Manupassa wanted to invest a million euros in Xennt’s network. It seems unlikely that Manupassa did so: after he was arrested, in April, 2016, Ennetcom was shuttered and turned inside out by the Dutch police in a search for information. The cybercrime unit developed a bold scheme. With the permission of high-level German authorities, it created its own dark-Web site on Tor: a scam, involving lottery numbers, that accepted payment in bitcoin. The unit’s members made sure that nobody who used the site could lose money—otherwise the officers themselves would be committing a crime—but the site was designed to look as realistic, and as shady, as possible. Designing it was “kind of fun,” an officer admitted to me. “And isn’t it true, Mr. Robertson, that you habitually leave ridiculously small amounts of cereal in the box and then return it to the cabinet?”Cartoon by Teresa Burns ParkhurstCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied A week after Wall Street Market was broken up and its leaders arrested, several officers from the B.K.A., Germany’s federal police force, arrived at the Traben-Trarbach bunker to seize evidence relating to the case. A manager at the bunker expressed surprise and readily complied, escorting the officers to the server bank on the third floor. The officers took away the servers used by Wall Street Market, and left the rest. After Wall Street Market was taken down, Angerer fixed CyberBunker itself in his sights. A few minutes later, about a hundred police officers—including a contingent from Germany’s federal paramilitary police unit—raided the bunker. They seized four hundred and twelve hard drives, four hundred and three servers, sixty-five USB sticks, sixty-one laptops and computers, fifty-seven phones, piles of paper documents, and about a hundred thousand euros in cash. Some six hundred and fifty officers were involved in the arrests and the raid. Sven Kamphuis, the Prince of CyberBunker, was not arrested in the raids of September 26th; nor is he one of the six suspects still at large. After the raid, he claimed that the German police had engaged in “an act of war”—yet he had survived with barely a scratch. The police arrested almost everybody with a connection to the bunker. Given the comprehensiveness of the investigation, the prosecutors’ lack of interest in Kamphuis seemed strange. When I asked Patrick Fata, a senior police officer who oversaw the CyberBunker investigation, why Kamphuis was not accused in the case, he said that Kamphuis’s role in the organization had diminished since 2014, and that the police did not have enough evidence to link him to the administration of Wall Street Market or other illegal sites. I asked Fata if the police had spoken to Kamphuis during the exhaustive six-year investigation. “No,” Fata said, adding, “We don’t know where he is.” I found Kamphuis without too much difficulty. He agreed to meet me in March, in a train-station café in Middelburg, a pretty Dutch city near the first CyberBunker site. Kamphuis, who was wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit, had piercing blue eyes and a scraggly beard. Some of his teeth were blackened, and a few were missing. Using a tissue, he frequently dabbed at pus weeping from a sore on his eyelid. He drank three strong coffees in about ninety minutes, and his hands kept shaking. Kamphuis posts on the social-media site Gab, and his stream is a litany of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic assertions. He told me that he was part of the “libertarian extremist right,” and suggested that a “disproportionate number of Jews” held powerful positions in Europe and America. He often laughed at his own jokes. I asked him if he had created the dark-Web search engine that had been hosted on Xennt’s servers. He said yes. Later, by text message, he explained that he bore no responsibility for the results of the search engine, because it “finds things indiscriminately,” adding, “That is what search engines do.” You’re in the bike lane!”Cartoon by David SipressCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied Kamphuis insisted that he had not been an informant against Xennt of planning the dinner trap at the Historic Mill—even though I had been assured by Xennt’s family that the meal was a setup arranged by the gardener Xennt told me that he also blamed the gardener and maintains that there were “no informants” inside the bunker A recently leaked legal file suggests that the gardener was an undercover policeman.) Although Kamphuis said that he hadn’t been involved regularly with CyberBunker since 2014 and currently the head of state,” of the organization because both Spain and the Netherlands “respected his diplomatic immunity.” Kamphuis inveighed against the German police but he appeared to have profited from their prosecution of Xennt: he said that he was now helping to run Xennt’s encrypted-phone business and asked him again if he’d ever spoken to the German police “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said Xennt became emotional and apologetic in a police interview saying that he was “troubled” by how much illegal activity had flowed through the bunker The Van Wolferens spoke again and again about Xennt’s childhood bedroom in Arnhem, and how he had always been fascinated by a futuristic aesthetic. René said that, in late middle age, Xennt had begun dabbling in cannabinoid treatments, because he was interested in remaining “forever young.” He described his brother-in-law as someone with arrested development. “His whole world was science fiction,” René said. An earlier version of this article misidentified West Germany’s armed forces. On September 26, a data center in a former NATO military bunker in the town of Traben-Trarbach, Germany, was raided by police, according to a report by the Associated Press Set up by a man whom authorities describe as a 59-year-old Dutchman the "CyberBunker" offered "bulletproof" hosting services—promising to keep hosted sites secure from law enforcement actions and operational regardless of legal demands the bunker housed the servers for a multitude of "Dark Web" sites selling drugs Among the sites hosted was "Wall Street Market," which authorities claim was one of the world's largest criminal marketplaces—selling drugs and hacking tools—until it was taken down earlier this year The Traben-Trarbach data center was also involved in a 2016 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Deutsche Telekom The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement action at five locations by authorities in Germany Located within a 13-acre former military base the 5,000-square-meter (54,000-square-foot) five-floor Cold War-era bunker had been converted to house both servers There were also office spaces at the site where people operating the data center lived and worked The Traben-Trarbach site is the apparent successor to the original CyberBunker, run by Sven Olaf Kamphuis' company CB3ROB Domains seized by German authorities as part of the action included the domain for CB3ROB and Zytzm.com—a domain registered to the Dutch citizen Herman Johan Xennt Xennt was the owner of the original bunker in the Netherlands used by CyberBunker But after a 2002 fire in that facility—which revealed an MDMA lab sharing the same bunker, according to security reporter Brian Krebs—officials denied a business license to continue to operate the facility to Xennt and CyberBunker was forced to resell servers hosted elsewhere while continuing to claim to use the bunker It is not clear if Xennt is tied to the group that operated the Traben-Trarbach bunker CyberBunker was used to launch the 2013 DDoS attack on SpamHaus, for which Kamphuis was convicted but served no jail time Kamphuis was alleged to have been running CyberBunker from a mobile office in a van German police have raided and shut down Cyberbunker 2.0 a decommissioned NATO bunker that housed dark web market servers and child porn hidden in the Mosel River town of Traben-Trarbach held multiple stories of servers as well as "$41 million worth of funds allegedly tied to these markets," according to security researcher Brian Krebs for at least two of the men accused in the scheme this was their second bunker-based hosting business that was raided by cops and shut down for courting and supporting illegal activity online," said Krebs STORY CONTINUES BELOWDon't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newslettersSign me upBy signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.Police also raided locations in Netherlands Poland and Luxembourg in connection with the bunker's activities The bunker held multiple dark web markets including the financial scam site “Wall Street Market,” drug portal “Cannabis Road” and “Orange Chemicals," a market for synthesized drugs Police believe the bunker belonged to Herman Johan Xennt and Sven Kamphuis two hackers who originally ran a similar bunker in the Netherlands After a fire caused by an explosion in an ecstasy lab they had to shut down their original bunker and lost their ability to run their servers in the Netherlands They moved into the new Cyberbunker in 2013 the company that sold the original bunker to the pair “That’s something they’ve done for ages and they’re known for it.” The whole operation was deeply secretive and connected to organized crime. Xennt himself was quite a character. The Irish Sunday World tracked him down in 2015 saying: Cyberbunker servers image via swr.de John Biggs is an entrepreneur, consultant, writer, and maker. He spent fifteen years as an editor for Gizmodo, CrunchGear, and TechCrunch and has a deep background in hardware startups, 3D printing, and blockchain. His work has appeared in Men’s Health, Wired, and the New York Times. He runs the Technotopia podcast about a better future. He has written five books including the best book on blogging, Bloggers Boot Camp, and a book about the most expensive timepiece ever made, Marie Antoinette’s Watch. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Many paths lead to the small town of Traben-Trarbach which is situated on Germany's Mosel River and famous for its much-visited "underworld" of wine cellars Frankfurt-Hahn is located just 30 minutes away by car at least until the arrival of the coronavirus Situated on the southern bank of the river the town is also dissected by Highway 53 to Trier and Highway 42 running between southwestern Germany and Belgium Numerous other roads wind through the vineyards that line the river Walkers can reach Traben-Trarbach via stage 12 of the 365-kilometer Moselsteig hiking route which takes them up to the flat summit of Mont Royal a mountain that is rich in history and in histrionics the biggest traffic junction -- not only in Traben-Trabach at least until 650 police officers swept in to raid an old bunker referred to the by the press as the "Cyberbunker" a few months ago Traffic there wasn't measured in kilometers per hour It gave a new meaning to the "underworld" moniker because it tells the story of how a postcard-perfect old German town like Tranen-Trabach became a virtual metropolis of global crime four of its five floors are below ground and it has 5,500 square meters (59,000 square feet) of floor space and the fenced-in property aboveground includes a few structures according to the notarized bill of sale from June 26 special police units fanned out across Traben-Trarbach both on the mountain and below in the valley to shut down what is thought to have been the headquarters of a crime ring up on Mont Royal and to arrest members of that suspected criminal organization in a restaurant on the Traben-Trarbach side of the river when the police stormed the first floor of the restaurant where nine suspects had just sat down for the evening meal They were there at the invitation of a police mole The restaurant owner's face still goes pale today when remembering that terrible evening And as the group was being rounded up in the restaurant a large team of police data forensics experts secured computers data and other evidence up in the bunker on the mountain They must have felt like they were in a kind of digital Tora Bora The spectacular raid came after the kind of investigation that Germany hasn't seen too many times before The case involves myriad criminal proceedings but essentially focuses on the opportunities made available to criminals by the internet and Even as many of the crimes are committed in the analog world – such as forgery fraud and theft – much of it is organized and processed in virtual spaces At the heart of this story are two men who took over the bunker from the state with the apparent intention of using it for their criminal machinations And it highlights the challenges facing the state when it comes to combating the spread of cybercrime – and the challenges facing online security The Cyberbunker investigation is a cooperation among numerous government agencies including the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and two state counterparts numerous public prosecutors and investigative courts along with myriad experts and undercover investigators all of whom have combined to produce thousands of pages of documentation – which has now been compressed into a 275-page indictment The case is likely to go to trial in Trier a few months from now The judges are not in an enviable position While it is clear that the bunker was a kind of technical nerve center – a key darknet hosting service – for numerous criminal internet sites and dubious marketplaces it will likely be very difficult to prove that the operators knew about and supported what was going on it will be a significant defeat for the rule of law Should there be no conviction at the end of the trial it will cast a rather dubious light on the years of surveillance of the bunker owners the eavesdropping on their telephone conversations and email – the deep incursions on their constitutional rights The public prosecutor responsible for the case believes a guilty verdict is likely He is convinced he will be able to prove that the criminal activities of the websites hosted in the Cyberbunker were not random but were in fact the express purpose of the facility A Look Inside the Cyberbunker in Traben-Trarbach a man from Holland whose registered address is in Singapore wrote to DER SPIEGEL and to German public broadcaster NDR from pre-trial detention in Trier that "we had a clean conscience … and were all convinced that we were acting legally and correctly." The prosecutors plan to call 101 witnesses Their testimony will be augmented by 54 pieces of evidence and 144 court orders While it will ultimately be up to the court to determine guilt or innocence months of reporting by DER SPIEGEL in cooperation with NDR We are able to reveal the kinds of activity that was conducted via the servers in the bunker how that activity took place and who the main protagonists are The result is a narrative about modern-day crime and the widely available technical tools that make it possible Criminals of all stripes have left the analog streets behind and have found a digital home in the dark corners of the internet Tools that used to only be available to highly specialized tech freaks can now be accessed from home by anyone with a modicum of digital fluency It's a new version of the cat and mouse game between the authorities and their quarry The lead figure in this bunker story is Herman Johan Xennt who is head of the companies Calibour and Zyztm and who frequently refers to himself as "Jordan Robson" in communications with clients but his claims can't always be taken at face value His willingness to fudge goes so far that he even described the five dogs that watched over the Mt Royal facility – barking so wildly that complaints were made to the Traben-Trarbacher town council – as mutts even though there is a photo of four of the dogs that clearly appear to be Rottweilers His lawyer Ekaterina Ritter sent along a photo of Xennt dressed in a black which contrasted peculiarly with his shoulder-length blond curls His face bears a friendly aspect – to the point that the overall effect is that of a hippie in the wrong clothing Royal a frequently changing cast of characters that bore a closer resemblance to a commune than to a crime ring The core leadership included Xennt's sons Xyonn and Yennoah O. rapidly rising from being a mere assistant to working as a manager of the bunker a mohawked jack-of-all-trades with a weakness for alcohol Because the residents worked vastly different hours with some laboring through the night and sleeping during the day Rene made sure a warm meal was available at all times workers and residents would come and go – some would stay for two years while others would vanish again after just a month Some would only work in the above-ground buildings and never enter the bunkers several of whom were consistently necessary had the right to their own offices and rooms in the bunker and they seemed to quite enjoy their lives underground and they were responsible for keeping Xennt's servers up and running for programming and for communicating with clients and government agencies There were people working at the facility who appeared to have janitorial tasks while others were just friends with no clear duties many traveling in from the Netherlands as if to a vacation destination or they might help out with a bit of gardening or painting another man named René and a whole series of interns whose talent Xennt would identify in tech forums and then invite them to Traben-Trarbach for unpaid internships One of those who sporadically worked at the Mt Royal site from March 2018 to September 2019 – as a laborer or gardener – was an undercover investigator and his reports paint a rather pre-pubescent image of the goings on in the bunker He described how they would never pick up after themselves secretly talk behind each other's backs at every opportunity and act self-important in front of outsiders they would head down in pairs or small groups to Traben-Trarbach to drink they would head to Xennt's favorite restaurant in Trier When important business partners visited the bunker Xennt would take over hosting duties himself The Trier strip bar Booty Club was frequently part of the entertainment program with Xennt's son driving guests around in his father's white BMW X6 Everyone in Traben-Trarbach is familiar with the car and with the man it belongs to he had presented his project to a closed town council meeting saying that the bunker was to be transformed into a no-nonsense data center for companies the perfect use for the rather expensive site The German military had operated the facility in cooperation with NATO for 37 years as a geo-information center the facility was gradually moved to Euskirchen to the displeasure of those in Traben-Trarbach Around 400 people had worked in the "institute," as the bunker is called here most of them highly trained and well-paid technicians The kinds of neighbors that every town wants to have he was seen as someone who could perhaps revive the institute He did a bit of googling and found some rather unsettling details from Xennt's past life sharing them with the state criminal police office (LKA) in Mainz There were rumors that Xennt had fallen afoul of the authorities that he had previously operated a data bunker in the Netherlands that had apparently burned down The LKA passed Weisgerber's concerns on to Germany's federal real estate authority which was responsible for the sale of the site eight days before the deed of sale was to be notarized But the real estate authority was not interested in such trifles They were likely just relieved at having found somebody to pay 450,000 euros for the site The photos and descriptions of his office in the bunker make it sound like the command center of a power plant The undercover investigator reported seeing 14 mobile phones on his desk lined up next to each other and all of them on In his bunker bedroom – Xennt also had rooms in the surface buildings but liked sleeping underground – a life-sized figure of the Marvel hero War Machine stood next to his bed he also had a facehugger figure from the "Alien" franchise Xennt doesn't talk much to the authorities the most important of which was his claim that the police were investigating the wrong person He said he was only operating a data center with legal clients and had no knowledge of any legal violations he said he was "troubled" by how much illegal activity had flowed through the bunker He said he was sorry and hadn't ever intended such a thing DER SPIEGEL and NDR sent him a list of 65 questions in the reporting of this article Xennt's German is almost perfect; indeed he is quite eloquent in the language Police believe the Dutchman Hermann Johan Xennt was the head of the bunker on Mont Royal he rejected all accusations that he knowingly did business with criminals He also offered up an explanation that will almost certainly be part of his defense strategy "Our servers can be compared with safe deposit boxes in banks," he wrote "No bank employee checks to see what is inside it would have been quite possible to take a look inside says that in the decryption work they have thus far completed – they are investigating hard drives containing more than two petabytes of data which is the equivalent of 2 billion megabytes – they haven't yet found "even a single legal site." According to what they have thus far found exclusively "criminal sites" were operated using the servers in the bunker Can that have escaped the attention of the Cyberbunker operator for several years The prosecutor says the whole purpose of the bunker was to host illegal websites insists: "We expressly told our clients that we did not want to host anything illegal in particular sites promoting terrorism or child pornography we would have immediately shut down the server and reported them to the authorities." Given the evidence and testimony gathered so far that statement is at the very least questionable – the man who rose from assistant to manager – was responsible for complaints and so-called abuse reports but there were rarely consequences for the client that was reported complaints were simply forwarded from the bunker to the client in question but no effort was really made to make sure the problem was cleaned up says that he argued intensively with Xennt on the issue because he felt Xennt didn't take it seriously enough whereas he himself had wanted things cleaned up A short look into the history of the World Wide Web helps to better understand what drives people like Xennt When the use of the internet became a mass phenomenon thanks to the first web browsers in the early 1990s many pioneers saw it as a promising space of freedom a boundless new continent full of endless possibilities No one at the time expressed that idea as clearly as John Perry Barlow a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who said at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 1996: "Governments of the industrial world anarchic logic that knows no borders and contests the right of states to regulate the net apparently inspired Xennt as well His earlier ally Sven Olaf Kamphuis still talks about the "Cyberbunker Republic” as though it were a sovereign "nation-state,” and he continues to refer to himself on his Facebook profile as "Minister of Foreign Affairs who is not a defendant in the current proceedings also signed his mails as the "Prince of the Cyberbunker Republic.” When asked if he viewed himself as the king of the dominion Xennt answered in writing that it had only been a joke whatever – the call was to join the new era and to no longer tolerate the old men from yesteryear The property in Traben-Trarbach is a "real country,” Kamphuis posted shortly after the raid in September which meant they also had the right to "defend themselves militarily.” That may sound megalomaniacal almost as if the bunker crew had been indulging in the same drugs that had been distributing using their servers and prosecutors believe he intentionally opted for a clever business model In his written answers to DER SPIEGEL and NDR he argues that the Cyberbunker is ultimately no different than Amazon in that it provides a neutral technical infrastructure and nothing more but the customers who are responsible for all that is hosted on the servers they rent which thus far hasn't been classified as a criminal organization In contrast to content providers like online media organizations who are generally liable for their own content providers who merely provide infrastructure only have to react when they are notified about illegal content or learn about it in another way It’s a standard that is rooted in the analog world Landlords also aren’t responsible if their tenant starts an illegal drug trade in their apartment Xennt and his defenders will adopt a version of that argument; he believes the same laws must be applied to Cyberbunker which helps explain the lengthy investigation and the use of drastic surveillance measures "This is not about what the accused did,” says one investigator "but about what they knew.” The challenge is proving that Xennt and his associates were guilty of aiding and abetting crimes that they were in no way neutral providers of server infrastructure but rather the conscious and willing providers of the infrastructure for criminals of every type The public prosecutor’s office doesn’t have a smoking gun in their possession There’s no single email or a particularly stark statement made in a wiretapped call providing clear proof that the bunker was deliberately used to collaborate with criminals messages that read as though the hosting service felt that it might be expected to issue a warning Traben-Trabach Mayor Patrice-Christian-Roger Langer There are also messages that combine an abuse report with an offer for even better protection for an additional charge Prosecutors will try to prove that the bunker operators offered additional encryption options to conspicuous customers a kind of digital invisibility cloak that makes the originators of criminal content invisible on the web the case will be based primarily on circumstantial evidence which creates an image that the people in the bunker were by no means in the dark their marketing was aimed specifically at customers in the internet underworld They advertised their allegedly "nuclear proof” bunker server farm and claimed that data and transactions they hosted were safe from access by investigators and legal repercussions thus deliberately positioning themselves as service providers for all kinds of wrongdoing it is their pricing that provides one of the strongest clues storage space and server service from the bunker was anything but cheap with prices three or four times higher than those on the legal market investigators have listed details regarding who is using Xennt’s service The criminal activities of some of those customers are being pursued in legal proceedings stemming from the investigation – cases of organized Xennt and his helpers set up the servers for the Fraudsters platform credit card data and fake IDs to customers with code names like "Bigsalami,” "Lunar Eclipse” or "Martin Luther” in 1,133 proven individual cases over a period of two years the Swedish bunker customer Flugsvamp 2.0 developed into one of the major marketplaces for drugs police had counted more than 300,000 illegal transactions Some 10,000 customers had purchased narcotics from 600 vendors and the site had generated millions in sales Orangechemicals.com and Lifestylepharma.com were active through Traben-Trarbach Their specialty: the import of synthetic drugs from China preferably via the Leipzig and Cologne/Bonn airports The operators brokered a wide range of drugs on a grand scale You could order with a mouse click and the goods arrived by mail Cyber Prince Kamphuis also enlisted the bunker to host Onions.es and Cb3rob.org he has clearly distanced himself from child pornography but declined to respond to more recent inquiries on the issue The Mirai scandal also ran through Xennt’s server farm in November 2016 A hacker working on behalf of a Liberian businessman began an attempt to eliminate an unwelcome competitor through digital sabotage The plan was to use hundreds of thousands of Speedport-brand routers used by Deutsche Telekom internet uses in order to create a virtual army and drown the victim in unwanted traffic but he did manage to temporarily disrupt 1.2 million internet connections in Germany When customers like that need storage space and data lines the hosting service needs to be "bulletproof," industry jargon referring to hosts that exercise considerable leniency regarding the kinds of activities their customers are engaged in and the kinds of data stored on their servers – which are essentially hundreds of computers stacked up in racks like bread trays in a factory bakery Hosting services are paid to ensure that their computers always have power that they don’t get too hot and that they never break down provides for a "provider privilege," meaning hosting services have limited liability for what passes through their cables Among the largest German hosting services are Ionos all three companies said they would take immediate action if they learned of illegal content running through their data centers If law enforcement agencies come to them with a court order they disclose the identity of the customer that is operating the server in question None of the three companies allows anonymous rentals and nor do they permit payment in digital currencies or in cash Xennt and his team promised anyone who paid that they would in turn be provided with storage and server space without verification of name or address and without consideration for the person The fees were also payable in cash and could be placed in an envelope and handed in at the gate to the bunker facility Other means of payment included the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and money transfers through Western Union Contracts with general terms and conditions that customers had to sign didn’t exist There may be legitimate and even noble reasons for bulletproof hosting – to get around censorship or otherwise avoid persecution in dictatorial systems Xennt and his people also bragged about hosting the WikiLeaks whistleblower platform they advertised at times with a portrait of the young WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tends to raise doubts about the veracity of the claims being made Providers who are concerned about the protection of human rights don’t seek out the limelight – they move as inconspicuously as possible to avoid unwanted attention were eager self-promoters and Xennt himself was a master at it – and had been for a long time He had had several years of experience working in windowless rooms far below ground before setting up camp on Mont Royal That experience was amassed in another NATO bunker the actual birthplace of the virtual "Cyberbunker Republic.” Xennt and his partner Kamphuis made international headlines when they hosted the Pirate Bay firefighters discovered a synthetic drugs laboratory during a fire in the first Cyberbunker These Rottweilers guarded the premises and barked like crazy if anyone got too close Frightened locals even complained to the town authorities about them Kamphuis claimed at the time that the room had been rented out and that a Chinese triad had made pills there without their knowledge It's essentially the same excuse he is now using: We’re just the landlords and we don’t know anything the first bunker was sold to a different company leading Xennt to move its operations to the Mosel River region While still operating the first Cyberbunker Xennt promised his customers he would protect the data entrusted to him against any attack The bunker’s website included a claim that there were 10,000 liters of drinking water in the bunker along with sufficient food and two diesel generators for a continuous emergency power supply The team claimed it would keep all servers online all the time and "no matter what.” It created the impression that workers were prepared to defend their customers’ computers with life and limb if worse came to worst regardless of the kind of data that was running on those servers and it wasn’t just criminals who entrusted their data to the bunker: The operators also targeted extremist political groups investigators found a server rental contract for the right-wing extremist because of its overt racism and xenophobia is considered a suspect case by Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution the federal agency responsible for monitoring extremism in the country One of Xennt’s employees confirmed during interrogation that they had identified a "niche market” in supplying hosting services to extremist groups He said he approached such a group himself using an encrypted messaging service and closed a one-year contract with them for a cloud-based server But the promise of total protection was broken without hesitation in several instances especially when there were requests from the authorities – in May 2019 when investigators paid a visit to the bunker six officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office showed up at the front gate The investigators weren’t after Xennt and his colleagues they had just uncovered Wall Street Market (WSM) which had for years been one of the biggest darknet ventures the world had seen to that point the BKA and several state-level offices of criminal investigation the officers were pursuing further leads in the WSM case and one of them led to the servers in Traben-Trarbach The international investigators had already successfully traced the money flows of the WSM businesses following Bitcoins through wallets and blockchains They were dealing with cunning criminals -- three Germans who presented themselves on the net as "Kronos,” "TheOne” and "Coder420” – and they had built up an incredible business Wall Street Market had more than 1.1 million registered customers with more than 6,200 sellers peddling their illegal wares cocaine and speed by the hundreds of kilos crystal meth and heroin by the kilo and hundreds of thousands of ecstasy pills and many other kinds of narcotics WSM generated revenues amounting to 50 million euros with 15 million euros of that ending up on the pockets of the administrators Shortly after they were forced to shut down police officers showed up unannounced at the gate to the bunker "There was no reaction when the bell at the gate was rung," the report reads the system was set up so that the buzzer rang on all five levels of the bunker And there were also monitors in Xennt’s command center with images from the surveillance cameras The investigators then dialed the number listed on the Cyberbunker homepage a gifted conversationalist who enjoyed hearing himself speak in every situation so much so that the minutes of his interrogations are among the longest documents in the entire file He declared that he was prepared to turn the suspicious servers over to the investigators "without hesitation.” They obtained the judicial permission required to confiscate everything by phone the IT forensics team descended to the third level of the bunker – the second subterranean level – at around 11:15 a.m The first subterranean level is where Xennt Xennt’s office could only be opened with a numerical code which had to be typed into a pad next to the door But the door was often left open and anyone officials with the BKA and the public prosecutor’s office found themselves in the bunker's second underground level they located the server racks in a central location which they seized and took back to their offices who acted as the owner – Xennt remained out of sight – told the officials that the bunker company had also "cooperated with the police on several occasions in the past when it came to securing data.” Yes they had provided bulletproof hosting in the past but this had "no longer been the case for quite a while.” The hard drives investigators confiscated at Traben-Trarbach are a veritable gold mine They are still reviewing the data today and don’t yet know how many connections they will find or how many customers or sellers will become the subjects of legal proceedings "We now have a lot of customer data,” one official says "We will prosecute anyone who has bought or sold drugs on this platform and whose identity we can determine The darknet is literally a parallel world on the World Wide Web one that is accessed through programs like the Tor browser The browser works by concealing the connections between and computer and the sites it is visiting to the point of just about full anonymity you go directly from point A to point B when you plug a URL into your web browser you take a circuitous route to a website through a number of relays to such an extent that it is no longer possible to trace where the journey began and where it ended but the principle itself is simple: It allows people to surf without leaving a trace even though it’s not always a question of visiting underworld websites the technology is used to protect people from surveillance and persecution and it is also used by informants and whistleblowers Media organizations like the New York Times the Guardian and also DER SPIEGEL have set up virtual mailboxes for informants in the darknet Even Facebook offers secure access to its platform using the Tor network The darknet is a place of age-old vices and human weaknesses like theft and fraud Law enforcement agencies are extremely concerned about the darknet it is often extremely difficult to find what they are looking for the ability to commit a crime with the click of a mouse lowers inhibitions to the point that some of those who participate in criminal activity in the darknet would likely have never done so in the analog world Police arrested nine Cyberbunker workers at the Stadt-Mühle the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s central office for combating internet and computer crime officials attach great importance to the fact that the darknet criminals are "among us,” that they can be found just as easily in small German towns and villages as they can in Russia or Eastern Europe "Many people who we arrest have no previous criminal record,” a Frankfurt public prosecutor told DER SPIEGEL "That’s a major difference to organized crime in the analog world where in some cases we have had a paper trail of the criminals for some time.” With the darknet it only takes a few clicks to arrive in the underworld This is one of the reasons why the case of the Traben-Trarbach bunker is so important Regardless of the outcome of the criminal proceedings the case sends an important signal about the power of the law to criminals and upstanding citizens alike is that the government is by no means powerless in the digital era it is present even in the supposedly lawless space of the darknet and has the power to enforce the law there as well the case has also been a crash course for the authorities In cooperating with their international counterparts German officials have found ways to work around legal restrictions at home they consider too restrictive One experienced investigator who wished to remain anonymous told DER SPIEGEL "When we request mutual legal assistance from foreign agencies they can investigate according to the laws of their own country We can then use the results of those investigations in our own cases." In other words criminal prosecutors in Germany can use foreign proxies to obtain information that would have otherwise been inaccessible to them under German law The files don't indicate how much money is earned on Mont Royal tells an undercover investigator that their profits were 200,000 euros a year ate up so much energy that the electricity bill alone came out to 15,000 euros a month Nobody in Traben-Trarbach got rich off the hosting business That's why Xennt had to expand his companies' range of products He began presenting himself as an international technology service provider looking for new business partners and consulting for clients with special requests He came up with the idea for a "high-security app" that would ultimately be programmed in Poland and was billed to customers as being impossible to surveil It was also said to have had a panic button that allowed users to quickly delete all their data in the event of an emergency Such a function would be ideal for criminals who else would be willing to pay 3,000 euros a year for an app like that Xennt needed partners for some of his businesses especially for the app with the panic button though that's how everybody referred to him at Mont Royal Green or the "Penguin," is believed to have been the real boss of the criminal organization Green visited him maybe three times in total said he saw him at the complex three or four times a month at the beginning The massive case file on the Cyberbunker dedicated hundreds of pages to George M. and appeared to go to great lengths to portray him as the real boss of the criminal organization investigators were unable to prove that the Irishman belonged to the organization There was "no probable cause," according to the chief public prosecutor The Irishman's lawyer says his client is an upstanding citizen who is not involved in any criminal activities But he was feared by the team at Mont Royal When the newspapers in Ireland write about him they refer to him as the "Godfather" and a drug lord They call him a mafia boss and use his nickname the "Penguin," which he picked up while working in a Dublin chocolate factory making "Penguin" candy bars and because has dominated the drug trade in Ireland and large parts of Europe for decades Police in Ireland also suspect him of dealing in weapons He spent several years in prison in the late 1980s police in Ireland considered him one of the top five criminals in the country has always denied all accusations against him He says he is an honest entrepreneur in the import-export business After Ireland set up a special unit to confiscate property that had been acquired criminally Green was considered to be the mastermind behind a multimillion-dollar theft of computer parts He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison by a Dutch court His son-in-law also died of unnatural causes in the Netherlands: He was shot in front of his home The man had been a successful football player back in Ireland he had apparently been involved in the family business for quite a while and was considered one of the island’s biggest heroin importers They depicted a man with dark hair and a beard cheap old-fashioned prescription glasses on the brim of his nose It is likely that he commuted between the Netherlands a property in Morocco and a beachside apartment in Malaga a Moroccan-born woman who was his former secretary The "Penguin" evidently also traveled between Wittlich in western Germany and Traben-Trarbach on the Mosel River Some people at the bunker had apparently found him an apartment in Wittlich His presence -- he usually flew into Frankfurt-Hahn airport on Ryanair -- took the activities on Mont Royal to a whole new level Connections were established to the world of global organized crime Green is suspected of having conducted huge drug deals and of being in touch with cartels in Colombia According to memos from the state office of criminal investigation in Rhineland-Palatinate he is also believed to have been involved in a bloody clan war over supremacy in the European drug trade that left 17 people dead over the course of two years At the same time the Irish police were busy seizing 440 kilos of cocaine in a container in an operation connected to Mr he is also believed to have been involved in an equally massive shipment of cannabis with a street value of 190 million euros According to the Irish tabloid Sunday World Europol had listed him as one of the top 20 European drug traffickers in 2014 he apparently didn't have any trouble traveling around Europe and Rhineland-Palatinate It's possible that Xennt and the bunker never would have been discovered had the Irish "godfather" never gotten involved one of the bunker's many young interns had offered an Irish tabloid photos of a "member of the Irish mafia" in October 2015 the Sunday World published a front-page "exclusive" and dedicated no fewer than four additional pages to its major scoop: The paper had gotten its hands on the first pictures in 20 years of the "missing godfather." A female reporter had confronted the "Penguin" on a street in Traben-Trarbach Splashed across the paper were photos of a corpulent grumpy-looking man wearing a dark jacket and holding a shopping bag His lawyer rejects all accusations against his client out of hand otherwise prosecutors would have charged his client especially since many of those charged today can be seen in the photos from 2015 Next to the Irishman are Xennt and his son who was always available as a chauffeur as long as their guest was staying in the Mosel area The "drug lord in exile" was doing business with Xennt The paper also laid out the duo's dubious history But apparently nothing came of the article The bunker's inhabitants were unmoved by the story and kept working as if nothing had happened They were already under intense observation Caught off guard by the Irishman's presence investigators were now using every tool at their disposal against the gang on Mont Royal their phones were tapped and GPS tracking devices were placed on their cars Entire network nodes were even infiltrated in order to sift through as much data flowing in and out of the bunker as possible German investigators got a judge's permission to monitor 16 mobile phone numbers They requested the contents of a Gmail mailbox from Google The puzzle that investigators may soon be able to solve shows a clear picture the Irish godfather is the real boss in Traben-Trarbach He's the one who makes the appointments and gives orders In the eyes of the public prosecutor's office he is the alleged head of the criminal organization operating in Traben-Trarbach It's also possible that Xennt got the money for the bunker from Mr The "Penguin" invested 700,000 euros in an "IT project" in Germany through his "finance minister," Kevin G. This could be referring to the acquisition of the bunker Investigators also believe the Irishman remained active in his core business a phone call and a text message from October 2016 concerning hundreds of "boxes of oranges," a "Chinese" man and the appropriate bank for this deal The 350 orange crates from Malaga could be sold for twice as much elsewhere Green was clearly uncomfortable talking over unsecure phone lines He told the person on the other end that he would send him a secure phone with an encrypted app In their requests for new methods of surveillance His presence seemed to corroborate their suspicion that Traben-Trarbach is home to an active cybercrime business allowed investigators to make the case for more invasive surveillance measures Green's primary interest in the bunker appeared to have been a technical one Green's associates are also keeping up with the times As indicated in the conversation about the boxes of oranges they were eager to keep the authorities in the dark maintaining one's own bulletproof hosting service would seem just as logical as developing an in-house encryption app for mobile phones Xennt is like a younger brother who knows about technology and he can turn to with every single technical question," says one former bunker employee and Xennt were about "apps" financed by the "Penguin." They bore names like "Exclu" and "Enigma." They sold them pre-loaded onto BlackBerry phones to shady contacts around the world "On the basis of investigations carried out thus far but also services related to drug trafficking are carried out through these communication channels," reads one investigation report this could also mean that they have only chipped away at the tip of the iceberg Discussions about the most serious crimes are likely only ever conducted over encrypted channels The equipment that was modified in Warsaw and Traben-Trarbach went to an illustrious group of buyers Police assume that encryptable BlackBerrys were delivered to Bogotá and Medellín like the Bandidos biker gang's chapter in Arnheim But not everything went smoothly between Mr Business in the bunker evidently didn't go as the Irishman had imagined he complained that the bunker's operating costs were too high and that it wasn't earning enough not a businessman" and doesn't have a business plan As one of the few people who stands accused investigators used the presence of this prominent criminal to justify virtually every one of their requests for surveillance Investigators kept close tabs on him wherever possible bugging his phones and tracking his every move arrived in Traben-Trarbach and scooped up all the fish There are both simple and complex answers to this question Green's departure is that the investigations against him eventually ground to a halt sometime in 2017 and even the most dedicated investigators have to operate within the unwieldy German legal system which is only partially suitable for pursuing international mafia-like organizations Investigators were probably under pressure to bring the case to some presentable end and not to overdo it Whether he passed by the bunker again is unknown overlooking the village of Traben-Trarbach there is a bunker once used by the German army It has since become a major hub for illicit activities on the darkweb while the bunker is located beneath the green structures in the rear left of the photo Heavily secured: The German government sold the former military bunker on Mont Royal for 450,000 euros The Office of Military Geophysics had previously been housed there for years A desk in the bunker: Employees lived above ground but the offices were located in the bunker which extended several floors below the surface A windowless office: In addition to infrastructure that facilitated trade in illegal goods like drugs and counterfeit money the servers also hosted data for the far-right Identitiarian Movement the operators of the bunker rented servers to their customers and promised to keep them running under all circumstances This lifesize action figure belongs to the presumed bunker boss Herman Johan Xennt consumed so much energy that the electricity bill alone amounted to 15,000 euros a month The control center: The company's range of services included not only hosting but also several special encryption apps for mobile phones Old hardware and plentiful space around it: The bunker has five floors with a total area of 5,500 square meters (around 59,000 square feet) The workshop in the bunker: The photos show images of the rooms as they were found after being raided by the police Emergency preparedness: Battery blocks were on standby at the bunker to provide emergency power The kitchen: Since the individual members of the bunker crew worked very different schedules during the day and at night they generally had a warm meal waiting for them 'Bulletproof hoster' gets shot down German investigators shut down a "criminally operated data center" in a former NATO bunker that they claim was used to host sites selling drugs More than 600 police officers stormed the 'CyberBunker' data center in Traben-Trarbach Prosecutor Juergen Bauer told reporters that alongside the seven arrests the long-running investigation has thirteen people aged 20 to 59 under investigation None of the suspects were at the data center at the time with the arrests taking place at a local restaurant and in Schwalbach There were separate raids in the Netherlands Among the illegal services allegedly hosted at the German data center were Cannabis Road and the world's second-largest narcotics marketplace Police also claim that a large-scale attack on approximately one million Telekom routers at the end of November 2016 was operated via a server in the bunker The former NATO facility was acquired in 2013 from the Office for Geoinformation of the Bundeswehr, by an unidentified Dutchman, who is the chief suspect. Press reports at the time describe the site as a multi-story protective structure with a floor space of 5,500 square meters It has two adjacent office buildings with a total floor space of 4,300 square meters and is set on 13-hectares of land A 2012 article in Immobilien Zeitung reveals that the site was already being used as a data center by the military and has four underground stories reaching a depth of 25 meters upgraded the bunker "in order to make it available to clients exclusively for illegal purposes," regional criminal police chief Johannes Kunz said that we were able at all to get police forces into the bunker complex which is still secured at the highest military level," Kunz added protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center." but said that he was also involved with CyberBunker the alleged operator of a Dutch data center in its own Cold War bunker now-defunct data center company 'Bunker Infra' claimed CyberBunker was using images of its bunker CyberBunker previously said it would host "services to any Web site 'except child pornography and anything related to terrorism.'" The company's website is now unavailable The location of the Traben-Trarbach facility matches that of Calibour a company that said it operated a NATO-bunker based secure data center The case against those charged is still developing, and there are as yet no formal identifications or charges. While 200 servers were seized, some reports suggest that there could be as many as 2,000 at the facility Kunz told reporters the analysis of the data could take years to complete Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders Complete digital access to quality analysis and expert insights complemented with our award-winning Weekend Print edition Terms & Conditions apply Discover all the plans currently available in your country See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times Darknet commander Hermann Xennt ran online market selling drugs and child pornography from an underground bunker The Sunday World found George ‘The Penguin’ Mitchell with Xennt George 'The Penguin' Mitchell's business partner has been sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail after a German court found that he was running a dark web supermarket selling drugs and child pornography from an underground bunker Dutch oddball Hermann Xennt spent a year on trial before he was convicted this week along with seven others for operating a data centre at a former NATO bunker in Traben Trarbach in the Mosel Valley The bunker and the relationship between Xennt and Mitchell was first uncovered by the Sunday World in 2015 and led to a massive investigation by German police who kept it and the pair under surveillance over a number of years Through wiretaps and placing undercover operatives in the bunker they discovered that among the illegal services hosted there were Cannabis Road orangechemicals and the world's second largest drugs marketplace German cops found more than 800 servers inside the facility It was raided in September 2019 by 600 police officers and Xennt and a number of accomplices were arrested But when the case came to court it emerged that Mitchell had slipped the net when he became suspicious that police may have been watching him In a huge probe the German police cybercrime unit bought up thousands of dollars of Bitcoin and created an illegal website which they then sought to host at Xennt's facility During the raid there were more than 800 servers and hard drives along with USBs phones and more than one hundred thousand euro in cash Seven other defendants were given sentences ranging from four years and three months in prison to one year All were convicted of forming and membership of a criminal organisation but were acquitted of being accessories to the 250,000 crimes identified in court documents At one point during the trial a lawyer asked if criminal godfather Mitchell could give evidence on behalf of Xennt on a virtual link from Spain as he believed he was under investigation in Germany and was afraid to attend the court in Trier said Mitchell was ready to testify and to give a statement that would shake the credibility of another defendant who confessed to his role in the bunker Cops kept the bunker under surveillance before pouncing Xennt had bought the bunker in the preceding years and registered it as a data centre but after our story appeared police decided to take a closer look at what was really going on there Mitchell went by the name Mr Green when he was in Germany but had returned to Spain before investigators moved in The trial heard that Mitchell was the financier behind an earlier bunker associated with Xennt in the Netherlands where an ecstasy factory was discovered after a fire broke out The court heard that The Penguin put up the €700,000 to buy it back in 1995 meaning his relationship with Xennt spans almost three decades Mitchell was trying to develop his own encrypted phone service at the bunker in Traben Trarbach and had his own riverside apartment in the village Please check your inbox to verify your details Now download the free app for all the latest Sunday World News, Crime, Irish Showbiz and Sport. Available on Apple and Android devices Penguin George Mitchell bunker and communications centre in Germany A mammoth trial centring on activities in an underground bunker in a German town where criminal godfather George ‘The Penguin’ Mitchell was developing an encrypted phone system has got underway More than 14 months have been set aside at the district court in Trier where evidence this week heard that Mitchell was a regular visitor to the bunker and that he was working with dark net expert Herman Xennt to create the phone system charged with nearly 250,000 different offences relating to facilitating criminals transaction online in drugs is Johann Hermann Xennt who the Sunday World identified as an associate of Mitchell when we tracked down The Penguin to the cyberbunker facility in 2015 The NATO cold war bunker was raided by more than 600 police in September 2019 after a lengthy probe into dark net activities there Penguin George Mitchell bunker and communications centre in Germany Traben-Trarbach Servers and computers were confiscated during the raid in preparation for the trial which is expected to continue until at least December 2021 Court hearings will be held twice a week until all the evidence is heard While Mitchell was under investigation by police and was at one point suspected of being in charge of the bunker he slipped the net after a fallout with Xennt over money The Sunday World previously revealed details of the secret police files which contained transcripts of bugged phone-calls and details of warrants presented to the court describing Mitchell as a major international drug lord with investments all over the world More than 100 witnesses are expected to be heard over the course of the trial and already two have referred to Mitchell as being a regular at the bunker was turned into a hub to facilitate organised crime offered so ‘bullet proof’ networks to clients who went by the name of the mysterious 'Mr Green' escaped prosecution despite being the focus of undercover cops for years and being suspected of being Xennt’s boss and the true financier of the operation Sunday World first revealed his ties to Traben Trarbach and the bizarre looking Dutchman Xennt in 2015 but it took officers another four years to complete their investigation into his links to the Bunker – giving Mitchell plenty of time to move away According to German media the trial will break new legal ground as it is the first time that charges have not been brought against the Darknet operators but those accused of making the technology available to them Xennt has claimed that he knew nothing about the content on the 403 servers which were seized during the massive raids German police files seen by the Sunday World indicate that at one point officers investigating the goings on in the bunker believed that Mitchell was the boss They repeatedly sought warrants to tap his phones as he met with senior criminals spoke in code about suspected drug deals and even chatted with his lover Khadiba Bouchiba A lengthy article in the New Yorker by journalist Ed Caesar detailed the Sunday World’s investigations and revealed how Mitchell met Xennt when he was dealing in stolen computer parts in Holland more than two decades ago Mitchell had been arrested in the Netherlands in 1998 after he was caught unloading a shipment of computer parts and spent a year in jail While police across Europe would go on to describe him as a major international narcotics tracker in the decades that followed the significance of the computer part bust is only beginning to become apparent In his lengthy investigation Caesar describes how businessman Martijn Burger remembered Xennt and Mitchell spending time together around the turn of the millennium Burger did not know of Mitchell’s status in the criminal world and teasingly called him Charlie Chaplin and carried a small bag containing ‘ten to twelve’ Nokia phones each with its phone number written on the back,” wrote Caesar Mitchell’s early obsession with using a network of phones would explain discoveries made by German police about him during their wire tap investigations As revealed in the Sunday World Mitchell was named as the number one target in the huge investigation as he was watched and bugged while visiting associates at the underground bunker Secret police files revealed how officers in Europe believe that Mitchell deals directly with Columbian Cartels supplies drugs and weapons to Northern Ireland floods Holland with heroin and is under investigation for money laundering in Spain Officers believe that Mitchell travelled Europe as he made plans to set up his own encrypted phone network out of the German bunker and that he hoped to make a killing and sell €1,200 a unit blackberries coupled with a €3,000 secure app with an annual service fee of up to €50,000 to a network of criminals The files show that phones were shipped to customers in Bogota and Medellin However when German police eventually swooped on the bunker the Penguin was long gone having fallen out with Xennt over money and the way he was planning to run the business At one point during the probe prosecutors applied to have 16 of Mitchell’s phones tapped but despite the huge volume of time and resources put into the operation they were hampered by the secret language and codewords used by the pensioner criminals An undercover investigator who worked at the bunker as a gardener will also give evidence of what he saw inside It is expected that Mitchell’s visit and his move to Traben Trarbach in 2015 will be heard along with his penchant for strip clubs gin and tonics and breakfasts by the river “No one can stop me,” he said in Netflix’s Cyberbunker Netflix’s Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld begins by describing Herman Xennt as a “007 James Bond typical villain.” Moments later ready to answer the true-crime documentary crew’s questions from inside a prison in Trier where he is now serving a six-year sentence In Cyberbunker, directors Max Rainer and Kilian Lieb explore how Xennt — a charismatic man with long blond hair and a black leather coat — and his gang of “mysterious Dutchmen” purchased a NATO bunker under the German tourist town of Traben-Trarbach in 2013 soon became home to international criminal businesses Beginning at another former NATO bunker in Goes CyberBunker offered “bulletproof hosting” to websites they provided highly secure hosting for websites that contained sensitive or illicit material Within years, however, the operation shifted to Germany’s Traben-Trarbach, and the Julian Assange-founded WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay were among the websites CyberBunker hosted Police also claimed it was the source of a botnet attack on German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom in late 2016 that knocked out about 1 million customers’ routers More than 600 German police raided the bunker in September 2019 seizing servers and resulting in seven arrests (Xennt’s third son was born in 2019.) He was acquitted of aiding and abetting the crimes on the CyberBunker-hosted sites Xennt was found guilty of forming a criminal organization Xennt was sentenced to serve just under six years in prison A German court rejected his appeal in September 2023 Xennt spoke out about the verdict with the Cyberbunker filmmakers and so neither was the judgment,” he said from a prison in Trier adding that he doesn’t consider himself a criminal “Nothing I could have said would have mattered I was already convicted before I was arrested.” Xennt’s defends that he “[didn’t] even notice” customers were using his servers for criminal purposes He also reiterated his belief that “privacy is a fundamental right,” warning that “the more communication evolves the easier it becomes for third parties to eavesdrop and spy on” citizens also cryptically said he has “many plans for the future,” following his prison release “I know that there is no one else who wants to or can do what I want to do,” he concluded and I will eventually be able to realize my vision for a better world This article was originally published on November 8