Perhaps the most ingenious work of all they had undertaken, under pretense of garden work, involved the installation of a hidden electrical device, buried in the ground some three centimeters below the surface just inside the lower opening in the hedge, and connected by underground wire with the house, which, when activated by the pressure of a foot, set off a bell inside. With advance warning that persons had entered the garden, the baron could go quickly downstairs into the cellar below the south parlor, and thence through the newly discovered tunnel that led outside under the southwest corner of the west wing, extending some twenty meters underground to a wooden door, there to await the new arrivals.

This door Schmidt and Hans had stumbled upon when digging up a tremendous overgrown shrub that covered a steeply contoured wall of earth along the hillside in the northwest corner of the garden.

The baron had immediately been summoned. The door was excavated, pried open, and the missing tunnel discovered. Running through the dark, moldy, damp sunken corridor, they soon found themselves swinging back rusted hinges of a heavy stone door with crowbars and hammers and entering the cellar. The baron was beside himself to find such communication between the underground portion of the house and Der Frühlingsgarten.

“To think,” he said, “that all these years the legendary tunnel was thought to be on the north side, when actually it had been dug straight through the cellar! We had the wrong garden attached to the old stories!”

The half-rotten wooden door had been replaced and great quantities of shrubbery and hedge transplanted to hide it as effectively as before. A pull cord was installed to ring a second bell inside the cellar, where the stone door was completely outfitted with new hardware.

By the time these operations were complete, a nearly fool proof system was in place whereby only those who had been informed of all three aspects of obtaining entry were admitted to the secret life of Lebenshaus—the opening in the hedge, the precisely phrased password, and the hidden cord in the hedge. None but those sent through the mechanism of the network would know how to make use of all three.

As the complexity of their activity grew, the baron released most of his permanent staff. The war took all the younger men, and he took to the employment of day laborers in his fields, many of whom were women of the region who now, with husbands absent, sought whatever work they could find.

Those few faithful servants who remained, whom he trusted and whose Christian faith was sound—Heidi, Carola, Hans, Schmidt, Heiko, and a handful of others—he took into his confidence. There was a danger to them if they remained, he said. If they wanted to leave, he would understand and wish them well. All decided to remain.