n the final minutes of the movie "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," with a nuclear conflagration on the horizon, the only person in the Pentagon's war room who remains upbeat about the prospect of mass annihilation is Strangelove himself. Doing slide-rule calculations in his wheelchair, this proud father of the Doomsday Machine assures the president and his generals that thousands of Americans can ride out Armageddon inside the country's deeper mine shafts.

"Of course," Strangelove, the not-so-ex-Nazi, says brightly, "it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition." The men in the room listen raptly to his proposal for a "ratio of 10 females to each male." As survivors, the madman tells them, they should feel no guilt about the tens of millions incinerated above ground but instead enjoy their new subterranean lives in "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead."

The 25 photographs by Andreas Magdanz at the Janet Borden Gallery in SoHo, from Saturday through Feb. 21, are like a glimpse of Strangelove's demented vision of a nuclear sanctuary translated into historical truth. One set of plans for a postnuclear-war world, it turns out, were almost as fantastic — and banal — as those in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire. The Dienstelle Marienthal (or Marienthal Office) is among the most ambitious but least-known monuments to "thinking the unthinkable" ever conceived. This vast underground tunnel complex, built from 1960 to 1972 outside Bonn, was once so secret that to acknowledge its existence could bring charges of treason in West Germany.

Designed to house 3,000 of that government's essential personnel in case of nuclear attack, it represented one of the most exclusive fraternities in the world. (Membership in the American version, under the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's tenure, was even more restricted. It accommodated only 1,000 people. After the 535 members of Congress and their top aides were assigned spaces, little room was left for anyone else hoping to survive.)

The Germans, however, built on a grander scale. The mountain caverns in the Ahr Valley near Marienthal had been hollowed as a railroad tunnel before World War I. Invading French troops dynamited passages, and the place was abandoned until World War II, when the Nazi military discovered that the cathedral-like spaces, beneath 350 feet of slate, were ideal for assembling V-1 and V-2 rockets beyond the reach of Allied bombs. After joining NATO in 1955, West Germany began to plan to use the site in case of a nuclear war, expanding and upgrading it so that a community could live deep underground, in theory, for at least a month.

There are 25,000 doors in the bunker complex at Marienthal, only 38 of which open to the world outside. Among the hundreds of rooms where the sun never shone are 897 offices and conference areas and 936 sleeping cubicles. Canteens, showers, medical areas, a printing shop, a hair salon, a television studio and — most touchingly — a post office were provided for the inhabitants, along with two large bays for bicycles, the chief form of transportation around the nearly 12 miles of galleries and tunnels.

Mr. Magdanz, a 40-year-old German based in Aachen, began the project in 1998 after reading a newspaper item about the structure. His request to photograph it was grudgingly honored by the Interior Ministry, which granted him a three-day permit. Persistence led to a seven-month extension. He was the first person authorized to photograph there, although he had access to only the three sectors in the east half of the complex. (There were five sectors in all, linked but different.)

His photographic tour of the forbidden city — he shot more than 1,000 negatives in both black and white and color with a large-format camera, and also made a videotape — is not comforting. The government code name for the complex was typically euphemistic: Rosengarten (or Rose Garden). Monotony, regimentation and claustrophobic dread are the outstanding qualities found in the pictures. The oppressive spotlessness of Marienthal is matched by a complete lack of privacy. Only the West German president rated his own bathroom and, in an incongruous visual note, also had a suite with chairs and sofas upholstered in hot pink.

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