Indeed: that would help reconcile the presumed secrecy with the fact that, also per the article, there are upwards of 2000 of these tunnel-structures that fall into this category. All across Central Europe. Aggressor knows THAT there's likely a safe-tunnel, but doesn't know exactly WHERE the safe-tunnel is, and whether it's worth taking the time to find...
For that matter—A place to stash the kids from the census-taker and the harvest from the tax man? Tuck them away, just for that day, once every so often, and pull them out afterward?
Or knowledge privileged to some specific order, whose representatives are geographically widespread but sparse within a given community?
The erdstall surely could not have been built with storage in mind, since their length and narrowness offer no advantages over a conventional and convenient cellar. And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones. Though they could have provided refuge for a small family, why would they be accessed from such public spaces? Or be too small for a large man or pregnant woman to fit through? The lack of exits is a further strike against this theory—if enemies became aware of such a tunnel being used as shelter, it would quickly become a death trap for its inhabitants. Besides, in either of these cases, one would expect at least some goods to have been left behind—remnants of food or clothing, cached or dropped valuables. Instead, there is nothing
You also need to look at the locations and context. There are several of these things in the region my family comes from and at the estimated time they were built there were no invaders or other problems that would justify using them as shelters. Not to mention that if there were, you'd hide your family in existing shelters in the surrounding forests or hills, not some cramped underground deathtrap.
Read my comment. I literally quoted half of what you're telling me to read. That's what I'm critiquing.
And you might not have time to bring your family out to the surrounding forests. If these were centrally located in town, they might have been intended just for the people who happened to be in town at the moment.
I'm not saying that I know what they were for. Just that the reasons the article gives for saying they weren't for hiding don't hold up at all.
The ones I'm aware of aren't in the middle of town, and by definition they can't be because they're holes in the soil landscape which is in short supply in the centre of a town. They're near small villages for which getting your family into hiding can be as simple as walking across the road into forests, ravines, etc. It'd actually be much easier to just herd your family into some nearby patch of wilderness than to shove them all into a hole in the ground without food, water, or toilet facilities.
In any case hostile forces don't just teleport into your village, they're moving on foot and stopping to loot on the way, you've usually got weeks of warning that something bad is happening and days of warning that it's about to happen to you. The whole shelter theory just doesn't hold water.
Tax collector avoidance is actually a pretty excellent alternative proposal. From searching, it looks like a lot of the taxes were on stuff that was difficult to hide, like farm animals owned, and houses / farmland.
However, this site [1] shows several categories for taxation that might be hidden to falsify the taxation basis. Cash, Inventories, Household Goods, Luxury Clothing. Admittedly, it seems like there would be a greater percentage of items left behind in some of these locations, since there often tend to be something. Yet, for taxation avoidance purposes, maybe they're very motivated to recollect everything that was hidden.
For that matter—A place to stash the kids from the census-taker and the harvest from the tax man? Tuck them away, just for that day, once every so often, and pull them out afterward?
Or knowledge privileged to some specific order, whose representatives are geographically widespread but sparse within a given community?