Toward the end of World War II, during the retreat of the Wehrmacht, the old bridge was blown up to prevent Soviet armies from pushing onward. Pstrąże, or "Strans" as it was known in German at the time, was captured by the Red Army on 10 February 1945. The place was initially inaccessible to Poles even after the forced resettlement of Polish families from the former Polish territories in the east, since, to make the movement of Polish civilians in the military area more difficult, the road section of the bridge had not been rebuilt. From that point, Pstrąże was not officially listed on the maps. The military part of the city was separated from the civilian part by a wall. Everything inside the military section was kept as top secret. Urban legends as well as assumptions based on partial evidence have it that the Soviet troops kept nuclear weapons in the secret section of the village. The military part was fully equipped with hangars and garages for trucks, whereas the civilian district had many amenities of a normal town: not only residential tower blocks, but also shops, a school, a cinema, a theatre, etc.