Removal vans are already blocking the pavements throughout Bonn and huge piles of folded removal boxes stand in front of the offices of the German parliament.

The government quarter is beginning to look like a cargo centre as the city prepares itself for the departure of the Bundestag, parliament's lower chamber, which has been based in Bonn since 1949.

The official date for the move to start is July 5, and from then until the end of the month a total of 32,000 cubic metres of goods will be transported from the banks of Bonn's Rhine river to the river spree which snakes through Berlin's government centre.

Ensuring everything ends up where it is supposed to requires the logistical planning of a military operation. The move is a herculean task.

Within four weeks, the offices of the 669 MPs and 81 Bundestag sitesscattered all over Bonn, have to be cleared and the contents moved into 16 office buildings in Berlin.

In addition, the offices of over 4,000 people linked to parliament are moving to Berlin from Bonn in July.

Roger Cloes, who is in charge of the Berlin move, believes it will go off smoothly.

``I am completely confident it will all work. Thus far everything is going according to plan,'' he says as numbers, details and deadlines bubble out of him.

Cloes has retained an overview of the organised chaos, thus far at least. ``The dates of the move from Bonn... to Berlin will be kept to the day,'' he says.

This is crucial, because if anything in the carefully timed plan is changed or delayed, ``the subsequent deadlines will fall like dominoes''.

The only safety cushion during the month of the move consists of the weekends. Around 99 per cent of the goods will be moved to Berlin by rail.

Every day 50 containers are to be loaded and taken by truck to a nearby rail freight station. In this way, 38,000metres of documents and 1.3 million volumes from the parliamentary library are to be transported.

In addition, 3,600 works of art are being moved. These, however, will not travel by rail but in trucks fitted with special air suspension. Parliament's fine porcelain will travel by the same protected route.

``We have to break down the Bundestag into its constituent parts here and reassemble them in Berlin,'' is how Cloes describes the huge task.

He and his four top aides are taking great pains to ensure the project does not get on top of those involved.

The ministries are planning and executing their own moves, with the public works ministry being the first to go.

Removal dates are staggered to relieve the crush in Berlin, where the many construction sites are causing bottlenecks. Last to go will be the foreign ministry which will leave Bonn only in November.

Parliament is getting advice on carrying out the move from a curious source: experts at Munich airport. In 1992, the airport carried out aflawless move of its entire operations overnight to a newly built airport on the other side of the city.