Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin«

Denkort Bunker Valentin

Since May 2011, the Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin« commemorates the victims of the satellite concentration camp in Bremen-Farge and six other camps in the region. Between 1938 and 1945, the prisoners were deployed in the construction of the »Valentin« submarine bunker and an extensive underground fuel supply deposit for Wehrmacht and navy.

History

In 1936, the Economic Research Foundation (Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgemeinschaft, WiFo), a camouflage organization of the Reich Ministry of Econoic Affairs, began setting up an underground fuel deposit for the Wehrmacht in a forest close to Bremen-Farge. In 1938/1939, the first barrack camp to house WiFo forced labourers was constructed by the Gottlieb Tesch building firm. That same year, the »Marinegemeinschaftslager« I and II (navy labour camp for civilians) for the construction of a navy fuel deposit were built; later, Soviet prisoners of war were incarcerated there. In the following years, further camps were set up in the area: in 1940, the Gestapo established a labour education camp (AEL) in Farge, and a camp for prisoners of war and labourers from the east. Most of the prisoners were deployed in forced labour at the fuel deposit construction site. In the summer of 1943, Organisation Todt (OT) and regional building firms began constructing the »Valentin« U-boat bunker in a submarine shipyard sheltered from air raids on the banks of the Unterweser River in Farge. From that time on, many of the prisoners were deployed at this construction site. In addition, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in autumn 1943 in the Rekumer Feldmark. There were more than 2,000 forced labourers at the Bremen-Farge satellite camp alone. They had to do heavy work at the construction site at least ten hours a day, which, coupled with insufficient provisions, soon led to many deaths. After an Allied air raid on March 27, 1945, during which the bunker ceiling was hit, the camp commanders shut down all construction work - no U-boat was ever completed in the shipyard. The SS evacuated the Farge satellite camp on April 10, 1945, and the prisoners were forced to march to Neuengamme near Hamburg. There were at least seven forced labour camps in Bremen-Farge and the surrounding areas. They were liberated by the Allies at the beginning of May 1945.

Bremen-Farge, 1944, Construction site of the »Valentin« submarine bunker, Bundesarchiv, Bild 185-10-05A, N/A

Bremen-Farge, 2006, Ruins in the bunker, Harald Schwörer, photein.de

Victims

Up to 12,000 people were incarcerated in the camps around Farge. Most of them had to conduct forced labour at the bunker construction site. They came from all over Europe as prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers or »Ostarbeiter« - labourers from the Soviet Union. The number of deaths caused by forced labour and incarceration can only be estimated: at least 1,000 people died during construction work. After the Bremen-Farge satellite camp had been evacuated and the prisoners had been forced to march to Neuengamme, many of them were loaded onto so-called concentration camp ships and taken out to the bay of Neustadt. They perished when the ships were sunk during an air raid.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After World War II, the Allies took over the WiFo premises and the bunker shell construction. From 1957 on, the German ministry of defence administered the WiFo tank complex until it was taken over by the Industry Administration Society (Industrieverwaltungsgesellschaft - IVG) in 1961. In October 1966, the Bundeswehr opened a navy supply deposit in a renovated part of the »Valentin« bunker. In the 1960s, the Bundeswehr also took over the premises of the former »Marinegemeinschaftslager«. In the 1980s, discussions concerning the history of forced labour in Farge and the possibility of setting up a memorial at the bunker were initiated. Since 1990, visitors can book a guided tour of the bunker with the Bundeswehr. In 1995, the Bundeswehr set up a monument to the victims of the Farge satellite camp. In 1999, the private »Geschichtslehrpfad Lagerstraße e.V.« (History Trail Lagerstraße Association) was founded. The bunker was placed under monumental protection in 2005, the Bundeswehr gave up the facilities in 2010. In 2009, the city of Bremen began to turn the bunker into a memorial site. After the Bundeswehr left the premises and construction work on the historical building had been completed, a part of the bunker has been opened as the Memorial Submarine Bunker Valentin on May 8, 2011. There is an exhibition in the building, while guided tours present the bunker building and the remains of the former labour camps.

Bremen-Farge, 2007, View of the bunker from the South, Harald Schwörer, photein.de

Possibilities

Guided tours

Open

By appointment.

Contact

http://www.denkort-bunker-valentin.de

mail@bunkervalentin.de

+49 (0)421 696 736 70

Rekumer Siel 1
28777 Bremen

Bremen-Farge, 1944, Forced labourers on the construction site of the submarine bunker, Bundesarchiv, Bild 185-23-21, N/A

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