Emden bunker museum

Emden bunker museum

Data
place	Emden
Art	History museum , military museum , war museum , memorial
opening	May 6, 1995
Number of visitors (annually)	5000-6000
operator	Working group Bunkermuseum eV
management	Franz Lenselink
Website	http://www.bunkermuseum.de
ISIL	DE-MUS-496119

The Emden Bunker Museum was opened in 1995 in a raised bunker in downtown Emden . It is considered the first museum in an air raid shelter in the Federal Republic of Germany that deals with the history of the buildings. In 26 rooms, each with a different thematic focus, it shows the history of the bunkers, the persecution and oppression by the National Socialists in the city of Emden from 1933 to 1945 and the post-war period until the early 1950s. The museum is open from May to October. The association, founded in March 1994, is the Bunkermuseum Working Group . The museum is financed through grants, donations and voluntary work by the members of the association. The bunker museum hardly receives any money from the municipality or other public sources.

history

At the beginning of the Second World War, Emden was an important industrial and port city, which, due to its location in the extreme northwest of the German Empire, could be reached quickly by the Allied bomber fleets stationed in Great Britain . The National Socialists therefore classified Emden in "Rank 1 cities at risk of air warfare". Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939 ( attack on Poland ), with the exception of four public air raid shelters and a command post, no other air raid protection structures had been completed for the population of Emden (population 35,189). On March 31, 1940, Emden was bombed for the first time by British Royal Air Force (RAF) planes , killing seven residents, injuring 17 and leaving 78 homeless.

Bunker construction

It was not until October 10, 1940, when the " Führer Immediate Program " was ordered, that building activity began to increase. In Emden , 35 large air raid shelters and a further 141 shatterproof small bunkers were built in Emden by the end of the war, using foreign forced laborers and prisoners of war who were not allowed to seek protection in the buildings. In total, the German Reich paid around 20 million Reichsmarks for the construction of the shelter in Emden .

Emden continued to be bombed, including on September 6, 1944. More than 80 percent of the city area was destroyed. The comparatively low number of aerial warfare deaths (at least 415) was due to the many air raid shelters. Besides Wilhelmshaven, Emden was the only city in which there were bomb-proof rooms for almost all residents.

Holzsägerstrasse bunker

The construction of the bunker on Holzsägerstrasse began on April 1, 1941 according to plans by the Air Protection Construction Office. Several houses had previously been demolished there. The structure was completed on April 14, 1942. A total of 2,901 cubic meters of reinforced concrete was used. It is 14.06 meters long, 13.70 meters wide and 18.35 meters high. It has a basement and six floors above it. The outer walls are 1.40 meters thick, the inner walls 0.40 meters and the ceilings 1.40 meters. Inside there are 28 rooms that are between 3 × 2.10 meters and 3 × 3.20 meters in size. In the smaller rooms there were three beds and in the remaining nine beds one above the other. In each mezzanine there were small kitchens and the toilets with washrooms. The bunker had a total of 276 berths and 84 seats. The infirmary, guard room for the bunker guard, ventilation system and the emergency power generator were housed in the basement. The building stood empty for a long time after the war. It came into the possession of the Federal Property Administration , which kept it for civil defense .

Bunker Museum

In March 1994 a working group was founded. The aim was to set up a museum in the Holzsägerstrasse bunker. On the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Emden, the working group organized an exhibition in the building for the first time on September 6, 1994, which attracted more than 5,000 visitors. In the following months, the Federal Property Administration transferred the building to the association. With the participation of the Ostfriesland University of Applied Sciences , the Borssum citizens' initiative, the Osterburg School as well as private individuals and sponsors, the association then prepared the building and designed the exhibition. On May 6, 1995, the museum opened at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in the presence of Canadian guests and pilots from the squadrons that bombed Emden. On July 2, 2006, the 100,000 visitors were counted.

Permanent exhibition

In the entrance area a plaque reminds of the bomb dead from Emden. The permanent exhibition runs in chronological order through 26 rooms. It begins with the end of the Weimar Republic . You can see a projection entitled Emden before and during the war . Other topics include persecution, terror, emigration, deportation , forced labor, foreign workers and deportees , ... and there was it, the resistance as well as a new political beginning and reconstruction in Emden . On the upper floor of the bunker museum, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge provides information about its work. Other exhibition rooms deal with the history of the bunker construction in Emden under the title Air Protection Measures - The Illusion of Bomb Protection or Life in the "World" of the Bunker . The history of the Engerhafe concentration camp in the municipality of Südbrookmerland , which is located near Emdens, is presented in the Remembrance - Processing - Commemoration room . A satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was located there from October 21 to December 22, 1944 . It was the only one in East Frisia. 188 inmates died within the two months that it existed.

Exterior design

The facade was designed by the Hamburg artist Uwe Ochsler. He had the bunker painted with alternating black and white fields, on which the repetitive writing AUSSENWELTEN INNENWELTEN can be seen with gold-lacquered plastic letters . The artist said: “There is hardly a place where the inside and the outside are so strongly separated from each other as in a bunker. The function of a bunker is to protect its own reality from an external threat; everyone takes their own world into the bunker ”. According to him, the colors black and white are “in their polarity synonymous with opposing positions. The gold in the script stands for something material on the one hand, and gold of course always has a spiritual orientation on the other hand. ”The text band is complemented by interlocking windows that are hung in front of the facade. They stand for a lack of transparency between the inside and outside world.

Web links

Commons : Bunkermuseum Emden  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ostfriesen-Zeitung of August 22, 2012: Between siren shreds and the roar of bombers , viewed on January 30, 2013
2. ^ Nicole Mehring: Functional Architecture - Emotional Memories: Air raid shelters as places of remembrance in the Federal Republic since the 1990s . In: Psychologie und Gesellschaftskritik 30 (2006), 2, p. 91.
3. ↑ Thomas Klaus: On the way - Behind thick walls ( Memento from January 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 30 kB). In: Landwirtschaftsblatt Weser-Ems . No. 49 of 9 December 2005. p. 76
4. ↑ ^{a b} Bunkermuseum Emden: History of the bunker construction in Emden , viewed on January 30, 2012.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Hillgriet Eilers: Das Bunkermuseum ( Memento from January 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 23 kB), viewed on January 30, 2013.
6. ↑ Karin Böke-Aden, Dorles Löning, Onno Santjer: Places of Remembrance in East Frisia . Emden, 1996. Without ISBN. P. 138
7. ↑ Bunkermuseum Emden: OUTSIDE WORLDS INNEN WORLDS ( memento from January 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), viewed on January 30, 2013

Coordinates: 53 ° 21 '58 "  N , 7 ° 12' 13.6"  E