Elbe II
Elbe II was a submarine bunker in the port of Hamburg on the shipyard of the Howaldtswerke Hamburg (HWH) during the Second World War . It was built in the Vulkanhafen from 1940 and, after its completion in 1941, was used to equip new submarines before they were commissioned. It was used by the Howaldtswerke together with the Blohm & Voss shipyard .
It was erected using caissons on a foundation of 2,500 piles in the sandy Elbe floor and consisted of two wet boxes with a capacity of six type VII C submarines each . Its ceiling was three meters thick, and a usable area with workshops and administration rooms was created on the ceiling, which in addition to its use also served as additional camouflage.
During the intensified air raids on the Port of Hamburg from 1944 onwards , the bunker received several hits, and was partially destroyed in an attack on April 8, 1945. At the end of the war, the boats U-3004, U-2505 and U-3506 were sunk by their own crew within the West Box; In front of the bunker, U-2501 was laid aground on May 3, 1945 - all four boats were of the newest type XXI . U-2501 was later lifted and demolished while the other boats remained in the West Box. On November 11, 1945, British occupation forces blew up the bunker with the three submarine wrecks still lying there. These were cannibalized in the following years and the remains left there. The bunker ruins remained intact for decades and the three submarine wrecks were visible at low tide .
It was not until the container port was expanded in October 1995 that the boxes were washed up with Elbe sand and, from 1999, the entire basin of the volcanic port was filled. On June 2, 2001, the remaining facilities of Elbe II were supposed to be blown up, but initially this did not succeed. The bunker had to be loosened bit by bit by means of smaller blasts and then crushed using heavy hydraulic tools. It was not until the summer of 2003 that the remains, which were still visible until then, were covered with a layer of earth and a storage area for containers at the Tollerort container terminal (CTT) was created.
See also
literature
- Jan Heitmann : Boats under concrete. The Hamburg submarine bunker. (Series of publications by Hamburger Unterwelten eV, Vol. 1) Elbe-Spree-Verlag Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-931129-32-3 .
Web links
- Howaldtswerke Hamburg in the 1950s. In the foreground the volcanic harbor with the blown up submarine Bunker Elbe II on the right edge of the picture
- Christel Grube: U-boat bunker in Hamburg , April 9, 2008, homepage geschichtsspuren.de (formerly lostplaces.de) , with images, accessed on June 2, 2012
Coordinates: 53 ° 31 ′ 40 " N , 9 ° 56 ′ 48.5" E