The Valentin Bunker – Once a Place of Cruelty, Today a Place of Remembrance
My novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night, is set in Bremen Germany in 1946 and there is a German naval facility located in the Bremen suburbs that figures prominently in the story. The facility is called Bunker Valentin, or the Valentin Bunker.
In the novel, Caspar Lehman, a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent and Luba Haas, a former Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative are given the assignment to find and capture the bunker’s former head of security, Gestapo Senior Lieutenant Ulrich Dettmer.
Dettmer, a man of extraordinary cruelty, is among those chiefly responsible for working thousands of laborers to death during the bunker’s construction. Haas has additional motivation to find Dettmer. Her husband, a Polish resistance fighter who was trained by the SOE, was among those interred at the nearby Farge concentration camp, which supplied the laborers for the bunker. She desperately wants to know his fate.
So, what was the Valentin Bunker?
The bunker was intended to be a submarine assembly facility and it is located about 25 miles northwest of Bremen, near the villages of Rekum and Farge. The bunker, which actually acts as a protective shell for the submarine assembly lines inside is enormous, and it is the largest free-standing bunker in Germany. Rising up from the otherwise flat Northern German plain, the bunker stands more than 25 meters tall, 97 meters wide, and 426 meters long.
Construction on the bunker began in February of 1943 and continued until March 1945 when it was abandoned. By then, the fate of Germany was sealed. The Wehrmacht was reeling from the pounding it was taking by the Soviet Red Army in the East and Allied forces attacking from the West. The camp’s Kriegsmarine guards, and their SS and Gestapo overseers wanted to cover evidence of their abuses, so prisoners from the Farge camp were packed into railcars and sent to other camps to await their fate.
Building the Valentin Bunker is a story of incredible cruelty. Bunker construction was carried out by thousands of slave laborers. The majority of the laborers were POWs – Russian, Polish, Greek, and French soldiers. There were 32 Irish prisoners illegally held at the Farge camp; Ireland was a neutral country, but they were held, nevertheless. These men were Irish merchant seamen who served on British vessels and were captured by German Navy raiders. But there were also ordinary Germans who worked on the bunker. Many were political prisoners, some were communists or labor activists, members of the clergy, and there were a host of others who were convicted of various crimes against the Nazi regime.
Workers were fed a starvation diet and disease was rampant. Medical care was rudimentary at best, and supplies were scarce. There was at least one documented outbreak of cholera during the construction of the bunker. But what took its greatest toll on the laborers was the work itself. It was backbreaking and exhausting. Workers poured thousands of tons of concrete, they hoisted and put steel girders into place, all while working largely by hand. Many workers died in place during the construction, their remains are still there to this day, entombed in the concrete that now surrounds them forever.
Had the bunker’s submarine assembly lines become operational, intelligence estimates are that the bunker would have eventually produced more than a dozen Type XXI submarines each month. The Type XXI was a state-of-the-art submarine, unlike any other submarine of its day. It was the first submarine designed to operate primarily submerged. Other submarines of the period spent most of their time operating on the surface and only submerged to avoid detection. Other design improvements made the Type XXI a submarine a formidable weapon that was in a class by itself and was more advanced than any other submarine of the period, Allied or Axis. Thankfully, only two Type XXI’s made it to active service, and they never saw combat.
We do not know the actual number of those who died building the bunker. About 550 names, mostly French POWs are recorded today on the memorial that has been erected at the site. However, deaths are estimated to be at least 6,000 and some estimates are much higher.
Today, the bunker stands as a memorial site “in remembrance of the war and the crimes committed by the Nazis.” Grown Men Cry Out at Night is dedicated to the thousands of slave laborers who lost their lives and to those who survived the ordeal of building the Valentin Bunker. Although we may not know your names, we shall never forget your suffering.
In the novel, Caspar Lehman, a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent and Luba Haas, a former Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative are given the assignment to find and capture the bunker’s former head of security, Gestapo Senior Lieutenant Ulrich Dettmer.
Dettmer, a man of extraordinary cruelty, is among those chiefly responsible for working thousands of laborers to death during the bunker’s construction. Haas has additional motivation to find Dettmer. Her husband, a Polish resistance fighter who was trained by the SOE, was among those interred at the nearby Farge concentration camp, which supplied the laborers for the bunker. She desperately wants to know his fate.
So, what was the Valentin Bunker?
The bunker was intended to be a submarine assembly facility and it is located about 25 miles northwest of Bremen, near the villages of Rekum and Farge. The bunker, which actually acts as a protective shell for the submarine assembly lines inside is enormous, and it is the largest free-standing bunker in Germany. Rising up from the otherwise flat Northern German plain, the bunker stands more than 25 meters tall, 97 meters wide, and 426 meters long.
Construction on the bunker began in February of 1943 and continued until March 1945 when it was abandoned. By then, the fate of Germany was sealed. The Wehrmacht was reeling from the pounding it was taking by the Soviet Red Army in the East and Allied forces attacking from the West. The camp’s Kriegsmarine guards, and their SS and Gestapo overseers wanted to cover evidence of their abuses, so prisoners from the Farge camp were packed into railcars and sent to other camps to await their fate.
Building the Valentin Bunker is a story of incredible cruelty. Bunker construction was carried out by thousands of slave laborers. The majority of the laborers were POWs – Russian, Polish, Greek, and French soldiers. There were 32 Irish prisoners illegally held at the Farge camp; Ireland was a neutral country, but they were held, nevertheless. These men were Irish merchant seamen who served on British vessels and were captured by German Navy raiders. But there were also ordinary Germans who worked on the bunker. Many were political prisoners, some were communists or labor activists, members of the clergy, and there were a host of others who were convicted of various crimes against the Nazi regime.
Workers were fed a starvation diet and disease was rampant. Medical care was rudimentary at best, and supplies were scarce. There was at least one documented outbreak of cholera during the construction of the bunker. But what took its greatest toll on the laborers was the work itself. It was backbreaking and exhausting. Workers poured thousands of tons of concrete, they hoisted and put steel girders into place, all while working largely by hand. Many workers died in place during the construction, their remains are still there to this day, entombed in the concrete that now surrounds them forever.
Had the bunker’s submarine assembly lines become operational, intelligence estimates are that the bunker would have eventually produced more than a dozen Type XXI submarines each month. The Type XXI was a state-of-the-art submarine, unlike any other submarine of its day. It was the first submarine designed to operate primarily submerged. Other submarines of the period spent most of their time operating on the surface and only submerged to avoid detection. Other design improvements made the Type XXI a submarine a formidable weapon that was in a class by itself and was more advanced than any other submarine of the period, Allied or Axis. Thankfully, only two Type XXI’s made it to active service, and they never saw combat.
We do not know the actual number of those who died building the bunker. About 550 names, mostly French POWs are recorded today on the memorial that has been erected at the site. However, deaths are estimated to be at least 6,000 and some estimates are much higher.
Today, the bunker stands as a memorial site “in remembrance of the war and the crimes committed by the Nazis.” Grown Men Cry Out at Night is dedicated to the thousands of slave laborers who lost their lives and to those who survived the ordeal of building the Valentin Bunker. Although we may not know your names, we shall never forget your suffering.
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Lest we forget.