The St Pauli bunker as evening falls in Hamburg. — Photos: WOLFGANG STELLJES/dpa
You can easily overlook it, the entrance to the Tiefbunker (deep bunker) Steintorwall located right next to Hamburg’s central train station in Germany.
Guests at a Turkish snack shop must shuffle their chairs aside before Michael Richter, using a hydraulic lift, can raise the metal floor plate. Once removed, it reveals 35 steps leading down into the depths.
“You won’t get down there only in flip-flops or high heels,” Michael’s wife Sonja warns. “The steps are shorter and steeper and don’t meet German norms.”
And it’s advisable to take a jacket along, what with temperatures steady at 12°C. The Richters, one up front, the other at the back, lead their group through the gloomy labyrinth.
In no other German city were so many bunkers built during World War II than in Hamburg. More than 1,000 are documented, with about half of them being smaller tubular or tube bunkers. After the war, many of the bunkers went unused.
Rock bands found them useful as a place to practice. One bunker was converted into a cocktail bar.
The Tiefbunker Steintorwall was built by slave labourers during the war. “But they weren’t allowed in when the air raid sirens went off,” Richter says.
After the war, the bunker served as a restaurant and hotel. After October 1964, it was re-outfitted as an “ABC” – atomic, biological, chemical warfare – bunker.
Kanne showing visitors to the bunker the remains of a melted gas canister.
Bunk beds
Everything that you see here is Cold War, Michael Richter says. It starts with the counting system which noted each person entering the bunker. The bunker consisted of two facilities, each with a capacity for 1,351 people. Once that number was reached, the special system automatically shut the doors, “... no matter if a child or maybe your partner was still outside,” Richter says.
The large room was filled with rows of seats, five or six per row. The guidelines for waiting out an attack dictated “16 hours sitting, eight hours lying down”.
Each row of seats had a bar of soap, a plate, a cup and spoon for each person. “But no knives or forks – nothing that could be used to injure someone else.”
And who would have slept, and where, in the bunk beds dubbed “sleeping beauty”, Richter is asked. “This is a topic that you shouldn’t dwell on for too long, for it would then raise other questions,” he says.
After 14 days at the latest the bunker keeper was to put on a protective suit and go out to look around. “He had a short-wave radio and could listen to what was going on outside.”
The toilet
One tubular bunker that people can enter is in the district of Hamm, east of the downtown area of Hamburg which was destroyed to 96% by the “Operation Gomorrha” Allied bombing raids of July 1943.
It was one of four tubular bunkers hidden beneath the garden of a church.
“Almost nothing was left standing here after the air raids,” says Stephanie Kanne, a historian who heads the Hamm district archives. During a tour of the bunker she answers visitors’ questions, including where people slept (“seated on one of the wooden benches”) or what they ate (“whatever that they brought”) or toilets (“down at the end of the tube”).
The four tubes provided protection to 50 persons each against bomb fragments and falling debris, but not against any direct hits. What people sitting below ground must have felt during the 1943 firestorm above? “We cannot even begin to imagine,” says Kanne.
The ruins of this shelter were converted into an energy bunker in 2010. — BODO MARKS/dpa
Tourist attraction
Hands down, the best-known example of the repurposing of a bunker is the anti-aircraft bunker in the St Pauli district. It was one of the largest ever built. Officially, it could take in 18,000 people, but during the July 1943 inferno, clearly more took refuge there, says city guide Tomas Kaiser.
After the war, the British occupiers decided against trying to blow up the massive concrete monstrosity.
Starting in 1990, the bunker was converted into a media centre while it also housed a renowned music club called Uebel & Gefahrlich (Evil & Dangerous) as well as a “resonance room”, the first club in Europe devoted to classical music.
Then, between 2019 and 2024, five further floors were built on top, providing room for a convention hall and a hotel with restaurant, cafe, bar and shop. Today, the bunker is two colours – gray below, green up above. Thousands of perennial plants, bushes and trees were planted on the five new floors.
The climb is rewarding. Once on top, there is a panoramic view of the nearby St Michael’s Church, the sparkling new Elbphilharmonie concert hall, the bustling Elbe River harbour, and the surrounding neighbourhood.
Only when first-division football club FC St Pauli hosts a home match in the Millerntor Stadium next to the bunker is the “Bergpfad” closed down – nobody could reach it among the throng of football fans.
A St Pauli bunker has this view of the Millerntor stadium.
The Energy Bunker
In addition to the anti-aircraft bunker in St Pauli, there is another one in Hamburg, located on the Elbe River island district of Wilhelmsburg. As part of the International Building Exhibition, the war ruins were converted into an energy bunker in 2010.
During a guided tour, you can get to know the heart of the facility, with a 20m heat storage tank in the middle holding two million litres of water and supplying all connected households in Wilhelmsburg with heat when needed.
You can also visit the Cafe Vju in one of the four anti-aircraft towers without a guided tour. From 30m up, the distant view of the Hamburg skyline is in no way inferior to the panoramic view offered by the bunker in St. Pauli. – WOLFGANG STELLJES/dpa
