Sites in Northern Germany

Bremen 

  Bremen from the bank of the river Weser in the 1930s and today. 

On 2 December 1922, the first Bremer local chapter of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was founded. Its membership from 1925 to 1927 was between 80 and 100. In 1928 the Nazi Party obtained only 1.1 percent of the vote. The local group was divided, and their chairs often changed. Its director Carl Röver Bremer disbanded the local group and they started again. It formed three party districts in the city: Old Town, East and West.  

On 14 September 1930 before the general election Adolf Hitler visited for the first time and on 30 July he gave a campaign speech at the Weser Stadium . In the election in Bremen about twelve percent of the electorate voted for the NSDAP compared to 18.2% in the rest of the country. By the next election on 28 November following another visit by Hitler, the Nazi Party had 1000 members and received 25.4% of the vote with 32 seats in the Bremen State Parliament.

   
After the war

Stephanibrücke after the war and its current incarnation.
    
The cathedral then and now 

Robinson-Crusoe-Haus and Haus Atlantis on Martinistraße July 6, 1941 and today

Entrance to Böttcherstraße in the 1930s and today, with Bernhard Hoetger’s Lichtbringer dating from 1936.

The Faulenquartier after the war and today

 

Am Wall in 1936 given the Olympic flags and today

Obernstraße  in 1938 and today, looking towards the Cathedral

Sögestraße in 1938 and today
 
Nazi eagle remaining on the façade of Allianz-Haus at Sögestraße 59.

 Weserstadion, since extensively rebuilt after the war. On July 20, 1932 Hitler spoke here, declaring that "For me it will be easier to answer before history for the destruction of thirty parties than for those who founded them."

Shortly before Hitler had landed in Bremen, he had given the crowds gathered in the Weser Stadium an effective demonstration of his Promethean qualities. He had instructed the pilot to circle over the stadium in the dark night sky with the cabin illuminated. The result was an eerie, otherworldly scene, and many in the audience were left with the impression that Hitler had actually descended to earth as a sort of god. What had been conceived as mere fantasy by Benson in his book, The Lord of the World, seemed to become reality.

Domarus (146) The Complete Hitler

 Hamburg
Hauptstadt der deutschen Schiffahrt (Capital of German Shipping)

The Hamburger rathaus at Adolf-Hitler-Platz as named in a 1935 postcard and today at the renamed rathausplatz.

 The Grossen Festsaal inside has changed little from the time Hitler spoke within

Hitler speaking from the rathaus balcony 14 February 1939 and how it appears today

  Johann von Leers's Bomben auf Hamburg is available online

Former Gestapo Headquarters at Stadthausbrücke 8

After the allied air strike from Operation Gomorrah of July 1943 making the complex to a large extent useless for the use by the police. Today the former city hall is to be the site for a documentation centre by 2013.

The main railway station sporting the swastika and today

This former Hafenbunker on Landungsbrücken 7 now houses a Portuguese restaurant

 The Flakbunker in Hamburg, Wilhelmsburg now being converted to an Energiebunker

http://www.iba-hamburg.de/de/01_entwuer ... bunker.php

A gravestone at Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg from the Nazi era.

There were three large forced-labour camps in Hannover, a large industrial city in northern Germany. All three of the camps were part of the Neuengamme concentration camp system. 

Neuengamme  

 

Neuengamme concentration camp, the largest concentration camp in north-west Germany, was established to the south-east of Hamburg in 1938. The camp existed until 1945. Over 100,000 prisoners from throughout Europe were imprisoned in the main camp and its 86 satellite camps. At least 42,900 people died in Neuengamme, its satellite camps and during the camp evacuations at the end of the war.

In early April 1945, American forces entered Hannover and freed the surviving prisoners. The American Signal Corps filmed one of the Hannover camps soon after liberation. American forces fed survivors of the camp and required German civilians to help bury the dead. 

 

 

 After the war, the British military authorities used the concentration camp buildings as an internment camp for three years. In 1948, the occupying forces handed the camp over to the city of Hamburg, which set up a prison on the site. At the end of the 1960s, the city established a second prison building on the grounds of the former concentration camp. A monument was set up in 1965 as a memorial, and in 1981, a document building was added. Other parts of the former camp were gradually incorporated into the memorial. When the penal facilities were finally moved, the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial was able to expand into the site of the former prisoners' barracks and open as a centre for exhibitions, international exchanges and historical studies in May 2005. 

Greifswald

The eleven stolperstein in town were apparently targeted by neo-Nazis who removed them on the 74th anniversary of Kristallnacht, November 9 2012. As of today a makeshift sign marks where they were taken.

SA Platz, now renamed Platz der Freiheit

The marketplace then and now

 The rathaus

Schleswig-Holstein

Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein)

Laboe Naval Memorial was completed by the Nazis in 1936 after Hitler had observed the naval manoeuvres in Kiel and watched a parade from the light battleship Grille before inspecting the German shipyards. At a ceremony commemorating the dead of the Great War on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Skagerrak (May 31, 1916), Hitler attended the dedication of the memorial and laid a wreath honouring the navy’s dead. In fact, Hitler did not like the U-boat monument in Laboe at all; in one conversation he called it “an unrivalled essay in kitsch and bad taste, as it stands there with its inverted bow.” (Doramus (1310) The Complete Hitler)

The tower itself is 72 metres high with an observation deck near the top. There is also a large, underground memorial room and a museum detailing the history of the German Navy which had been originally dedicated to the German naval war dead of the First World War. In the 1950s it was converted to a memorial for sailors of all nationalities who died in the World Wars and the right photo shows the memorial to those who had served in the Second World War.

At the east shore of Kiel Bay is the U-boat Memorial at Möltenort to the memory of submariners who lost their lives. The reichsadler is by Fritz Schmoll, responsible for others seen on this site. The photo on the left shows its inauguration in 1938.

Pelzerhaken (Schleswig-Holstein)

This lighthouse on the Baltic was built in 1843 and stands at 19 metres, although the eagle itself has remained since its establishment in 1936

Adolf Hitler Koog

In 1935, the Nazis reclaimed land from the North Sea to obtain Lebensraum for Aryan families. The centerpiece of this new community on Adolf Hitler Koog, now Dieksanderkoog located 62 miles from Hamburg, was a grand hall. Here the concept of Volksgemeinshaft that lived up to Nazi ideals of racial purity and loyal to NSDAP ideology was to be realised. Settlers had to produce documentary evidence that proved their Aryan ancestry dating back to 1800 before being personally examined and hand-picked by senior local officials. Hitler himself was present when the project was completed.

Official groundbreaking to Neulandhalle on the “Adolf Hitler Koog” on 29 August 1935. Hitler, The Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse and other NS-Hoheitsträger lay the foundation-stone during the official inauguration.

The outside of the building sported two monumental figures, one armed with a rifle and the other holding a shovel, staring into the distance. The originals were removed after the war, but replicas will be put back in their original place when the new museum scheduled to take over the site opens.

The frescoes by Otto Thämer remain intact

 Mecklenburg

The island of Rügen is much mythologised in the German national imagination. Frequented in the late 19th and early 20th century by the country’s good and great, including Bismarck, Thomas Mann and Einstein, its chalk coastline was also immortalised by Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in 1818. It was here that the sea resort of Prora was created, designed to house 20,000 holidaymakers. Designed by Clemens Klotz, the buildings complex extend over a length of 4.5 km and are roughly 150 m from the long flat sandy beach. All rooms were planned to overlook the sea. Each room of 5 by 2.5 metres (16'5" x 8'3") was to have two beds, an armoire (wardrobe) and a sink. There were communal toilets and showers. 

Hitler's plans for Prora were much more ambitious as seen in this model. He wanted a gigantic sea resort, the "most mighty and large one to ever have existed". At the same time, Hitler wanted it to be convertible into a military hospital in case of war. During the few years that Prora was under construction, all major construction companies of the Reich and nearly 9,000 workers were involved in this project. With the onset of World War II in 1939 construction on Prora stopped, and the construction workers transferred to the V-Weapons plant at Peenemünde. The eight housing blocks, the theatre and cinema stayed as empty shells, and the swimming pools and festival hall never materialised.

The Nazis' touristic policy, 

which prioritized unknown and less busy destinations, was primarily motivated by a desire to keep KdF participants away from places frequented by wealthier private tourists. Even the massive KdF resort complex, Prora, on the island of Rügen, represented another way to steer KdF tourism away from the top German resorts.63 Thus, rather than force upper-class tourists and exclusive resorts to adhere to the oft-proclaimed principles of Nazi egalitarian- ism, the Nazi regime did all it could to avoid damage to the commercial tourism industry and minimize the potential problems that arose when the two groups of tourists came into contact. In sum, then, bourgeois touristic consumption was to continue ‘as normal’, with as few intrusions as possible.

Semmens (112) Seeing Hitler’s Germany 

  During the Allied bombing campaign, many people from Hamburg took refuge in one of the housing blocks, and later refugees from the east of Germany were housed there. By the end of the war, these buildings served to house female auxiliary personnel for the Luftwaffe.
In 1945 the Soviet Army took control of the region, and established a base at Prora. After the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) part of it was used as an army holiday centre. The sturdy but derelict shell of the complex remains as a tourist curiosity. After German reunification, the National People's Army of GDR left the region, and it stood uninhabited until new plans were put in place. The buildings suffered heavy vandalism during this period.
Nowadays, it is still a question what to do with the huge buildings complex, partly hosting some interesting museums. There are plans to turn it into a modern tourist resort but also some skepticism from the locals, who feel that there are already too many tourists in the region, and voices who say that the town's past made it an inappropriate location for tourists.

Güstrow

Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, now Eisenbahnstraße

The Reichsbahnamt

Heiligendamm

The ‘white town on the sea’ is Germany’s oldest seaside resort, founded in 1793 by Mecklenburg duke Friedrich Franz I and fashionable throughout the 19th century as the playground of nobility. Since 2003 it was reborn with the opening of the exclusive Kempinski Grand Hotel Heiligendamm which accommodated US President George W Bush on a state visit and hosted a G8 summit in 2007.Perhaps fittingly, it hosted Hitler a few decades earlier.

In Irving describes a number of occasions where Hitler and Goebbels vacationed here, once with Leni Riefenstahl to whom the latter's wife 

told her privately that she had only married Dr Goebbels so as to be near to Hitler. What of Leni’s politics? ‘She is the only one of all the stars,’ wrote Goebbels that summer, ‘who understands us.’Her name often cropped up in the diary, and in mid August she spent the night at Heiligendamm with the Goebbels’ again. (313)

Hitler and Goebbels with the latter's children in 1935. Another instance Irving relates is when

Goebbels and Hitler drove up to Heiligendamm. ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, who had just returned from America, found them there. ‘Hitler,’ he wrote years afterwards, ‘had a flushed, evil look, as though gorged on the blood of his victims.’ It was not a pleasant vacation. The crowds gawped and cheered them wherever they went, and they had to break off their stay. (349)

The resort then and now