Barrack Wilhelmine

The Baracke Wilhelmine stands in Schwanewede’s Neuenkirchen Heath on the site of a former Nazi labour camp and later military installations. A single-storey brick building with a shallow roof, it was erected in 1939 as part of the Marine Gemeinschaftslager II built to house workers constructing a massive underground fuel depot. After the war the same structure served as a naval hospital, an evangelical hospital and finally a Bundeswehr barracks before falling into disuse. The site witnessed forced labour on an industrial scale. Up to twelve thousand prisoners, deportees and concentration camp inmates were crowded into seven camps around the U-boat bunker Valentin, one of the largest construction projects of the Third Reich. The Baracke Wilhelmine itself housed the bunker’s construction office, while nearby the SS ran the Lebensborn home at Haus Friesland, a programme whose history the memorial now examines. Inside, eleven exhibition rooms cover the site’s transformations from labour camp to hospital to barracks. Original fittings such as wooden sash windows and doors have been recreated, while displays trace the fates of those who worked and died here. The surrounding heath still holds traces of the bunkers and camps, linking the memorial directly to the landscape of wartime exploitation.