A reinforced-concrete submarine repair bunker on the Deutsche Werft shipyard grounds, built to finish and refit U-boats out of Allied bomber range. It fell to a single raid in the war’s final month, was buried under its own rubble in the 1980s, and resurfaced by chance in 2002 when Airbus extended the runway next door.
At a glance
Fink II stood on the grounds of the Deutsche Werft shipyard at Hamburg-Finkenwerder, on the Rüschkanal opposite Hamburg’s city centre across the Elbe. Built from 1941, it was not an assembly bunker but a repair and fitting-out facility: submarines built elsewhere were completed and refitted inside its five flooded chambers, safe from Allied air raids — 114 U-boats, mostly Type VIIC, passed through it before the war’s end.
A single RAF raid on 9 April 1945 penetrated the bunker’s roof and killed dozens of people sheltering inside. The ruins were largely demolished and buried after the war; what remains today sits in the Rüschpark, exposed again since 2002 and marked by a memorial since 2006.
Key facts
- Built: planned from 1940, under construction from March 1941; roughly 150 by 150–200 metres, five submarine chambers (expanded from four in 1944), reinforced-concrete roof up to 3.6 metres thick, an estimated 130,000 m³ of concrete — exact dimensions vary slightly between sources and are reported here as approximate.
- Purpose: repair and fitting-out, not construction from scratch — 114 U-boats, mostly Type VIIC, were completed or refitted here.
- Forced labour: Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers from occupied Europe worked at the shipyard from 1941; one documented case, Petr Subarenko, died on 24 January 1943, recorded in camp registers as «cardiac weakness». From October 1944 the shipyard operated its own sub-camp of Neuengamme concentration camp, solidly documented for a few months (roughly September to November 1944) with 500 prisoners. No source found gives a total count of forced labourers or deaths across the full 1941–45 period.
- The raid, 9 April 1945: around 40 RAF aircraft dropped Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs, one of which penetrated nearly 4 metres of roof slab. Roughly 58 civilians were killed and over 120 seriously injured; the bunker was sheltering an estimated 3,000 people at the time.
- After the war: British forces began dismantling the structure from October 1945, with further structural reduction through the 1960s; the Deutsche Werft shipyard closed in 1973 and the ruins were fully buried in the 1980s.
- Rediscovery: the ruins resurfaced by chance in 2002 during the expansion of the adjacent Airbus runway. The site became the Rüschpark public park in 1996, and a memorial, «Mahnmal U-Boot-Bunker Fink II», opened on 26 August 2006.
- Coordinates: 53.5413° N, 9.8545° E.
How it was built
Fink II was built into the Deutsche Werft shipyard’s own grounds rather than as a standalone facility, using forced and prisoner labour from the start of construction in 1941. Its five flooded chambers let U-boats built elsewhere on the Elbe be towed in, completed and refitted under a concrete roof thick enough to withstand conventional bombing — a defence that held until the RAF began using purpose-built Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs, heavy enough to break through even this kind of structure, in the war’s last year.
Who tells it, and where the accounts diverge
The record here divides not between competing narratives but between what is solidly documented and what is not. The bombing of 9 April 1945 is well attested across every source consulted: roughly 58 dead, over 120 seriously injured, the bunker sheltering about 3,000 people that night. The forced-labour history that preceded it is documented far more thinly — a named individual death in January 1943, and a sub-camp of Neuengamme solidly attested only for a two-to-three-month window in late 1944, against four years of shipyard operation under wartime conditions. That gap between the length of exploitation and the length of surviving documentation is typical of Neuengamme’s smaller satellite camps, and is stated here as a documentary limit, not resolved into a number that no source actually gives.
What you see today
- Exposed sections of the bunker’s ruined concrete structure within the Rüschpark, resurfaced since 2002.
- The «Mahnmal U-Boot-Bunker Fink II» memorial, opened 2006, with an information plaque.
- The site is a public park, not an active industrial or commercial facility.
Getting there
The Rüschpark is in Hamburg-Finkenwerder, on the south side of the Elbe opposite Hamburg’s city centre, reached by ferry or road; the site is freely accessible as a public park.
Sources
- German Wikipedia, Fink II — construction dates, dimensions, capacity, post-war chronology.
- Gedenkstätten in Hamburg (gedenkstaetten-in-hamburg.de) — the 9 April 1945 raid, casualty figures, forced-labour context.
- Finkenwerder Geschichtswerkstatt (finkenwerder-geschichtswerkstatt.de) — local historical documentation, survivor accounts.
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