Anniversary: The Dambusters Raid on Bunker Valentin — March 27, 1945

On Good Friday, 27 March 1945, 18 Lancaster bombers of RAF 617 Squadron — the «Dambusters» — dropped Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs, the largest conventional bombs used in the war, on the Valentin submarine assembly bunker at Bremen-Farge. Two penetrated the roof slab, then only 4.5 to 4.6 metres thick in that section rather than the full 7, and blew a hole roughly eight to nine metres across. A second raid followed three days later. Construction, already 90 to 95 percent complete, was never resumed.

The bunker had been built to assemble Type XXI submarines by a workforce of 10,000 to 12,000 forced labourers and concentration-camp prisoners, most from a sub-camp of Neuengamme housed nearby in a disused fuel tank. It never completed a single U-boat. The site had no public memorial for seventy years after the war, including twenty-five as an active Bundeswehr depot; it opened as the Denkort Bunker Valentin only in 2015.

The Bunker Valentin entry tells how the building itself — and the labour that built it — became the memorial’s central subject.