Three of the German navy’s most advanced submarines were scuttled by their own crews inside this bunker in the war’s last days, then buried under British demolition charges with the wrecks still in place. Decades later, when a container terminal needed the ground back, army engineers with 226 charges of dynamite still couldn’t finish the job in a single try.
At a glance
Elbe II stood in the Vulkanhafen, on the Howaldtswerke Hamburg shipyard grounds at Steinwerder, built from 1940 and completed in 1941 to fit out newly built U-boats before commissioning, shared with the neighbouring Blohm & Voss yard. Its two flooded chambers held six Type VIIC submarines apiece, under a three-metre concrete roof doubled as workshop and office space above — and as camouflage.
Bombed repeatedly from 1944 and hit hard on 8 April 1945, the bunker’s last wartime act was its own crews scuttling three state-of-the-art Type XXI submarines inside it rather than surrender them. British forces demolished the structure that November with the wrecks still inside. What was left proved unexpectedly stubborn: a 2001 demolition meant to clear the site for container storage had to be abandoned and redone piece by piece, and the ground wasn’t fully cleared until 2003.
Key facts
- Built: 1940–1941, on caisson foundations driven into 2,500 piles in the sandy Elbe riverbed; two wet chambers, each holding up to six Type VIIC U-boats; roof three metres thick.
- Purpose: fitting-out newly built submarines before they entered service, operated jointly by the Howaldtswerke and Blohm & Voss shipyards.
- Damage, 8 April 1945: an air raid partially destroyed the bunker during the intensified Allied bombing of Hamburg’s harbour that began in 1944.
- Scuttled inside the west chamber: at the war’s end, their own crews sank U-3004, U-2505 and U-3506 — all Type XXI, the most advanced submarine design then in service — rather than let them be taken. A fourth, U-2501, was grounded outside the bunker on 3 May 1945, later raised and scrapped.
- Demolition, 11 November 1945: British occupation forces destroyed the bunker with the three wrecked Type XXI boats still inside; the wrecks were salvaged for parts over the following years, and their remains left in place, visible at low tide for decades.
- Container port expansion: from October 1995 the chambers were filled with Elbe sand; from 1999 the whole Vulkanhafen basin was filled in.
- Final demolition, 2 June 2001: an attempt to blast the remaining structure failed outright; the ruin had to be loosened with smaller charges piece by piece and broken up with heavy hydraulic tools. The site was only fully covered over in summer 2003, becoming a container storage yard for the Container Terminal Tollerort.
- Coordinates: 53.5393° N, 9.9615° E (Steinwerder).
The fact
Elbe II’s final wartime act and its final demolition were separated by 56 years, and both defied the outcome each side expected. In 1945, three of the German navy’s newest submarines went down not to Allied action but to their own crews’ hands, inside the bunker built to protect them. In 2001, the demolition crew clearing the site for container storage — a routine industrial job, not a military operation — found the structure would not come down on the first attempt, and had to reduce it charge by charge and machine by machine over two more years.
Who tells it, and where the accounts diverge
There is no real dispute over what happened at Elbe II — the German Wikipedia account, drawn from Jan Heitmann’s history of Hamburg’s U-boat bunkers, and the surviving 1981 photograph of the ruin agree closely. The tension here is less about competing narratives than about what each era chose to leave behind. The British in 1945 destroyed the bunker but left the scuttled wrecks and rubble largely undisturbed for decades, visible at low tide as an accidental monument nobody had planned. It took a commercial need — more container storage on the Elbe — rather than any act of memory, to finally clear the site in the early 2000s, and even then the ground gave up the wreckage only reluctantly.
What remains
Nothing of the bunker or the submarine wrecks is visible today: the site was fully backfilled by 2003 and is now part of the working container yard of the Container Terminal Tollerort. There is no public memorial on the ground itself.
Getting there
The former site is inside the operational Container Terminal Tollerort at Steinwerder, in the Port of Hamburg, and is not open to public access; the harbour can be viewed from public ferry routes and the nearby Elbe waterfront.
Sources
- German Wikipedia, Elbe II, citing Jan Heitmann, Boote unter Beton: Die Hamburger U-Boot-Bunker (Hamburger Unterwelten e.V., 2007) — construction, the 1945 scuttling and demolition, and the 2001–2003 clearance.
- uboat.net, on the Type XXI submarines scuttled at Elbe II and their postwar discovery.
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