Built in 300 days by a workforce of more than a thousand forced labourers to shield up to 25,000 civilians from Allied bombs, this flak tower spent seven postwar decades as newsroom, nightclub venue and creative-industry warren before a €100 million conversion turned it into a hotel with a public garden spiralling up its wartime concrete. The result is now the subject of open debate in Hamburg over what the building owes its own history.
At a glance
The Feldstraße flak tower, known locally as the St. Pauli Bunker, is one of Berlin-style anti-aircraft towers Nazi Germany built across several major cities; Hamburg’s stands on the Heiligengeistfeld, on the edge of the St. Pauli district. Built in 1942 in just 300 days with forced labour, its roof-mounted guns and thick concrete shelter made it one of the war’s most heavily used civilian refuges in the city, sheltering up to 25,000 people during the firestorm raids of Operation Gomorrah in 1943.
Unlike most of Germany’s other flak towers, it was never seriously targeted for demolition after the war: newsprint offices, Germany’s first NDR television broadcast, and later dozens of creative-industry tenants and music venues occupied it for decades. Since 2024 it carries five new pyramidal storeys, a public spiral garden path, a concert hall, and a hotel — one of the most ambitious adaptive reuses of a Nazi-era structure anywhere in Germany, and one of the most contested.
Key facts
- Built: 1942, in around 300 days, using more than 1,000 forced labourers, reportedly including concentration-camp prisoners.
- Dimensions: footprint roughly 75 by 75 metres, original height about 39 metres; concrete walls up to around 2 metres, roof and floor slabs up to 3.8 metres.
- Shelter capacity: sources put the nominal figure at up to 25,000 civilians, with real numbers during the heaviest raids of 1943 reported higher still.
- Operation Gomorrah, July–August 1943: the bunker sheltered civilians through the firestorm bombing that killed an estimated 34,000–40,000 people across Hamburg and destroyed a third of the city’s housing.
- Postwar reuse, largely uninterrupted: publisher Axel Springer’s Hörzü magazine moved in from 1946; NDR broadcast Germany’s first regional Tagesschau news bulletin from inside the tower in December 1952; roughly 30 creative-industry businesses and music venues occupied it into the 2010s. The Allies considered the demolition too costly and risky to nearby buildings, and never carried it out.
- Conversion, 2014–2024: a ten-year lease to developer Matzen Immobilien funded five new storeys (roughly 20 extra metres), a 560-metre public spiral path (the «Bergpfad») planted with some 4,700 trees and shrubs and 16,000 perennials across more than 7,600 m² of new green space, a 2,200-capacity concert hall (Georg-Elser-Halle, named for the failed 1939 assassin of Hitler), and a 134-room hotel, Reverb by Hard Rock, which opened in July 2024. Declared cost of conversion: roughly €100 million.
- Coordinates: 53.5564° N, 9.9700° E.
How it was built
Feldstraße was raised in 300 days by a workforce of more than a thousand forced labourers, at a pace typical of Germany’s wartime flak-tower programme, which prioritised speed over almost everything else. What set this bunker apart from most of its siblings was not its construction but its survival afterward: rather than standing empty or half-demolished like Berlin’s Humboldthain, it was pressed straight back into civilian use within a year of the war’s end, and stayed in continuous occupation for most of eight decades.
Who tells it, and where the accounts diverge
The developer and the city describe the conversion as responsible stewardship of a difficult site: a free public park replacing a closed military ruin, a memorial exhibition inside acknowledging the building’s origins, and a project that won the MIPIM 2025 award for best conversion. Hamburg’s taz newspaper has told a sharper story in a series of direct reports: the original landscape architects, Interpol, were dismissed shortly after planning permission was secured, prompting accusations of cost-cutting once the approval was in hand; residents of the neighbouring Karoviertel describe 6,000–7,000 daily visitors plus concerts and hotel guests bringing round-the-clock noise their district now absorbs; and a district council member is quoted summing up the mood as «endless party people». A separate taz piece questioned naming the concert hall after Georg Elser, the carpenter who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1939, inside a building built by his regime with slave labour — asking whether invoking a resistance figure risks laundering a commercial venue’s relationship to that history. A University of Hamburg lecture series marking the 80th anniversary of Operation Gomorrah posed the question in its own title: «Bunker, monument, event venue — place of memory?» — a question its organisers left open rather than answered.
What you see today
- The 560-metre public spiral path (Bergpfad) climbing the tower’s exterior, free and open daily.
- A memorial exhibition inside addressing the tower’s wartime history and forced labour.
- The Georg-Elser-Halle concert venue and the Reverb by Hard Rock hotel, both housed in the new upper storeys.
Getting there
The tower stands on the Heiligengeistfeld in St. Pauli, a short walk from St. Pauli and Feldstraße U-Bahn stations; the public garden path is open daily, independent of hotel or concert access.
Sources
- City of Hamburg (hamburg.de) and bunker-stpauli.de — construction, shelter capacity, postwar reuse, conversion figures.
- ASCE Civil Engineering magazine (asce.org) — structural dimensions and the conversion’s engineering.
- taz, «Streit um den Feldstraßenbunker» and «Event-Location auf St. Pauli: Die Macht des Faktischen» — the design-team dispute and residents’ account of the venue’s impact.
- Mahnmal St. Nikolai (mahnmal-st-nikolai.de), on Operation Gomorrah’s death toll and the bunker’s wartime role as shelter.
- University of Hamburg lecture series (lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de), «Bunker, Denkmal, Eventlocation — Gedenkort?» — the open academic question about memory and commercial reuse.
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