Qualla: Valentin submarine pens

Valentin submarine pens: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olga Ernst, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around 1,600 forced labourers died building it. Of those, 1,144 are known by name. Start there, because the concrete will otherwise take over the story - and the concrete is genuinely difficult to ignore. On the Weser between the Bremen suburbs of Rekum and Farge stands a slab 426 metres long and 97 metres wide, its walls four and a half metres thick, its roof reaching seven metres in the eastern section. The Germans codenamed it Valentin and intended it to assemble Type XXI U-boats from prefabricated sections floated upriver on barges: three boats in April 1945, then at least fourteen every month. By March 1945 it was ninety percent finished and the machine tools were installed. Not one submarine was ever completed inside it. Everything it cost was paid by people who had no say in the matter, and it bought nothing at all.

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Image: Olga Ernst | CC BY-SA 4.0

Valentin submarine pens: The People Who Built It

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzystofsugi, CC0. Up to 10,000 people worked the site at a time, and estimates of the total run to 12,000. They were civilian forced labourers seized from eastern and western Europe, Soviet prisoners of war, Italian military internees, concentration camp prisoners held at the Neuengamme satellite ...

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Image: Krzystofsugi | CC0

Valentin submarine pens: Thirty-Two Men from a Neutral Country

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Fahrenhorst, CC BY 3.0. In 1943 the Gestapo put a proposition to thirty-two captured Irish merchant sailors, citizens of a neutral state, held after their ships were taken: work for Germany. All thirty-two refused. They were sent to the labour re-education camp at Farge, starved, beaten and put to work ...

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Image: Gerd Fahrenhorst | CC BY 3.0

Valentin submarine pens: Twenty Months of Arches

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hannes Grobe/BHV, CC BY 3.0. The Organisation Todt designed and oversaw the work, with Marineoberbaurat Edo Meiners in overall charge and Erich Lackner as supervising engineer on site; Lackner went on to a long postwar career as one of Germany's most prominent civil engineers. The roof was assembled from doz...

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Image: Hannes Grobe/BHV | CC BY 3.0

Valentin submarine pens: Grand Slam

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit see src, Public domain. On 27 March 1945 the RAF sent twenty Lancasters of 617 Squadron - the crews who had refined precision bombing after the Dams raid - carrying seven five-ton Tallboys and thirteen ten-ton Grand Slams. Ninety Mustangs escorted them; a separate force of 115 Lancasters hit the fuel de...

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Image: see src | Public domain

Valentin submarine pens: Too Solid to Remove

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corradox, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 1946 the Anglo-American Project Ruby began dropping more bombs on Valentin to learn what it would take to break heavy concrete. The finding was blunt: none of the bombs tested were suitable against massive reinforced concrete. Demolition by explosive was ruled out too, b...

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Image: Corradox | CC BY-SA 4.0