# A Luxury Hotel With a Lush Rooftop Garden Is Rising Inside a Massive Former Nazi Bunker

> A vast former Nazi bunker in Hamburg is being transformed into a luxury hotel with a rooftop garden. See how the city is reshaping its heritage.

- URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/kolyshnii-natsystskyi-bunker-u-hamburzi-peretvoriuietsia-na-rozkishnyi-hotel-iz-sadom-na-dakhu/
- Language: en
- Published: 2024-02-07
- Categories: Culture, Historic Sites, Museums, Hotels, Tours, Germany

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A luxury hotel crowned by a lush rooftop garden is set to open inside a huge former Nazi bunker.

Originally known as Flakturm IV (Anti-Aircraft Tower IV), the Hochbunker in Hamburg's St. Pauli district stands as a reminder of Germany's military past.

Built in 1942 in just 300 days, the bunker in the St. Pauli district has been in constant use since the defeat of the Nazis three years later, which marked the end of the Second World War.

At first, the building housed civilians during Germany's postwar housing crisis. Later, the space was used by a German television station and other businesses.

Since the 1990s it has been known as the "media bunker," home to around 40 organizations, including nightclubs, radio stations and studios, according to Hamburg's official tourism website.

Now a hotel is planned there too, and the entire complex is undergoing a major renovation that includes an innovative landscape design project.

NH Hotel Group hopes to create a 136-room hotel called nhow Hamburg, with rooms starting at 100 euros per night.

According to a statement on the group's website, the hotel, which will also feature a bar, cafe and restaurant, is scheduled to open in mid-2021.

The rooftop park, open to everyone who uses the building, will include a memorial center dedicated to the victims of Nazi Germany.

The plan is to add five pyramid-shaped floors, topped by a lavish rooftop garden offering panoramic views over the city. According to the planners, it will feature a "planted 'mountain path' that climbs upward around the bunker."

More than 1,000 bunkers were built in Hamburg during the war, and the Hochbunker was one of the largest in Germany. According to Hamburg's official website, in 1942 around 1,000 forced laborers were made to build the structure, which measured 75 by 75 meters wide and 35 meters tall, with walls 3.5 meters thick.

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Designed to shelter 18,000 people, it had a wide entrance so women could push strollers inside. About 25,000 people took refuge there during the summer air raids of 1943.

Plans to demolish it after the war were abandoned, according to the Hamburg website, because the amount of explosives needed would likely have destroyed the surviving residential areas as well.

Frank Schulze, a spokesperson for Bunker St Pauli, said the project is part of an initiative dreamed up by local residents to create an "urban garden for the neighborhood."

Schulze noted that the hotel chain is not running the construction project but is a tenant, like the other 40 companies that "continue to have their home in the bunker."

"In addition to this new public natural oasis, the bunker will, for the first time, gain a memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime and the Second World War," he added.

Maarten Markus, managing director for Northern Europe at NH Hotel Group, said his company is aware of the building's history and significance.

"Our design and lifestyle brand takes an inclusive approach, which means nhow Hamburg will integrate into the neighborhood and the creative scene."

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The concept is likely to tap into the growing trend of dark tourism, which involves traveling to places where death or suffering has taken place or been memorialized. Such sites can include Holocaust locations, battlefields, prisons, sites of slavery, cemeteries and other places of great suffering.

"Dark tourism has become a widespread cultural activity over the past couple of decades," said Dr. Philip Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. "This former Nazi bunker being turned into a hotel is a sign of appropriating difficult heritage. In short, instead of destroying our sites of pain and shame, we repurpose the functional aspects of the buildings while honoring their complicated past.

"The plans for an internal memorial inside the hotel show how sensitive heritage can be appropriated, and how heritage can help us remember, whereas in some places history is forgotten.

"Future guests may be drawn to the hotel because of its complicated heritage, and there will always be a fine ethical line between exploitation and commercialization. The challenge is to repurpose the building responsibly and give guests an authentic narrative. In that way, dark tourism can shed light on our painful past."