Bunkermuseum Emden, Military history museum in Emden, Germany.
The Bunkermuseum Emden is a museum set inside a preserved World War II bunker in the city of Emden, in northern Germany. It displays photographs, documents, and everyday objects from the war period, showing how the installation was built and how it functioned.
Construction of the bunker on Holzsägerstraße began on 1 April 1941 to plans by the Luftschutzbauamt and was completed on 14 April 1942, using 2,901 cubic metres of reinforced concrete. After the war it stood empty and passed to the Bundesvermögensverwaltung, which kept it for civil defence. A working group founded in March 1994 opened a first exhibition there on 6 September 1994, and the museum followed on 6 May 1995.
The permanent exhibition runs chronologically through 26 rooms, beginning with the end of the Weimar Republic and a projection titled "Emden vor und im Kriege". Room themes cover persecution, terror, emigration, deportation and forced labour, and one room presents the Engerhafe concentration camp, the only satellite camp of Neuengamme in East Frisia, open from 21 October to 22 December 1944.
The museum occupies the Hochbunker at Holzsägerstraße, a tower-like structure with a cellar and six floors above ground, so visitors climb stairs rather than descend. It is open from May to October. The building was closed from November 2020 until 6 September 2023 for fire-safety work, when an escape tower was added.
The bunker was designed to hold several hundred people at once, and its internal layout has not been changed since the war. The narrow corridors and small rooms still give a direct sense of how cramped daily life inside a shelter could be.
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