The 76m platform
A glass lift over what burned.
W. Bulach โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท LuxTonnerre โ CC BY 2.0 ยท Frank Schulenburg โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Dirtsc โ CC BY-SA 3.0
A series of British and American air raids on Hamburg in late July 1943 that ignited a firestorm reaching hundreds of degrees and drawing the oxygen out of shelters. Around forty thousand civilians were killed within days, much of the city destroyed and hundreds of thousands made homeless. The memorial here is built around that event specifically.
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The tower of St Nikolai is what remains of a church that was for a period the tallest building in the world (1874-76) at a hundred and forty-seven metres. The church itself burned and was destroyed in Operation Gomorrah โ the air raids that struck Hamburg in July 1943, killing some forty thousand people within days and burning whole districts in a firestorm. Hamburg's post-war decision was that the church would not be rebuilt: the tower alone would stand, with the ruins beneath it, as a permanent warning. The floor today is open and the broken columns still stand, and a basement exhibition documents the bombing โ but from an unusual angle: it also covers the German air force's bombing of other cities such as Coventry and Warsaw, refusing to separate what happened to Hamburg from what Germany did first. A glass lift rises inside the tower to a platform at seventy-six metres overlooking the city centre and harbour โ a direct view across the area that burned. The tower remains among the tallest structures in Hamburg.
A glass lift over what burned.
It also covers Coventry and Warsaw.
Willy-Brandt-Strasse 60, 20457 Hamburg