Qualla: Laboe Naval Memorial

Laboe Naval Memorial: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vwpolonia75 (Jens K. Müller), CC BY-SA 3.0. In August 1927, Admiral Reinhard Scheer struck the foundation stone of a tower on the Baltic shore and spoke three lines over it: for German seamen's honour, for Germany's floating defence, for the return of both. Scheer had commanded the High Seas Fleet at Jutland. The fleet he wanted back lay on the bottom at Scapa Flow, scuttled by its own crews eight years earlier. Whatever else the monument at Laboe was going to be, it began as an argument about the future. It has been revising itself ever since.

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Image: Vwpolonia75 (Jens K. Müller) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laboe Naval Memorial: A Flame, Not a Sail

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Gustav August Munzer's design was chosen from the 1927 competition — the formal first prize actually went to a rival entry, Heinz Stoffregen's, but the judges preferred Munzer's concept and had it built in simplified form — with a shape nobody has ever agreed on. Guides point out...

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Image: Public domain

Laboe Naval Memorial: The Ceremony of 1936

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KzS R. Rossow (†1941), CC BY 3.0 de. The memorial was formally inaugurated on 30 May 1936. Adolf Hitler attended, watching a naval review from the aviso Grille while the sail training ship Gorch Fock rendered honours offshore. A monument conceived in the Weimar years by the Deutscher Marinebund — a veterans' associa...

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Image: KzS R. Rossow (†1941) | CC BY 3.0 de

Laboe Naval Memorial: What the Inscription Became

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1945 the Royal Navy took the complex over and expelled the Marinebund. The Allies handed it back in 1954, but with a condition attached: the memorial had to widen. The new dedication read "Dem Gedenken aller toten deutschen Seefahrer beider Weltkriege und unserer toten Gegner"...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Laboe Naval Memorial: The Boat on the Beach

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Then there is U-995, hauled up onto the sand below the tower, grey and improbably small. She is a Type VIIC/41, commissioned on 16 September 1943, and she made nine war patrols in Arctic waters under two commanders, Walter Köhntopp and then Hans-Georg Hess. At the surrender she w...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Laboe Naval Memorial: From the Deck

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phileas Fogg, Public domain. The view from 85 metres is worth the climb regardless of what brought you. Kiel Fjord runs south toward the city and the naval base; ferries work the water below; on a clear day the Danish coast is a suggestion on the horizon. Laboe itself is a modest seaside town, all beach huts...

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Image: Phileas Fogg | Public domain