VEB MÖBELFABRIK [DE]

Exploration #287. The former VEB Möbelfabrik Colmnitz in Saxony began in the 19th century as a chair factory created from the Neumühle site. After decades of furniture production, nationalisation and conversion under the GDR, it closed in 1992.

The industrial story of this abandoned factory starts in 1885, when chair maker Carl Friedrich Hofmann bought the Neumühle property in Colmnitz. By 1896, Hofmann and Carl Albert Kittel had turned chair making into factory production, linking the village to Saxony’s furniture industry. The first chapter ended in 1937, when financial difficulties forced the business to stop. Two years later, Helmut Richter acquired the buildings and rapidly expanded furniture production through military contracts during the Nazi period.

After 1945, private ownership disappeared and the plant was nationalised as VEB Möbelfabrik Colmnitz. Under the GDR, the factory mainly produced kitchen furniture, cupboards and buffets. But the planned economy created overproduction, while a destructive storm in 1958 further weakened the business. Furniture production faded, and the site was absorbed into VEB Bodenbearbeitungsgeräte Leipzig.

Its final role was agricultural: the Colmnitz works made parts for the KS-6 self-propelled beet harvester and later spray booms for crop protection. After German reunification, the factory could not survive the market transition. The last machines were dismantled on 31 March 1992, leaving empty halls and a surviving office wing.

ZECHE FARMER [DE]

Exploration #275 Zeche Farmer. Zeche Farmer is a former coal mine shaft located in the Saarland region of Germany. Like many other mining sites in this area, it was shut down following the steady decline in coal demand, which made extraction economically unsustainable. After its closure, the site was gradually abandoned and left without protection.

Over time, it suffered from looting and the destruction of its machinery, a fate shared by many industrial structures that lose their original function. The absence of conservation measures accelerated its physical decay, erasing much of the technical heritage that once defined the site.

Today, Zeche Farmer survives in a marginal and improvised form: parts of the former mining complex are used as storage space by local farmers. While this new use has little to do with its industrial past, it represents a pragmatic form of reuse and highlights the complex afterlife of industrial landscapes in post-mining regions..

MAUSOLEUM KORCK [DE]

Exploration #239 Mausoleum Korck. The former pastor and scientist Dagobert Schönfeld Korck was buried in this crypt built by him on 8 September 1916.  He was son of Carl Gottfried Schönfeld from Elbing and Marianne Bertha Hacker; the father was also a pastor at the evangelical church in Putzig between 1826 and 1835 and later, until his death, pastor in Jungfer (West Prussia).

Above the crypt rises a small church with a domed ceiling at the apex of which is a circular opening two metres in diameter called the opaion, or oculus in Latin, with the function of allowing light to enter. In order to save weight, the dome is structured by three concentric rings of 22 boxes each, with the boxes of the individual rings becoming smaller and smaller towards the top.

FLUGPLATZ BRAND [DE]

Exploration #216 Flugplatz Brand. Flugplatz Brand is an abandoned airbase about 50 km south of Berlin. Its construction started in 1938 for the Luftwaffe and in 1939, the airfield was equipped with a 1000 m long grass runway. It served as an operational airport and, until September 1944, as a training airfield for the pilot school. A school building was erected especially for the pilot training school.

The Soviet forces, who remained in Germany as occupation forces after the end of the Second World War, extended the small airfield in 1950/1951 by adding a 2500 m long concreted northern main runway. In 1958, another 2000 m runway was added as an auxiliary fighter runway. In later years, there was even a command post and a weapons warehouse that could be used to store nuclear aircraft bombers and MIG-17 as well.

The Soviet left the base and the buildings in 1990 and the site was transferred to German authorities. In 1998 the society CargoLifter bought the area and started dismantling the northern runway and built the most extensive unsupported hall in the world to construct cargo airships. After the insolvency of CargoLifter in 2002, the airship hangar was sold to an investor from Malaysia, who has been operating the amusement park “Tropical Islands” there since 2004. On the contrary the buildings are nowadays abandoned.

HAUS DER OFFIZIERE [DE]

Exploration #206 Haus Der Offiziere. Haus Der Offiziere, also known as the Forbidden City or Little Moscow, is a big abandoned military complex located in Wünsdorf, a small town not far from Berlin. The town was the headquarters of the Soviet forces in communist East Germany and was the largest military base in Europe. From 1994 it is abandoned.

The history of this place begins in 1910 when a military training camp and the Prussian military railway were built. The complex “Haus Der Offiziere” was built in 1914 as a military sports school. During first world war Wünsdorf became the headquarters of the Reichswehr, the German military. After the war the site was also used as a gymnastic training camp to take advantage of its facilities and during the race to 1936 Olympic games some of the Olympic team trained here.

Everything changed drastically in 1945 when the town was occupied by the Soviet army and the Germans surrendered without fighting. The soviets transformed Wünsdorf into a closed town which become the largest Soviet military camp outside of the Soviet Union. A daily delivery via a direct rail link from Moscow allowed the town to isolate itself from the surrounding areas, having its own shops, bakery, and hospital. In preparation for the construction of the Berlin wall Commander-in-Chief Marshall Ivan Konew organised the Soviet armoured protection for the project from here. The Haus Der Offiziere was certainly the best most elegant of town with leisure facilities such as a theatre and swimming pool and the locals were not allowed on site to enjoy the luxuries the Soviets had. A giant statue of Lenin stands was also erected in front of the central building.

Wünsdorf changed again in 1994 when the Soviets left the area and its population dropped from about 60.000 to 6.000 people. Many former Soviet buildings were left abandoned and are still up for sale.
Haus Der Offiziere was also abandoned but luckily it was preserved and today is guarded, waiting for future development projects. The statue of Lenin is still in its original position and it is one the few statue still surviving outside Russia.

If you like this exploration you can also have a look to others abandoned military sites in Germany: the CCCP pilot school, the abandoned soviet hospital.

LANDESANSTALT TEUPITZ [DE]

Exploration #198 Landesanstalt Teupitz. In the years between 1905 and 1908, the psychiatric hospital Landesanstalt Teupitz was built as a self-sufficient institution from 28 individual buildings with clear Art Nouveau influences.

During the First World War, it was used for the first time as a military hospital, then again as a so-called state insane asylum; at the beginning of the 1930s, 1,660 patients lived here. At the beginning of the 1940s, the clinic was subordinate to the Bernburg killing centre, where, according to the National Socialist eugenic-racial ideas, mentally and physically handicapped persons, mentally ill persons and persons classified as antisocial were exterminated within the framework of the euthanasia action “T4”, of whom more than 1,500 came from Teupitz.

Some buildings were reopened after the war as a psychiatric institution, but the majority were converted into a Soviet military hospital, which explains the Cyrillic lettering throughout. Since the withdrawal of the Russian forces after reunification and the rebuilding of the psychiatric hospital in 1997, the houses have been empty, the grounds are hardly affected by vandalism due to their remoteness, most of the damage is due to natural decay, and the former park has now turned into a dense forest area where roe deer and wild boar roam. From autumn 2021 the Landesanstalt Teupitz is totally fenced off with a 2.5m high fence and monitored by cameras.

SCHLOSS W. [DE]

Exploration #164. The Castle is a large four-winged Baroque complex from the 17th and 18th centuries in the Nordsachsen district of Saxony. It has been in disuse and in danger of deterioration since it was sold in 1998 at the moment. The photos only refer to the area of the stables as the main structure was not accessible.

HEILSTATTE GRABOWSEE [DE]

Exploration #154 Heilstatte Grabowsee. Heilstatte Grabowsee was the first sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis in northern Germany and was founded by the German Red Cross in 1896. It is located about 30 km north of Berlin, in the urban area of Oranienburg. The approximately 34 hectare area is surrounded on two sides by forest and banks in the south and west into the Grabowsee lake.

In the second half of the 19th century, the number of lung patients in the German Empire rose sharply. About a third of all patients between the ages of 15 and 60 suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. The Heilstatte Grabowsee was part of the People’s Hospitals Association for the Red Cross initially planned as a test facility. It was to be investigated whether lung patients could also be treated successfully in the northern German lowlands. Until then, human medicine assumed that lung diseases could only be improved or cured in the mild climate of the Mediterranean Sea or in pure mountain air. This is how the first lung sanatorium in northern Germany was established in 1896. In 1900 there were already 200 beds available for slightly to seriously ill men.

During the four years of the First World War, Grabowsee was used by the Red Cross as an emergency hospital for the treatment of soldiers with lung disease. Prisoners of war were also housed here until 1918. The war and the inflationary period also brought the sanatorium into great economic hardship. The people’s sanatorium association sold the institution on June 1, 1920 to the Brandenburg State Insurance Institute. From 1926 onwards, extensions were built so that the number of existing beds doubled to around 420 by the 1930s.

After the Second World War, thanks to the discovery of antibiotics, tuberculosis could be cured more quickly: long hospital stays were no longer necessary and the facilities were no longer used for medical purposes. The sanatorium was used by the Red Army as a Soviet military hospital between 1945 and 1995. Some facilities were run down in the long term, so that after the withdrawal of the armed forces of Russia in 1995, a new use did not seem possible without enormous expense.

Today, the grounds are a popular backdrop for films and photographs. In 2013 the site was used as a location for the film Monuments Men – Unusual Heroes and in 2017 for the film Heilstätten, which takes place in the Beelitz Heilstätten. An association is nowadays taking care of the place.

You could also check my report of these abandoned sanatorium: sanatorio città di Milano, Landesanstalt Teupitz, le sanatorium d’Angicourt.

VEB CHEMIEWERK RÜDERSDORF [DE]

Exploration #143. This former cement, then phosphate, chemical factory is located in the city of Rüdersdorf which dates back to the 13th century. It was around this time that the local settled farmers encountered large chunks of limestone when they tried plowing their fields. Little did the farmers know that they stumbled upon the resource which would be used to build the grandeur of Berlin for centuries to come.
The use of limestone saw rapid adoption and by 1600 it was realized that calcium oxide, otherwise known as quicklime, used in making cement and mortar, could have been produced by burning the limestone and dousing it with water. Rüdersdorf began soon to operate limekilns to mass produce said quicklime. What is known as the Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf today had its origins in the year 1900, when the C.O. Wegener Company built its first cement factory which produced cement using its ultra-modern rotary kilns.

During the years of Nazi terror, Nazis immediately took over control of the factory and over 2000 forced laborer’s had to work in the lime quarries and cement works, as did Italian, French and Soviet prisoners of war (who were held in a concentration camp nearby). The Cement factory continued producing cement until 1944, when it switched over to producing synthetic bauxite. Bauxite is used to create Aluminum and the German war industry was hungry for it. The majority of the buildings that are left standing today trace their origins back to that construction phase.

After the war Rüdersdorf capitulated to the Soviets. While the forced laborer’s and foreign prisoners of war were liberated – the Soviets erected a new Prisoner of war camp in May 1945 on the grounds of the cement factory. The Soviet Camp had a camp within the camp reserved for high ranking Nazis, Concentration Camp Commanders and personnel.
Because of its state-of-the-art technical equipment, the alumina plant immediately became the focus of the Soviet occupation’s dismantling efforts. The factory was completely cleared out, even doors, windows and gutters were sent east. On 25 August 1949, the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) issued Order 106 to reinstate the former plant with the aim of installing fertiliser production in the empty halls. A magnesium phosphate was produced from kola apatite and kieserite in the rotary kiln. In 1959, the annual production was 21000 t.

From 1972 onwards, the same technology was used to try to produce a calcium-sodium phosphate for industrial animal husbandry in the GDR, but this did not succeed satisfactorily because of the short rotary kilns. Therefore, major investments were made and two 100-metre rotary kilns were built at the Rüdersdorf branch of the VEB Chemiewerk Coswig, together with the equipment for waste gas purification, grinding and shipping, which was about 80% new.

The Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf began producing high quality feed phosphate under the brand name Rükana. The quality of Rükana was so good that the GDR used it to sell it abroad to western markets.
German reunification did not bring any good fortunes to the factory. The Rüdersdorf Chemical Factory did manage to continue production through the first years of German reunification but it was slow death. Rebranded as the Rüdersdorfer Futterphosphat GmbH, production capabilities and personnel were scaled down to such an extent that one could assume that the new owners and investors were deliberately running the company into the ground and by 1999, production was shot down. After all assets were sold off, all that remained were the empty production halls from the 1940s.

The ruins are today used as a film location for various film, big Hollywood as well as local German productions.

KODAK FACTORY [DE]

Exploration #141. Since the beginning of the 1900s the area was occupied by Glanzfilm AG. After about 20 years business didn’t go well, so the American Kodak Corp. bought Glanzfilm. The factory was renamed Kodak AG Werk Köpenick and it was the second producing photo-chemical products aside German AGFA.

During World War II, the Nazis declared Kodak an “enemy property” and confiscated the factory in 1941. After the end of the war, the Americans waited in vain to get their factory back, but being located in the Soviet part of Berlin the factory continued to operate under Soviet control keeping the Kodak name (as did Agfa after the war) mainly because of the visible brand name and the possibility to make some profit.

In 1956, still under Soviet management, the name was changed to VEB Fotochemische Werke Köpenick, or FCW. As under Kodak, they continued to produce black-and-white film, radiographic film, photobase paper, and development chemicals.

Finally after Germany’s reunification the factory was returned to Kodak. But due to digital photography, the products were not needed anymore. Until 2010 X-ray-Retina was produced and then the factory was shut down and abandoned.