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.

VÖLKLINGER HÜTTE [DE]

Exploration #159. Völklinger Hütte is a steel complex located in the German town of Völklingen in the Saarland. Construction began in 1873 when engineer Julius Buch Steel installed the first machines near the town of Völklingen to produce iron girders and railway sleepers by digging iron ore in the Luxembourg mines. The factory ceased operations in 1879. The abandoned site was bought by Carl Röchling two years later and the first blast furnace was built in 1883. At the end of the 19th century, the factory became one of the most productive in Europe and the first centre for the production of beams in Germany. The centre was the first in the world to apply the dry gas purification method, creating the plant in 1911.

After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 granted France ownership of the coal mines, including the Völklingen plant, and placed the Saar basin territory under the mandate of the League of Nations. The plebiscite of 13 January 1935, in favour of joining Germany, obtained an overwhelming majority and the factory became German again.
During the Second World War, 13,000 men, women and children, mainly from Russia, Poland and Yugoslavia, worked in the forges and steelworks under very harsh conditions. Among these ‘Zwangarbeiter’ (forced labourers), about 260, of whom 60 were children, died in the plant. After the war, the Saar was included in the French occupation zone and the administration of the factory returned to France until it was annexed to West Germany on 1 January 1957.

From the end of the Second World War until the end of cast iron production in 1986, only minor modernisation and maintenance changes were made. The factory reached its peak production level during the construction boom. The number of workers reached over 17,000. From 1975, the global steel crisis was also felt in the Saar. The steel and metallurgical complexes in Völklingen and Burbach, under the name ARBED-Saarstahl, did not escape this decline. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and the factory stopped production in 1986.

In 1987, an association was created to preserve buildings and equipment and make them a centre of industrial heritage in the Greater Region. Ownership of the factory was then transferred from Dillinger-Hütter-Saarstahl AG to the regional government of Saarland and the site was declared a cultural monument by the regional law on the protection and preservation of monuments. The complex was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994: it was the first industrial monument to appear on this list (source: wikipedia).

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.

LANDSCHAFTSPARK DUISBURG NORD [DE]

Exploration #151. Landschaftspark is a public park located in Duisburg-Meiderich, Germany. It was designed in 1991 by Latz + Partner (Peter Latz), with the intention that it work to heal and understand the industrial past, rather than trying to reject it. The park closely associates itself with the past use of the site: a coal and steel production plant born in 1901 and abandoned in 1985.

OPERATING PERIOD
Growing demand for steel from the US and the German navy’s extensive shipbuilding plans led to a pig iron shortage around 1900. It was against this background that, from 1901, August Thyssen initiated the building of a blast furnace plant in Meiderich to produce pig iron. Pig iron is smelted with the addition of lime and coke from iron ores. The liquid end product can then be further processed into steel. The property was located in the immediate vicinity of the coal fields he had previously acquired, thus creating the perfect conditions for the operation of the blast furnaces. In July 1901 he began construction of the works and on 16 May 1903 blast furnace 1 was blown for the first time, and blast furnace 2 became operational as early as August 1903. By 1912 all five blast furnaces of the “Ironworks Company” in Meiderich were working. Until closure in 1985, the works produced special types of pig iron to make castings for mechanical engineering, for example. Because of its wide product range, the ironworks was therefore known in professional circles as the “pharmacy of the Ruhr District”.

CLOSURE
The mid-1970s saw a worldwide steel crisis and overcapacity in the European steel market. Production in the Meiderich works had to be cut back, resulting in short-time working. From 1979 the sales crisis intensified, leading to the closure of blast furnaces 1 and 2 in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, the Thyssen Group continued to invest in the Meiderich ironworks. In 1982 it relined the modern blast furnace 5, had a desulphurisation plant built and the gasometer was completely overhauled. Nobody, therefore, was expecting the plant to close and the end caught the workforce completely by surprise. The last shift was worked on 4 April 1985. The remaining 300 employees were offered alternative jobs in the Thyssen Ruhrort and Hamborn works, and a social plan and an early retirement scheme meant that any major protests could be avoided. In the 82 years of its existence, the Meiderich ironworks had produced 37 million tonnes of pig iron.

THE PARK
Duisburg City Council finally decided in April 1992 to preserve the disused ironworks. The Landscape Park was to become a large open and recreational space for the population and to sustainably improve the quality of life in the surrounding areas. In addition to the preservation of the industrial facilities, the preservation of the flora and fauna that had developed since the closure of the works also played a significant part. The first areas of the Landscape Park were opened to the public on 17 June 1994.

(source: https://www.landschaftspark.de/).