The Nazi Navy:
a guide to Laboe
and U-995

The memorial most visitors walk past without understanding.

The audio tour is titled The Nazi Navy: A Guide to the Laboe Naval Memorial and German Submarine U-995. It starts at the main entrance and gift shop and takes you through the parts of the site most people never find — including the flag room, which contains a Nazi-era swastika flag displayed as a historical artefact, and the model ship museum hidden on the lower floors.

Before you board the submarine, the tour tells you the story of Dieter — a fictional fresh-faced boy from Kiel who joined the U-boat service in 1941. By the time you squeeze through the hatches of U-995 yourself, you'll be imagining what it was like for the 50 men who lived, slept and worked in that space.

What the tour covers

The memorial in context

The Laboe Naval Memorial was designed in 1927 and opened on 30 May 1936 — the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the largest WWI naval battle between Germany and Britain, in which 10,000 sailors were killed in 24 hours. The opening ceremony took place at the height of German rearmament, only two months after Germany had invaded the Rhineland.

The tower design is deliberately ambiguous — a spinnaker in the wind, an eternal flame, or a submarine periscope emerging from the waves. From the observation deck, on a clear day, you can see all the way to Denmark.

U-995: the facts

U-995 is a Type VIIC U-boat — one of approximately 700 built, and one of only four surviving WWII U-boats in the world. It is the only surviving example in Germany. After the war it served in the Norwegian Navy for over 20 years before Norway sold it back to Germany for one Deutschmark — roughly 60 cents — to be preserved as a museum ship. It has been at Laboe since 1971.