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All Denmark Copenhagen Wehrmacht Graffiti

Wehrmacht Graffiti

Bored potato-guarding Nazis etched their thoughts onto a brick storage building in Copenhagen's Meatpacking District.

Copenhagen, Denmark

Added By
Kenn Munk Nielsen
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An anti-war comment on Goebbels’ “Total War” speech.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Guarding potatoes right to the end. Three months later, the war was over.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Children’s playground & Paddleball Court   SEANETTA / Atlas Obscura User
  SEANETTA / Atlas Obscura User
Guard duty in 1940 and again in 1942   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Pattern.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Brick with Sütterlin-schrift, a German lettering system scrapped by the National Socialists.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Scratched out graffiti.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Christmas on guard duty.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Heart.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
“I stood guard here 1941.”   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Unfinished “Stuttgart.”   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
Brick joke.   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
The Twin House (now a childrens’ art school).   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
“Adolf Gimpel is Simple” (There was a Polish-Jewish theater director named Adolf Gimpel, but this is likely to refer to another person).   A secret club / Atlas Obscura User
  Collector of Experiences / Atlas Obscura User
  SEANETTA / Atlas Obscura User
Graffiti from August 1942   katielou106 / Atlas Obscura User
  SEANETTA / Atlas Obscura User
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About

Food supplies are vital in any invasion. When the German Wehrmacht marched into Copenhagen in April 1940, they seized control of Kødbyen (the Meatpacking District), home to the city's abattoirs and food processing facilities.

The bulky, symmetrical building known as the “Twin House” at the Northernmost edge of Kødbyen housed the Nazi forces’ potatoes, a crucial source of carbs. Soldiers kept the stock of stored potatoes under a 24-hour surveillance.

As they soon learned, guarding potatoes in a largely peaceful country wasn’t very exciting. They began to scratch words into the bricks of the Twin House so that now, decades later, people can read the thoughts that passed through their bored minds.

Most of the messages are what you’d expect: names of loved ones and hometowns, drawings, and other tributes to home. But some allow us a closer look at how the soldiers tracked their time. “Weihnachten auf Posten 1943” (Christmas on guard duty, 1943) reads one glum brick. Another guard had scratched the date of his guard duty (August 1st, 1940) only to return almost exactly two years later to add the date August 4th, 1942 to his brick.

Toward the end of the war, you can see the soldiers' disillusion in solid brick form. One soldier scratched the words from Goebbels’ famous Sportpalast speech, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” (Do you want total war?) which had been followed by a roaring YES! at the Nazi rally. The guard on duty didn't agree. On the brick wall, a small “nein” is scratched below the propaganda minister's words—something that would have gotten a German soldier into a lot of trouble.

Oddly enough, this piece of history doesn't have protected status. New graffiti is added to the walls from time to time and as these age and darken, it becomes difficult to spot the difference between a half finished “Stuttgart” (probably abandoned because a commanding officer showed up) and a neo-Nazi swastika from last year.

Related Tags

World War Ii Potatoes Graffiti Nazis War History Military

Know Before You Go

Keep walking down Staldgade from Halmtorvet, when you get to the ramp leading to the underground parking, the back of The Twin House is on your left.

Community Contributors

Added By

A secret club

Edited By

SEANETTA, Collector of Experiences, katielou106

  • SEANETTA
  • Collector of Experiences
  • katielou106

Published

November 30, 2017

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Sources
  • https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasionen_af_Danmark_i_1940
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin
  • The caretaker of the area (man i yellow trousers on one image)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin
  • http://jyllands-posten.dk/kultur/historie/ECE7686683/Skudhuller-soldatergraffiti-og-besættelseshistorier/
Wehrmacht Graffiti
Staldgade 35
Staldgade
Copenhagen
Denmark
55.668285, 12.563266
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