The beautiful port town of Honfleur is a popular tourist destination thanks to its harbourside cafes, restaurants, art galleries, and a famous maritime history.
For bunker hunters, there is a lot to see too. While there are small clusters of remaining WW2 German concrete emplacements located all over the area, it’s the huge Luftschutz air-raid shelter next to the Bassin Carnot which is worth the most attention.
This Kriegsmarine building was constructed in 1942 to provide shelter for up to 200 soldiers tasked with defending this area of the town around near to where the original railway station once stood.
The bunker – known as the Blockhaus de la Gare – measures over 25 metres long and nearly 13 metres wide, with outer walls between 1.1 metre and 1.6 metres thick with a 2 metre thick steel reinforced concrete roof. It has two entrances, both with anti-gas airlocks, and was defended from the outside by two Tobruks.
You can still see one of two original Tobruks which provided defence for the bunker at each end – the remaining Tobruk was built for a 5cm French mortar while the other, housed an MG42 machine gun.
On display outside there’s also a British naval gun built in Lincoln, England, a post-war French sea mine, French air-raid warning device, and a small collection of large calibre shells (all inert!).
Following Honfleur’s liberation by Allied forces on August 29, 1944, the bunker was cleared and used by displaced families, then by the town’s Chamber of Commerce, before being abandoned and taken over by squatters.
Around 2010 negotiations began between the municipality and the Honfleur 39-45 Association, a collection of local historians with a passion for preserving the site’s history and telling the story of Honfleur for the next generations.
In 2014, following a vast amount of restoration work, the new museum was completed and inaugurated by the Mayor of Honfleur Michel Lamarre and opened to the public.
What’s inside today makes it a must-visit museum on any trip to Normandy. The bunker’s eight large rooms offer around 350 square metres of space which has been filled with some of the best museum collections and rare exhibits we’ve seen, telling the stories of the occupation, civilian life, and liberation with some incredible, and tragic stories.
The visitor journey begins in the west entrance where you walk through the gas lock and into the first of the four main rooms – named in honour of resistance fighter Albert Manuel.
This space is dedicated to the resistants, deportees, and the French Army from 1939 to 19410.
Here you can get up close to a wide ranging variety of early-war exhibits including French uniforms, a collection of military and civilian gas masks, posters, rare documents, and even a relic revolver recovered from the evacuation beach at Dunkirk.
Some of the stand out items in this room include the personal box of items relating to a French prisoner of war and items from Colditz. In the small annex off this main room is a reconstruction of a German office, similar to what would have been in this space during the occupation.
The second main room is dedicated to British Paratrooper Jim Corbett, who actually inaugurated the room himself following the establishment of the museum.
There is an incredible mix of exhibits in this room ranging from British uniforms, airborne paratrooper helmets, cap badges, equipment, deactivated weapons, and even aircraft parts – including the canopy from a P-47D Thunderbolt which crashed to the south east of Honfleur.
Room three is dedicated to Gerard De Rycker who was part of the Belgian Brigade Piron which liberated Honfleur at the end of August 1944.
This room gives you a glimpse into life inside the bunker for the German occupiers with some rare items including the bunker’s air filtration system. The many display cases also showcase British, American, Belgian, and French equipment including a collection of radios, and also tell the stories of the Dieppe Raid in 1943.
The final main room is known as the Freedom Room and features a collection of French and American uniforms, plus items relating to the Free French Naval Forces, along with a German aircraft’s external fuel tank, and much more – see the photos!
Most of the items in the museum belong to the collections of member and committee of the Honfleur 39-45 Association, and one of the last rooms in the bunker is dedicated to a local historian and collector Manuel Badal who passed away in 2006.
Donated by his family, this room shows off some incredible items including rare photographs of Honfleur during the liberation and a massive collection of scale model tanks and vehicles in two glass cases.
On the floor are some surprising exhibits too – a complete German automatic flamethrower, several rockets (inert), wheels from a Panther tank, and fragments of a massive shell from the British Battleship HMS Warspite which saw action firing on the German batteries along the Normandy coast on D-Day.
The final room is the gas lock are for the eastern entrance to the bunker and is dedicated to highly decorated French soldier Michel Legrand. In this room you can find a reconstruction of a American mechanic’s workshop with many original items.
To see everything and read all the stories behind the exhibits you’re going to need a whole morning or afternoon!
The museum is open to the public at weekends in July and August and guided tours can be arranged during the rest of the year. More info at blockhausdelagare.fr
Huge thanks to our friends at the Honfleur 39-45 Association for their amazing guided tour and allowing us to film at the Blockhaus de la Gare.