This huge underground complex carved deep into the chalk cliffs on the northern side of the port town of Fecamp was constructed in secret and its exact wartime function has divided opinion.
Presented today as a hospital – which most believe it to have been its use and recently discovered archive evidence points strongly towards – there is also thoughts that it may have had a more sinister role largely due to it not conforming to other known WW2 German medical facilities.
Some argue the location, on the side of an incredibly steep hillside, and the narrow, tunnel-like entrances would make a hospital difficult to access on foot from the town, batteries, or port, and almost impossible via an ambulance in an emergency.
However, there wasn't the extensive woodland which now surrounds the entrances to site so there is a possibility that ambulances/trucks could have made the journey to the facility from the port area below.
Its height above the area port would likely rule it out as a Kriegsmarine storage facility for sea mines or torpedoes, and the many gun batteries which surround Fecamp all featured their own ammunition storage bunkers.
It’s also unlikely that it was linked to the large radar stations on the point of Cap Fagnet overlooking the town and port either, leading many to settle on the most common thought of an underground hospital.
Now heavily overgrown in the hillside woodland, the locations of the three, two metre wide entrance tunnels can be tricky to find.
The tunnels is range from around 10 to 20 metres long and lead to a series of galleries and small rooms, with brick arches supporting the chalk and flint excavations. Along some of the tunnels you can still see the tool marks where the rock was cut into by labourers in 1943.
At the western end of the tunnels – in line with the western entrance – there is a large concrete wall which looks to have been constructed to shore up a more fragile area of the underground facility.
Behind it a short section of tunnel and a small room have been excavated, and you can see the natural material here is a lot more fragmented, so the concrete was likely to shore up the area rather than hide a deeper network of tunnels.
Four brick enclosed rooms have also been built inside and these have been labelled as an operating theatre and doctor’s rooms.
The largest spaces are today labelled as wards and are large rooms of around five metres in height at the top of the excavated arch. If they were indeed wards, they would have been capable of hosting around 60 to 70 beds in total.
There are sections of the facility which look unfinished with brickwork lining stopping long before walls and arches were completed.
The lengths, widths, and heights of the main galleries are similar to the completed, brick-lined sea mine and torpedo storage facility we’ve filmed at Stp Hasso near the port of Boulogne, in the Pas de Calais region. However, theses spaces at Fecamp lack the ventilation shafts and blast doors needed for ammunition storage.
There’s also a short length of narrow gauge railway track running from the western entrance. This is believed to be original to the complex and would point away from it being used as a hospital, or that the underground facility was not yet completed and the line would allow small carts or wagons to remove excavated material from the mining operations.
This entrance has collapsed – perhaps due to the larger amount of clay found in its length - and so can’t be accessed. In entrance No2 – the central tunnel – you can find a small niche cut into the rock near the doorway. It’s thought this was for an electric generator with a short exhaust leading directly outside near to the doorway.
Managed by a local historians and the Fecamp tourism office, there are a small number of days where guided tours are available each year – more information at https://en.fecamptourisme.com/experiences/our-must-haves/cape-fagnet/