St. Nikolai Memorial

Why go

The St. Nikolai Memorial is the ruin of Hamburg's former main church of St. Nikolai, largely destroyed in 1943. In its own words, the memorial remembers the victims of the bombing raids in the context of the National Socialist war of annihilation and offers the chance to understand how wars come about. Its museum, in part of the church's former cellars, tells the history of the site with a focus on the summer of 1943, when Hamburg was bombed in the raids known by the military name Operation Gomorrha and the church was destroyed; a panoramic lift goes up the surviving tower to a viewing platform at 76 metres, where historic photographs of the city after the raids are shown. The memorial's website is published by the Stiftung Mahnmal St. Nikolai e.V., whose pages say guided tours of the exhibition are booked through the Museumsdienst Hamburg and that the memorial is being redesigned and extended with new buildings until 2028. The neo-Gothic church by George Gilbert Scott was built from 1846 and consecrated in 1863, after the medieval St. Nikolai burned in the Great Fire of 1842.