When Germany surrendered in May 1945, 18-year-old Bernhard Randerath was put to work clearing the very mines his own army had buried along the Dutch coast. Drafted into the Wehrmacht months earlier, he was assigned to Brigade Draga, one of the German units ordered by the Allies to remove the minefields that stretched in front of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The Atlantic Wall itself had been a massive undertaking. Ordered by Hitler in Führer Directive number 40 on March 23, 1942, it was a 5,000-kilometer defensive system running from northern Norway to the Spanish border.
It was built with more than 17 million cubic meters of concrete by up to half a million workers at its peak, including hundreds of thousands of conscripted laborers from Vichy France. The wall’s name was propaganda. It was not an unbroken barrier manned by elite troops, but a chain of separate strong points held by relatively few men, many of whom were recovering from wounds or considered too old for the front line. The plan called for 15,000 bunkers along the Dutch, Belgian, and French coasts, but by the May 1, 1943, deadline only around 6,000 existed.
The Netherlands had just 510 of a planned 2,000. The labor that built the wall came at a terrible human cost. On Alderney, a Channel Island emptied of its population, the Germans ran camps for the men constructing the fortifications. Two of those camps, Sylt and Norderney, were handed to the Waffen SS in 1943 as satellites of Neuengamme.
Prisoners were worked in the open through the winter and underfed because guards took their rations. Hundreds died on British soil. On June 6, 1944, the D-Day landings breached the wall in a single day after it had taken more than two years to build. Eleven months later, Germany surrendered.
The task of cleaning up what the wall left behind, both the concrete and what was buried in front of it, would take the rest of the century. Randerath, born in Mönchengladbach in 1927, was called up in December 1944. After six weeks of training near Bonn, he was sent to the Netherlands at the end of January 1945. His war lasted only three months, ending with the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath on May 4.
The surrender terms included a critical line: German commanders were to carry out every Allied order at once without argument. The first major order concerned mines. The Germans had buried millions of them along the Dutch and Danish coasts, and the Allies intended the men who buried them to lift them. There was a legal obstacle.
The 1929 Geneva Convention barred using prisoners of war on dangerous work. The solution was administrative. Rather than classifying surrendered Germans as prisoners of war, the British categorized them as surrendered enemy personnel, a status that allowed them to be sent onto the minefields. Randerath was among them.
His unit, the Dräger Brigade, grew past 3,000 men and lifted over a million mines from Dutch soil that year. Of those men, 179 were killed and 381 injured. The brigade tracked casualties by mine type, finding that 60 percent of men hit by anti-tank mines were killed. Randerath spent part of that year clearing fields around Roermond, just 30 kilometers from his parents’ house, which he was forbidden to visit.
He later described a grim final stage of the work. When a stretch of coast was declared clear, the men who cleared it were given a “free day” to spend on the ground they had just swept. They could swim, walk, or lie in the sun, but they could not leave. “We had to test with our own lives,” he wrote, “whether the ground was really free of mines.
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Denmark conducted an even larger clearance along beaches where German forces had laid roughly 1. 4 million mines. Clearance began on May 11, 1945, and was formalized that June as Mine Commando Denmark. The speed was possible because of German record-keeping.
Lance Corporal Bussa, stationed at a Luftwaffe radio station in central Denmark, had drawn a precise map between July 26 and August 7, 1944, recording all 5,983 anti-personnel mines laid around the station, including which were rigged to explode if lifted. That drawing remains accurate enough to work from today. Using such paperwork, teams cleared nearly 1. 39 million mines from 1,103 square kilometers in just under five months, more than 9,000 a day.
Many of those doing the work were teenagers with no training, prodding the sand by hand. By December 1945, the Danish Mine Control Office listed 149 dead, 165 severely injured, and 167 lightly injured. One out of five mine clearers had been killed or hurt. In 1949, the law caught up with the practice.
Denmark, the Netherlands, and France had together put tens of thousands of German prisoners into minefields, and at least 1,800 died in France alone. When the Geneva Conventions were rewritten that year, the new text held that no prisoner of war could be made to do dangerous work and added a line that had not existed before: the removal of mines was to be considered dangerous labor. The bunkers themselves began to be demolished within months of liberation. The reasons were not mainly practical.
The bunkers were the most visible thing the occupation had left behind, and people did not want to look at them. Dutch crews went at smaller bunkers with explosives, but standard concrete bunkers had walls and roofs at least two meters thick. The submarine pens were another matter entirely. The base at Saint-Nazaire held 14 pens under a roof eight meters deep, and demolishing them would have cost more than recovering governments were willing to spend.
The cheapest options were to fill a bunker with sand or lock it shut, and most of the ones filled with sand still are. A 1953 survey of part of the North Holland coast recorded the fate of each structure in three words: cleared, stripped, buried. Many bunkers found new uses. Crew bunkers had been built to house men, so from 1946 they housed men again.
On Texel, a cluster became known as the Bunker Dorp, the bunker village, housing families who could not find homes in the post-war shortage. Ten years later, those families were forcibly moved out, as the village had become worth more as a holiday destination. Similar parks opened at Bloemendaal and Zandvoort, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, spending a summer inside a German bunker was an ordinary Dutch holiday. Other bunkers went to stranger uses: ammunition archives, art storage, and mushroom growing.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Dutch volunteers dug bunkers back out so bats could overwinter in them. Then a disaster settled the argument that demolition crews had lost. On the night of January 31, 1953, a North Sea storm surge broke through the Dutch dikes. Several breaches occurred at points where bunkers had been built into the dike body.
Through the 1960s, many bunkers in Zeeland and South Holland were finally destroyed, not as relics of the occupation, but as dangers to the sea defenses. The wall built to keep an army out was being blown up to keep the water out. Denmark was still clearing the wall’s minefields in the 21st century. The one place where German record-keeping had failed was Skallingen, a sand spit near Esbjerg where mines had shifted underground.
Around 72,000 mines were laid there and 61,000 lifted by 1947, but the rest stayed. Between 2005 and 2012, Denmark cleared the last minefield believed to remain on the peninsula, destroying a further 3,357 mines, 67 years after the war ended. The bunkers themselves took longer to be seen as anything but rubbish. In 1958, a young Frenchman named Paul Virilio began photographing them along the Atlantic coast and continued for seven years.
In December 1975, the pictures appeared in Paris as the book “Bunker Archaeology,” arguing that these were not war debris but a new kind of building. The French state was never persuaded, and thousands of blockhouses still stand along its coast. Elsewhere, the opposite happened. The first Dutch Atlantic Wall Museum opened at Hook of Holland in 1996.
In 2012, 15 buried bunkers were dug out at Pointe du Hoc in France. In Denmark, the Tirpitz gun bunker at Blåvand became a museum in 1991. That position was built for four naval guns with a 55-kilometer range, whose barrels were still sitting at a railway station outside Esbjerg at liberation. The battery never fired a shot.
In some places, the wall’s biggest mark had nothing to do with bunkers. Until 1942, the ground behind what is now the Museon in The Hague was Zorgvliet, a neighborhood of large detached houses. The Germans cleared a strip 10 kilometers long and 500 meters wide for an anti-tank ditch across the city, and roughly 135,000 people were ordered out. Many never came back.
That cleared ground now holds the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the headquarters of Europol, two of roughly 160 international bodies in the city. The Hague rebuilt itself around the scar as a center for international law. On Alderney, the reckoning never fully came. Captain Theodore Panchev completed a British investigation into the camps on September 12, 1945, and the Judge Advocate General’s office found conditions comparable to camps elsewhere in occupied Europe.
The report was classified. Because most of the victims had been Soviet citizens, Britain passed the case to the Soviet Union, which did not pursue it. No German officer was ever tried in a British court for what happened there. In May 2024, a British government review led by Lord Pickles revisited the death toll.
It concluded that the number was higher than the long-quoted 389, but no higher than 1,134. Eighty years on, the counting was not finished. The Germans had recorded every mine they buried down to the last one in the last block.
Nobody kept that kind of record of the men sent to lift them.
