The Museum Bunkers are located in Skanderborg Dyrehave and are housed in former command bunkers built by the German Luftwaffe in 1944. The bunkers, which stood abandoned for almost 40 years, now contain exhibitions about the Second World War from local, national and international perspectives.
The exhibition is divided into a Danish and a German section. The Danish section focuses on Skanderborg and Denmark during the occupation, with topics such as 9 April, the police during the occupation, the resistance movement, everyday life and the liberation. The German section focuses on the Luftwaffe’s activities in the Skanderborg region, including the bunker construction and the Luftwaffe generals.
In 2022, a soundscape was installed that recreates the sounds that would have been heard in the bunkers when they were in use, giving visitors a sense of life in the bunkers during the war.
The final part of the exhibition focuses on the approximately 700 German refugees who lived in the Sølund Refugee Camp after the war, with photographs and accounts from both Danish and German perspectives.
If you visit the museum, be sure to walk down along the hostel towards the lake, where there is a lovely bathing jetty with a good view.
The abandoned bunkers contained several items from the war, including a rare, well-preserved Enigma code machine. Enigma was an electromechanical cipher machine used by German military forces during World War II for encrypting and decrypting messages. Despite its widespread use and the assumption that its code was impossible to break, the code was eventually cracked. This contributed significantly to ending the war earlier.
