Postwar Hamburg Germany

[David Dunlop]

I ran across this photo yesterday on line. No idea of the original source.

What surprised me was the surplus was not German, but Allied. Quite a variety of Sherman’s sitting there and it looks as if they have all lost their turrets by this point. Interesting the pile has been topped off with Stuart surplus.

I wonder if this was a private scrap yard, or government disposal site?


David

[Jakko Westerbeke]

They look like ex-American tanks to me, I don’t see any British features like spare track racks on the hull fronts.

[Hanno Spoelstra]

This is what I found about about it a while ago and posted on the Sherman Register page:

Sherman and Stuart tank hulls stacked up high, ready for scrapping shortly after WW2 at "Deutsche Werft" shipyard, Hamburg, Germany.
This shipyard was established in 1918 and built 113 submarines during WW2. Next to German labourers, the yard used several thousand forced labourers from countries including the Soviet Union, Poland, Belgium, France and Denmark. It could well be these labourers were set to work to dismantle the victor's tools of war.
Source: from a file held at the Kew Archives found by Craig Moore. Added three more photos via TankHistoria

The location of the former shipyard is known today as the Rüsch Park.

[David Herbert]

The pile of engines is I think largely aircraft engines. I can not see any that I can identify as Sherman or Stuart and there are a number that are twin row radials (DC3?).

I have seen the first photo before of the pile of Shermans topped off with Stuarts and I still find it very sad.

David

[Jakko Westerbeke]

Interesting too how many different ages of tanks are in there. In the photo where they’re cutting up the Sherman hull, it’s a fairly late one with outboard lifting eyes (meaning late 1944 or so production), while the lower hull in the foreground is an rivetted one, which means it must have been made in 1942 by Pressed Steel Car Company.