Yesterday I went to the Tirpitz museum, near Oksby. I was wondering what the connection was with Tirpitz, until I discovered that the Danes had renamed the Vogelsnest battery as the Tirpitz battery after the war, and this museum was located in and around one of the bunkers of that battery.Vogelsnest battery was intended to be fitted with two twin 15-inch turrets originally manufactured for the re-armament of Gneisenau. While considerable progress was made, none of the guns actually made it to the site before the end of the war - they were all stuck in a depot at Guldagar Station - about 30km from their intended mounting location. Three of the guns were cut into sections, and a number of those sections (including parts from all three guns, but some bits are obviously missing, as there aren't enough bits to make up three complete barrels) are now at the museum - mostly outside next to the path into the museum, but one section is inside the bunker.Although the Tirpitz Museum is named after the (renamed) battery, and includes one of the bunkers as part of the museum, it is also a natural history museum (hence the mammoth in the above photo), and local history museum, and many of the display halls have little or nothing to do with the bunker. It's a formula that seems to be working, because I was there mid-week, and unlike every other place I have visited on this trip, both the carpark and the cafe were packed with visitors. The museum had a very good gift-store, with a wide variety of books on various aspects of the Atlantic Wall. I picked up a book on the Northern Danish section of the wall, which was in English, and based on a well-researched PhD thesis, for less than $AUD10.Apart from the bunker (which is pretty similar to all the other bunkers in the Atlantic Wall), there really isn't much else of interest here (at least for me), so unless you really want to see cut-up 15-in gun barrel sections, or want to try the most expensive hot chocolate I have ever had, I wouldn't go too far out of your way to come here.
