In February 1943, 32 Irish merchant seaman were sent to a Nazi labour camp in northern Germany. They were being punished for refusing to join the Nazi war effort, and they became part of a slave work force that was used to construct an enormous bunker. However, in order to achieve this goal, the Nazis were prepared to work thousands of slaves to their deaths - including five of the Irishmen who died in one of their camps. This is their story.

In 1943, thirty-two Irish POWs refused a Gestapo request to work for Germany. They were sent to a labour camp, where they were starved, beaten and forced to dig the foundations for a Nazi super-structure codenamed Bunker Valentin - an immense U-boat factory. Thousands of the camp's prisoners perished, including five of the Irishmen; bodies fell into the foundations and were never recovered. The surviving Irishmen were saved by the goodwill of decent Germans.Among them was Harry Callan, a Catholic boy from Derry who went to sea at sixteen as a British Merchant Navy seaman. His ship had been captured by a German raider two years before he ended up at the labour camp. Harry was unable to speak about the brutality he experienced for decades after he was liberated. When he finally began to tell his story, his family were shocked by what they heard.In his eighties, Harry agreed to revisit the site of his incarceration. He found local historians had no evidence of the Irish prisoners: they had disappeared from official records. Determined to give his comrades recognition, he began working to preserve their memory. This is the gripping story of Harry's capture, resistance and liberation.But above all, it is the final chapter in his quest to honour the forgotten heroes of Bunker Valentin.

By employing new 'optics' and a comparative approach, this book helps us recognize the unexpected and unsettling connections between America's 'western' empire and Nazi Germany's 'eastern' empire, linking histories previously thought of as totally unrelated and leading readers towards a deep revisioning of the 'American West' and the 'Nazi East'.

How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have? Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg – a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism – to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fascinating new material and perspectives, but also more general original theorizing of the relationship between heritage, identity and material culture. The book looks at how Nuremberg has dealt with its Nazi past post-1945. It focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the city’s architectural heritage, in particular, the former Nazi party rally grounds, on which the Nuremburg rallies were staged. The book draws on original sources, such as city council debates and interviews, to chart a lively picture of debate, action and inaction in relation to this site and significant others, in Nuremberg and elsewhere. In doing so, Difficult Heritage seeks to highlight changes over time in the ways in which the Nazi past has been dealt with in Germany, and the underlying cultural assumptions, motivations and sources of friction involved. Whilst referencing wider debates and giving examples of what was happening elsewhere in Germany and beyond, Difficult Heritage provides a rich in-depth account of this most fascinating of cases. It also engages in comparative reflection on developments underway elsewhere in order to contextualize what was happening in Nuremberg and to show similarities to and differences from the ways in which other ‘difficult heritages’ have been dealt with elsewhere. By doing so, the author offers an informed perspective on ways of dealing with difficult heritage, today and in the future, discussing innovative museological, educational and artistic practice.