Coastal Fort

The excavation of the canal Nieuwe Waterweg (New Waterway) made the city of Rotterdam easily accessible to large ocean vessels, but also to enemy warships. To head off this danger, 1881 saw the start of construction of a fortress on the north bank, the ‘Fort on the Hook of Holland’. The rectangular fort, enclosed by a dry moat, was completed in 1890. It featured living quarters for a garrison of about 350 adjacent to the moat and an access road, magazines for ammunition, three gun turrets, a bakery and an elevator building.

As the fort was being readied for battle during the First World War, it proved to be woefully outdated. In the 1930’s, a modern battery was built in the sand dunes further to the west. The original fort was then assigned a supportive task. In early May of 1940 the battery saw action against German paratroopers in and around the Staelduin Forest and the old fort served as a lockup for captured German soldiers.

Later, the Germans used the fort to house a telephone exchange and a radio jammer. In the substructure of one of the armored gun cupolas they installed a 1919 Art Nouveau bread oven that was capable of processing 5,000 loaves a day. The remaining spaces were used for storage. A new elevator building was constructed in 1943. The armored tank cupolas, the equipment and the steam kettles were removed, but the “panzergalerie” (a battery for anti-tank guns shielded by heavy armor plating) was spared.

From the end of the war until 1975, the fort functioned as a command post and a storage depot. In 1987, it was the venue for a an exhibit about wartime Hook of Holland that drew so much interest that it spawned a foundation which has since created a wonderful permanent museum in the fort. Concrete replicas have been installed to replace the gun cupolas that disappeared during the war.