The Siegfried Line (as referred to here) is the construction built by the Germans as a response to the French Maginot Line. The name is one which was originally used for a section of the WW1 Hindenburg Line and was applied to this new work by the English. The Germans referred to these works as the Westwall.



The Westwall stretched from Kleve in the north, through some 630 km (390 miles) down to the Swiss border. The line comprised over 18,000 bunkers combined with tunnels and tank traps. Works were planned in 1936 and construction took place between 1938 and 1940. The intention was to provide Germany with an effective defence along its western border and unlike the Maginot Line, it was conceived as defence in depth as opposed to a series of centralised strong points.



This said, the Westwall did comprise a variety of different sized bunkers ranging from the B Werkes (larger bunkers which operated in a similar fashion to the smaller Infantry forts of the Maginot) through to simple machine gun bunkers. These were protected by a line of anti-tank obstacles (the so-called dragon's teeth) which were of steel-reinforced concrete and were located between the larger bunkers and the frontier. Raw materials were a premium asset in Germany and in order to reduce the demands on the overall economy, standardised designs were utilised on every aspect of the project.

The works were initially carried out by private contractors; however, there was insufficient capacity in the workforce so the Organisation Todt was employed, which utilised the manpower of German youth and forced labour. Working conditions on site were, to say the least, dangerous with little, if any, consideration given to (especially the forced elements of the workforce) health and safety.

After the fall of France in 1940, the works were gradually stripped of anything which could be re-used in the construction of the Atlantic Wall on the French coast, with the line as a whole falling into disuse; maintenance was neglected in favour of better direction of resources.



In 1944, it was hastily pressed back into active service, although it would never offer the effective protection it once had, due to the removal of the armaments and years of neglect (this quite aside from the advances in artillery, etc which had taken place over the years since its construction).

In 1946, the allies began to remove the various structures, with the German Federal administration making it a key priority from 1950 to accelerate this process. Due to this, little remains of the line today, although there is a handful of bunkers now open to public and some traces of the other defences still remain.