Qualla: Krupp Decoy Site

Krupp Decoy Site: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. Imagine a steel plant the size of a small town, except none of the buildings have insides. Shed roofs over nothing. A gasometer that holds no gas. Chimneys with no boilers underneath. A railway with no trains. And then at night, on the orders of a single officer in a concrete bunker on the Rottberg-Hills in Velbert, the whole non-existent plant lights up - blackout lamps glowing through cracked shutters as if someone forgot the regulations, scattered fires burning rags and tar, the whole illuminated theater of a real Krupp works failing at blackout discipline. From 20,000 feet, with cloud underneath and a navigator under stress, that is exactly what real industry looked like.

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krupp Decoy Site: The Krupp Problem

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Flöper, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Krupp steelworks in Essen produced the steel that produced the German war machine - tanks, artillery, U-boat hulls, locomotives. Royal Air Force Bomber Command identified Essen as a top-priority target early in the Second World War, and the bombers came almost every clear nig...

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Image: Stefan Flöper | CC BY-SA 4.0

Krupp Decoy Site: Building a Lie

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diehey, CC BY-SA 4.0. The decoy site - the *Kruppsche Nachtscheinanlage*, the Krupp night decoy installation - went up on the Rottberg-Hills near Velbert, 10 kilometers south of the real factory. It covered roughly 1.5 by 2.5 kilometers, the same footprint as the actual works. The construction was del...

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Image: Diehey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Krupp Decoy Site: Sixty-Four Percent

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. It worked. For two and a half years, until 1943, RAF Bomber Command did not realize the decoy existed. During that period, by the British air ministry's own postwar analysis, the bombers dropped 64 percent of all high-explosive ordnance and 75 percent of all incendiaries intended...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krupp Decoy Site: A Bunker on Private Land

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. What remains today is the control bunker - a single concrete box, low and gray, partly buried in a hillside in Velbert. The rest of the decoy - the fake shed roofs, the wooden gasometer, the dummy chimneys - was all temporary by design, and the war scoured the site bare. The bunk...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krupp Decoy Site: What Decoys Teach

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niederberger01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Military deception in the air war was not unique to Germany. The British built Starfish sites - decoy fires lit on the outskirts of cities to draw the Luftwaffe away from urban targets. The Americans painted inflatable rubber tanks for the D-Day deception campaign. But the *Nacht...

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Image: Niederberger01 | CC BY-SA 4.0