Maschsee
A shimmering artificial lake stretching almost two and a half kilometres south of the city centre, and Hannover's favourite spot for sailing, strolling and summer festivals. Beneath its cheerful surface lies a far darker story of hand-dug labour during the Nazi era.
About this place
The Maschsee is the largest body of water in Hannover, a long silver ribbon of roughly seventy-eight hectares set in the former flood meadows of the river Leine just south of the centre. Although it looks entirely natural, framed by poplars and lined with promenades, it is completely man-made, excavated almost by hand between 1934 and 1936 as a job-creation project that the National Socialist regime turned into a piece of propaganda theatre. Today the lake is pure recreation: sailing boats and pleasure steamers glide across it in summer, joggers circle its six-kilometre path, and every August the sprawling Maschseefest draws around two million visitors to its banks. It remains the honest, slightly conflicted heart of modern Hannover, a place of leisure that has never fully forgotten how it was born.
Key facts
- 1936 year — The lake was ceremonially opened on 21 May before around 200,000 spectators
- 1650 workers — Unemployed men dug the entire basin by hand for so-called hunger wages
- 78 hectares — Surface area, making it the biggest body of water in the whole city
📍 Nordufer, 30169, Hannover