An animal tour of the Haldensleben dispatch center: When the HF employees come to work, they sometimes encounter unusual visitors.
Christian Alpert and Thomas Külper, together with Stefanie Dannehl, are responsible for maintaining the impressive green spaces on the 54-hectare site. In an impressive interview, they told the journalist about their daily work on a very special industrial site. When they start work at six o'clock in the morning, they usually see animals scurrying around at dusk. "Deer are actually there almost every day," said Christian. He has counted up to ten animals at a time, which have apparently entered the Hermes Fulfilment premises through the truck gate and have long since made themselves at home there.
No wonder: the huge warehouses of the dispatch center are surrounded by nature. Only around a third of the total area of the site has been built on. As early as the planning stage in the early 1990s, Dr. Michael Otto had the express wish that this industrial complex should not only serve economic efficiency, but also take ecological aspects into account. As a result, a green world was created with a total of 680 trees, a biotope and several ditches.
A raccoon was once up to mischief - the secret star is a fox
Haldensleben's wildlife is still grateful to him today: the 3,000 or so HF employees in Haldensleben are constantly seeing wild animals that have settled there - here a fox, there a raccoon, sometimes a grass snake, nutrias, mallard ducks, pheasants, eight beehives (300 liters of honey a year!) and a pair of kestrels that come to nest on the fire escape of the high-bay warehouse every year. At a height of 36 meters!
The secret star on Hamburger Strasse: a fox that regularly patrols between the nearby supermarket and the dispatch center. In broad daylight, the wild animal walks through the turnstile at the main entrance, then marches across the site and makes its rounds here and there. Employees can even get within two meters of it. Many have photographed him. "He's used to people," reports gardener Thomas Külper.
One day, operations manager Stefan Nießen was annoyed by overflowing garbage cans on the beautiful avenue of lime trees that leads from the entrance across the grounds. "There was garbage scattered around the bins on the footpath," he recalls. He almost had his own staff under suspicion when it suddenly turned out that a raccoon had made a mess of the bins and was looking for food. Since then, the motto has been: No more leftover food in the garbage cans!
In July 2021, a huge snake that employees found in one of the washrooms triggered a fire department operation. The firefighting team also flinched and immediately phoned a vet. Only the vet was finally able to give the all-clear: The scary animal was just a grass snake - completely harmless to humans.
Even after almost 30 years: No ordinary industrial plant
No, even almost 30 years after the foundation stone was laid, the dispatch center still doesn't look like an ordinary industrial plant. Even the second high-bay warehouse, which was built later, was not simply placed next to the first - it would have blocked the employees' view of nature from the canteen. Instead, plenty of distance was maintained and a glass bridge was constructed, through which the parcels now pass on conveyor belts. More expensive, but much nicer!
Just like the huge halls in which the employees process the goods of the retailer bonprix: Comparable logistics halls elsewhere are built without windows, and work inside is usually done in artificial light. Not so at HF in Haldensleben: The shelving warehouses there have been generously equipped with windows. This means there is daylight inside - and a view of the outside, in the middle of nature.
