St. Maximilian Kolbe

In the new development area between Porz-Eil and Gremberghoven, which only became part of the Finkenberg district in 2007, a pastoral team had held services in a provisional "church shop" since 1971. In 1974 the mother parish of St. Michael in Porz-Eil commissioned architects Hans Schilling, Heinz Schwarz, and Edmund Fuchs to design the building. At the foundation stone laying on 8 May 1977, cathedral master builder Arnold Wolff presented a fragment of Cologne Cathedral. The parish became independent in February 1978. From 1991 the archdiocese, facing a shortage of priests, pursued plans to merge four Porz parishes; in 2001, as part of this reorganization, the church became a subsidiary church.

The brick building combines church and parish rooms within a single structure. Facing the lower street, the polygonal church with its asymmetrical floor plan and the inset octagonal tower rise steeply and enclosed, while the roof slopes down to single-storey height toward the crest of the hill. There, the entrance sits discreetly in a niche between the one- and two-storey sections. The interior is lit by narrow side windows along the sloping roof and a strip window in the choir; the clear glass opens views to the sky on one side and to a high-rise building on the other. The wooden ceiling features battens running crosswise to the slope. Four sides of the inset tower project into the interior, forming a niche for the tabernacle and providing access to the weekday chapel. The altar area is level with the floor and can be seated from all sides.

The tiled floor, whose design is attributed to Klaus Balke or Paul Bahlke, extends into the parish rooms, combining leaf, blossom, and geometric motifs with bicycles. Beneath the image of the church's patron saint, it is interrupted by a rectangular concrete inlay recalling the floor of the starvation bunker at Auschwitz concentration camp, where Kolbe sacrificed himself for a fellow prisoner and was murdered. Resting on it is a black wooden cross from Zduńska Wola, Kolbe's birthplace, given as a gift by former concentration camp inmates in 1988.