Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds

Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände

In 2001, the »Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds« was opened on initiative of the Nuremberg city council. It presents the history of National Socialism and the closely linked history of the National Socialist party rally grounds in Nuremberg. From 1933 on, the NSDAP leadership erected several representative buildings spread over a large area, where it held annual party rallies between 1933 and 1938.

History

Already in 1923, the National Socialists used the area around the Nuremberg Dutzendteich pond to celebrate »German Day«, an assembly of radical right-wing and paramilitary organisations, as well as for NSDAP rallies in 1927 and 1929. Already in the 19th century, this was a well-known recreational area. When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the fifth National Socialist party rally took place in Nuremberg. Following this, Adolf Hitler instructed architect Albert Speer to erect representative buildings on the site and to remodel the premises into the »Party Rally Grounds«. In the next few years, large buildings and rally grounds comprising the »Luitpoldarena«, the »Große Straße« (Great Street) or the »Zeppelinfeld« (Zeppelin field) were constructed. Some of the planned buildings - such as the Congress Hall or the German Stadium - were never completed. In total, the construction of 12 buildings was begun and an infrastructure consisting of a power substation, SS barracks, two train stations and a camp site for members of the SS, SA, Wehrmacht and Hitler Youth was set up. The state leisure organisation »Kraft durch Freude« (Strength through joy, KdF) established the so-called KdF compound in the vicinity: an area with several wooden buildings in which party rally visitors were offered entertainment. Between 1933 and 1938, annual Nazi party rallies took place here. During the war, forced labourers were deployed on the rally grounds construction site. The camp grounds, which had originally been intended for the Hitler Youth and other organisations, were converted to the »Stalag XIII D Langwasser« camp. Between 1942 and 1945, the Allies repeatedly bombed the party rally grounds.

Nuremberg, 1938, Zeppelin tribune, Museen der Stadt Nürnberg

Nuremberg, 2004, Zeppelin tribune, Stefan Wagner

Victims

Between 1933 and 1938, the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds were first and foremost significant as a propaganda site. The rally grounds and the rallies that were held there were supposed to demonstrate power, both within Germany and abroad. From 1939 on, about 30,000 prisoners of war were held captive in the »Stalag XIII D Langwasser« camp on the party rally grounds. About 2,000 of them had to perform forced labour on the extensive construction site. From 1940 on, construction management began working with stone which had been extracted at the quarries of the Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Groß-Rosen and Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps by prisoners working under atrocious conditions. In 1941 and 1942, deportations of Jews from Nuremberg and vicinity left from the Märzfeld train station on the party rally grounds.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After World War II, the Allies and the city of Nuremberg had different ways of dealing with the 16 km² large area. The »Luitpoldarena« was converted to a park once again in 1958/1959. The »Große Straße« first served as a taxiway for the US Air Force, in 1968 it was opened entirely and since then, the »Große Straße« has been used as a parking lot for large-scale events. The building excavation for the German Stadium was filled with groundwater already during the war; it exists today at the Silbersee lake. The remains of the so-called March field were blown up in 1966/1967. There and on the area of the former camp premises the new Langwasser district of Nuremberg was established. The municipal stadium was remodelled and renamed several times after 1945; today it is home ground to the 1. FC Nürnberg football club. Open-air events take place on what remains of the »Zeppelinfeld«. The unfinished Congress Hall came into municipal ownership in 1945 and under monument protection in 1973. Since 2001, the northern wing has been home to the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds. In May 2026, a new permanent exhibition entitled »Nuremberg and the Nazi Party Rallies« opened. The exhibition focuses in particular on the Nazi Party Rallies, as well as the history of the city of Nuremberg and its role during the era of National Socialism, but the exhibition also explores the history of forced labourers and prisoners of war on the historical site.

Nuremberg, 2001, Entrance to the documentation centre, Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, Stefan Meyer

Nuremberg, 2026, View of the permanent exhibition, Stiftung Denkmal, Benedikt Putz

Possibilities

Exhibition, education programme

Open

Monday to Friday: 9.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.

Contact

https://museen.nuernberg.de/dokuzentrum/

dokumentationszentrum@stadt.nuernberg.de

+49 (0)911 231 753 8

Bayernstraße 110
90478 Nürnberg

Nuremberg, 2008, Information pillars at the stadium of 1. FC Nürnberg, Jarlhelm

Nuremberg, 2002, The rotunda of the Congress Hall, seat of the Documentation Centre, Heiko Stahl

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