German Resistance Memorial Center

Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

The German Resistance Memorial Center commemorates in its exhibition »Resistance against National Socialism« individuals and groups who stood up to the National Socialist dictatorship between 1933 and 1945.

History

Resistance against National Socialism was much diversified. Men and women from all social backgrounds and political blocs were active in resistance either as individuals or in groups. Among the resistance groups which planned and undertook measures against the National Socialists was, for example, the »Kreisau Circle«, which was a centre of civil resistance.
The »Red Orchestra« was the term the National Socialists used to describe several resistance groups which were active all over Europe and supposedly had contacts to the Soviet Union. The group comprised about 150 men and women.
Oberst Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, on the other hand, was a leading member of a resistance group consisting of Wehrmacht officers. They planned to assassinate Adolf Hitler and thus put an end to the National Socialist regime. The assassination plot, which Stauffenberg personally took part in on July 20, 1944, failed, as did the attempted coup d'etat. Stauffenberg and other army officers who had been involved in the plotting were executed.

Berlin, July 21, 1944, Soldiers and officers at the Bendler Block after the failed assassination attempt, Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

Berlin, 2008, Commemorative courtyard in the Bendler Block, Stiftung Denkmal, Anne Bobzin

Victims

In the night of July 20/21, 1944, Oberst Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and three of his accomplices were executed in the courtyard of the Bendler Block by three Wehrmacht officers loyal to the regime. In all, 87 members of the resistance group led by Stauffenberg were executed.
Many members of non-military resistance groups as well as individuals who had undertaken resistance were persecuted by the Gestapo and murdered. Among the most well-known were Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were decapitated in Munich in February 1943 after being tried by the »Volksgerichtshof« (People's Court), but also the blue-collar worker Georg Elser, who, having tried to assassinate Hitler in November 1939 was murdered in the concentration camp Dachau shortly before the end of the war.

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

The German Resistance Memorial Center is located in the former building of the Army High Command in the Stauffenbergstraße, in the so-called Bendler Block. Oberst Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg's office used to be located in what are today the exhibition rooms.
On July 20, 1953, the mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, unveiled a memorial in the courtyard of the Bendler Block. Prior to that, the Berlin Senate had decided upon remodelling the courtyard into a site of commemoration. Since then, official commemorative ceremonies take place at the memorial annually on July 20. In 1962, a memorial plaque dedicated to the executed officers was set up on the courtyard.
At the end of the 1960s, a memorial and educational centre on the topic of military resistance to National Socialism was opened. The centre has had a permanent exhibition since 1983, which documents the diversity of German resistance against National Socialism. In 1989, the Memorial Center developed a further permanent exhibition entitled »Resistance against National Socialism«. It was replaced in he summer of 2014 by yet a new exhibition of the same name.
Today, the German Resistance Memorial Center is a site of commemoration, documentation, research and civic education. Its mission is to present an overall picture of German resistance.

Berlin, 2008, Site where von Stauffenberg was shot, Stiftung Denkmal, Anne Bobzin

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition »Resistance to National Socialism«, film screening every first Sunday of the month, publications, loanable travelling exhibition, guided tours available in several languages, seminars centred around various themes

Open

Monday to Wednesday and Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Contact

http://www.gdw-berlin.de

info@gdw-berlin.de

+49 (0)30 269 950 00

Stauffenbergstraße 13-14
10785 Berlin

Berlin, 2008, Statue by Richard Scheibe entitled »Young Man with his Hands Tied«, Stiftung Denkmal, Anne Bobzin

Berlin, 2014, Topic »Stauffenberg and the Assassination Attempt of July 20, 1944«, Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

Berlin, 2014, Topic »Georg Elser and the Assassination Attempt of November 8, 1939«, Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

Berlin, 2014, Topic »The Kreisau Circle«, Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

Berlin, 2014, Topic »The White Rose«, Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

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