Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism

NS-Dokumentationszentrum München

Since 2015 the Munich Documentation Centre informs on the history of National Socialism and its aftermath, particularly in the city of Munich.

History

The Bavarian capital of Munich plays a key role in the history of National Socialism. The German Workers' Party which in 1920 was renamed to NSDAP (»National Socialist German Workers' Party«) on at the instigation of Adolf Hitler was founded there shortly after the Forst World War. Initially a marginal phenomenon the party gained more and more popularity. With its anti-democratic elites and its beer halls which could be used for mass events, Munich provided an ideal breeding ground for the NSDAP and other radical right-wing groups. On November 9, 1923 a coup attempted by the NSDAP in Munich failed. Soon after Adolf Hitler and other leaders of the coup were given conspicuously mild sentences. In the late 1920s the NSDAP was gathering strength again. In 1930 the party moved into its new headquarters in the »Brown House«, a mansion near the Königsplatz converted for this purpose. Even after their rise to power in 1933 the party headquarters remained in Munich. All around the »Brown House« a whole quarter arose with government agencies and representative buildings like the »Führerbau« (Führer's buiding).
In 1933 political enemies were held captive and tortured in the basement of the »Brown House«. In March 1933 the first concentration camp in National Socialist Germany was established in nearby Dachau, it existed until the end of the Second World War. Also in 1933 radical right-wing students organized a book burning on Königsplatz. 1935 Munich was officially declared »Hauptstadt der Bewegung« (Capital of the Movement). In November 1938 the nation-wide anti-Jewish riots (»Kristallnacht«) were orchestrated from Munich. Exactly one year later Georg Elser (1903–1945) carried out a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller, one of the city's famous beer halls. During the war, large parts of Munich were destroyed by allied bombing, including the »Brown House«. The National Socialist's reign in Munich ended on April 30, 1945 with the arrival of US forces.

Munich, 2015, External view of the Documentation Centre, to the left the former »Führerbau«, now the Academy for Musik and Theatre, Jens Weber

Munich, 2015, View of the permanent exhibition, Jens Weber

Victims

The »Brown House«, the »Führerbau« (Führer's buiding) and other buildings in the vicinity of the Munich Königsplatz were sites of perpetrators. No mass crimes were committed here but the city played a key role in the development and the consolidation of National Socialism.

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 the war, Munich struggled for a long time to come to terms with its past as »Capital of the Movement«. Although for example a square near the Königsplatz was already in 1946 renamed »Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus« (»Square of the victims of National Socialism«, there were strong opposing reactions by parts of the population.
From the 1980s onwards citizens' groups ensured that the city's role in National Socialism was increasingly addressed. An information space at the original site of the party headquarters was demanded. In the 1990s there were intense discussions about suitable concepts but also about the location and especially about the use of the ruins of the »Brown House« whose foundations were eventually not incorporated into the new building but demolished. The costs for the development of the centre were born by the federal government, the state of Bavaria and the city of Munich. The running costs of the house which was opened in 2015 are covered by the city. The permanent exhibition focuses on Munich's role in National Socialism but also with its coming to terms with the past after the war. The documentation centre offers changing exhibitions, a comprehensive educational program and a library.

Munich 2015, View of the learning centre, Jens Weber

Munich, July 3 1932, March of the SA and SS at the Gau Rally Munich-Upper Bavaria, Stadtarchiv München W-Rep-0055

Possibilities

Permanent exhibitions, temporary exhibitions, library, guided tours, workshops, smartphone-app

Open

Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. To 7 p.m.
Opened on holidays that fall on a Monday
Closed 24. and 21. December

Contact

http://www.ns-dokuzentrum-muenchen.de

nsdoku@muenchen.de

+49 (0)89 233 670 00

Brienner Straße 34
80333 München

Munich, 1935, »Brown House«, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Bildarchiv

Munich, 2015, View of the permanent exhibition and the former »Führerbau«, Jens Weber

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