Topography of Terror

Topographie des Terrors

The »Topography of Terror« exhibition has been on display in the centre of Berlin, between the Niederkirchnerstraße (before 1951: Prinz-Albrecht-Straße), Wilhelmstraße and Anhalterstraße since 1987. Located here between 1933 and 1945 were the Gestapo and SS headquarters as well as the Reich Main Security Office. The exhibition presents information on the history of these organisations and the crimes they committed all over Europe.

History

Between 1933 and 1945, situated on the area between the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (today: Niederkirchnerstraße), Wilhelmstraße and Anhalterstraße were the headquarters of the National Socialist police apparatus. This part of Berlin - the Friedrichstadt - had been home to the Prussian government district since the end of the 18th century. Already in 1933, National Socialist authorities rented the former arts school on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8 and set up the Gestapo's central headquarters there. The Gestapo headquarters had their own prison since 1933 containing 39 cells in which members of the Gestapo interrogated and tortured prisoners. Later, further organisations moved to the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and to the close-by Wilhelmstraße, including the SS and the seat of the Reichsführer-SS as well as the security service of the SS (SD, Sicherheitsdienst). These institutions soon spread to further buildings on the Wilhelmstraße. From 1939 on, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) had its central headquarters in the Wilhelmstraße 101-106.
Together with the Gestapo headquarters and the SS headquarters, this area constituted the command centre for the persecution of political opponents and for the murder of European Jews and other victim groups. During the Second World War, the buildings were severely bombed.

Berlin, 1933, Gestapo headquarters, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R97512, N/A

Berlin, 2010, Permanent exhibition in the Documentation Centre, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, Stefan Josef Müller

Victims

The Gestapo interrogated and tortured political opponents and resistance fighters as well as forced labourers and POWs during the war in the prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8. It is not known how many people exactly were incarcerated here. For most of them, the Gestapo prison was only a transit point on the way to various concentration camps and other prisons. The premises on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße were first and foremost a site of the perpetrators: it is here that the persecution of political opponents was coordinated, this is where the murder of European Jews and of other groups was planned and from where it was implemented. Those responsible at the SS, the Reich Main Security Office and the Gestapo were not simply bureaucrats doing their jobs behind the scenes, they were part of a generation of devout followers of National Socialism with high hopes for advancement. Many high-ranking Reich Main Security Office staff members, apart from fulfilling their administrative tasks, actively participated in the National Socialist mass murder, for example commanding mobile killing squads in the occupied territories in Eastern Europe.

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, the ruins of the buildings on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and Wilhelmstraße were torn down and the rubble cleared away. After Berlin had been divided into sectors in 1945, the former RSHA premises were located directly at the border separating the American from the Soviet sector. The Soviet part of Prinz-Albrecht-Straße was renamed in honour of Käthe Niederkirchner, a communist resistance fighter. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the area became part of the border zone in West Berlin and remained without buildings, partly serving as a waste disposal site. A small part of the site was used as a circuit for car driving practice. The former city centre became derelict. At the end of the 1970s, the area once again came into public attention: the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) rejected the extension of a street, planned for 1980, which would lead across the former Gestapo premises. Various citizens' initiatives advocated the erection of a documentation centre or a monument on the former Gestapo premises and fought for a more open discussion about this site of the perpetrators. In 1983, the Berlin Senate launched a tender competition for architectural remodelling of the area, however, the winning design was never realised. The Berlin Senate appointed a workgroup led by Reinhard Rürup, whose task it was to set up a temporary exhibition and make the premises accessible to the public for Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987. The remains of the Gestapo building cellar, where the prison had been located, were uncovered as well. The »Perspektive Berlin« initiative and its chair Lea Rosh demanded in 1988 the creation of a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on the premises. In 1992, the Berlin Senate established the Topography of Terror Foundation. The construction of a documentation centre designed by architect Peter Zumthor was begun in 1993, however, it was discontinued in 2004. A new exhibition building opened in May 2010.

Berlin, May 2009, Uncovered remains of the former Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8, visible in the back are remains of the Berlin Wall, Bildwerk, Berlin

Berlin, April 2010, Courtyard of the Documentation Centre, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, Stefan Josef Müller

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours, educational programme, seminars, library

Open

Daily 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed on December 24, 31 and January 1

Contact

http://www.topographie.de

info@topographie.de

+49 (0)30 254 509-50

Niederkirchnerstraße 8
10963 Berlin

Berlin, 1997, Open air exhibition at the Topography of Terror, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors

Berlin, 2010, Topography of Terror Documentation Centre, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, Stefan Josef Müller

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