Villa ten Hompel Memorial Site

Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel

Between 1940 and 1944, the headquarters of the Ordnungspolizei (order police) for the military district VI were located in the former villa of industrialist Rudolf ten Hompel. The Ordnungspolizei was involved in National Socialist crimes. Between 1953 and 1968, the villa was home to the seat of the »Department for the Compensation of Victims of Political, Racial and Religious Persecution«. The city of Münster opened the »Villa ten Hompel Memorial Site« in 1999. Through its exhibitions it documents the history of the Ordnungspolizei in National Socialism.

History

The villa was built in 1924 by Münster cement producer Rudolf ten Hompel and remained in his possession until 1939. In 1939, he was convicted of several economic crimes, after which the house became property of the Reich treasury. In April 1940, the Ordnungspolizei installed its headquarters for the commander in chief of the Ordnungspolizei for military district VI at the villa. The area of this district comprised what is today North-Rhine Westphalia, the region around Osnabrück and later also parts of Belgium. The commander in chief of the Ordnungspolizei, Heinrich Lankenau, was in charge of a large number of policemen in this military district - military district VI was in fact the largest in Germany in terms of population. The tasks and responsibilities of the commander in chief broadened during the war: the number of employees at Villa ten Hompel rose from 7 to 40 and an air defence radio communication centre was set up, since military district VI was home to 21 cities which were especially endangered by air raids. Policemen from military district VI were moreover deployed in guarding deportation trains and at so-called labour education camps. At the same time, the commander in chief of the Ordnungspolizei drew up several police battalions which systematically murdered Jews in Eastern Europe, organised in »Einsatzgruppen« (mobile killing units). In October 1944, the successor of Lankenau, Reiner Ließem, moved the Ordnungspolizei headquarters to Düsseldorf-Kaiserwerth.

Münster, about 1942, Staff group photograph with the commander in chief of the Ordnungspolizei for military district VI, Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel

Münster, about 1955, Staff of the Department for Compensation celebrating carnival, Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel

Victims

Villa ten Hompel was not a site at which people were tortured or killed, yet it was a site of significance to the perpetrators: It was here that the commander in chief of the Ordnungspolizei planned the deployment of »his« policemen in guarding deportation trains and »labour education camps«, it is also where police battalions for the »Einsatzgruppen« active behind the eastern front were drawn up.

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, Villa ten Hompel became the headquarters of the police administration again: in May 1945, the British military administration appointed Friedrich Grützmann as »regional police president«. The »West German canals« commando of the river police was also located in the villa. Both of these offices relocated in 1953 and the »Department for the Compensation of Victims of Political, Racial and Religious Persecution« moved into Villa ten Hompel. By 1968, when the department was closed down, about 12,000 people from the administrative district of Münster had applied for restitution. Between 1971 and 1995, Villa ten Hompel was home to a branch of the municipal library. The city of Münster sold the building in 1996. In 1999, the »Villa ten Hompel Memorial Site« opened an exhibition there entitled »Persecution and Administration. The Economic Exploitation of Jews by the Westphalian Fiscal Authority«. The permanent exhibition »By Order. Police, Administration and Responsibility« was opened on May 7, 2001. The »Villa ten Hompel Memorial Site« is one of the few memorials in Germany to deal with the topic of police and administration under National Socialism.

Münster, 2001, Group photograph of the memorial's staff, Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, travelling and temporary exhibitions, lectures series

Open

Wednesday and Thursday 6.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m., from Friday to Sunday 2.00 to 5.00 p.m.
Guided tours of the exhibitions and educational tours by appointment.

Contact

https://www.stadt-muenster.de/villa-ten-hompel/startseite.html

tenhomp@stadt-muenster.de

+49 (0)251 492 710 1

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring 28
48145 Münster

Münster, 2002, Exterior view of the Villa ten Hompel Memorial Site, Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel, Christoph Spieker

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