Cologne is the largest city of Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city and one of the oldest in Germany. With 3.6 million people in the urban region and 1.1 million inhabitants within its city proper, Cologne is the largest city on the river Rhine and also the most populous city of both the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region and the Rhineland. Centered on the left (west) bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about 35 km (22 mi) southeast of NRW's state capital Düsseldorf and 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Bonn.
Pawiak was a prison built in 1835 in Warsaw, Congress Poland.
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It holds many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
Niederkirchnerstraße is a street in Berlin, Germany and was named after Käthe Niederkirchner. The thoroughfare was known as Prinz-Albrecht-Straße until 1951 but the name was changed by the socialist German government. The street was the location of the SS Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei, SD, Einsatzgruppen and Gestapo. The site is now marked by the Topography of Terror memorial and a museum, which includes a permanent exhibition showing the crimes of Nazism.
The Topography of Terror is an outdoor and indoor history museum in Berlin, Germany. It is located on Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, on the site of buildings, which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 was the SS Reich Security Main Office, the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei, SD, Einsatzgruppen and Gestapo.
The Brown House was the name given to the Munich mansion located between the Karolinenplatz and Königsplatz, known before as the Palais Barlow, which was purchased in 1930 for the Nazis. They converted the structure into the headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Its name comes from early Nazi Party uniforms, which were brown. Many leading Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, maintained offices there throughout the party's existence. It was destroyed by Allied bombing raids during the Second World War.
Operation Carthage, on 21 March 1945, was a British air raid on Copenhagen, Denmark during the Second World War which caused significant collateral damage. The target of the raid was the Shellhus, used as Gestapo headquarters in the city centre. It was used for the storage of dossiers and the torture of Danish citizens during interrogations. The Danish Resistance had long asked the British to conduct a raid against the site. The building was destroyed, 18 prisoners were freed and Nazi anti-resistance activities were disrupted. One online documentary includes footage taken by the RAF and interviews with those involved Part of the raid was mistakenly directed against a nearby school; the raid caused 125 civilian deaths. A similar raid against the Gestapo headquarters in Aarhus, on 31 October 1944, had succeeded.
Memorials to victims of the KGB have been set up in several countries that were formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, often in former KGB prisons, to document the repressions of the Soviet secret police and to commemorate its victims. Some are in the form of monuments at the location of KGB prisons or execution sites, others are museums and documentation centres.
The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, Lithuania, was established in 1992 by order of the Minister of Culture and Education and the president of the Lithuanian Union of Political Prisoners and Deportees. In 1997, it was transferred to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. The museum is located in the former KGB headquarters across from the Lukiškės Square and is informally referred to as the KGB Museum.
The burning of the Riga synagogues occurred in 1941, during the first days of the World War II Nazi German occupation of the city of Riga, the capital and largest city in the country of Latvia. Many Jews confined in the synagogues died in the fires. Many other anti-Semitic measures were launched at the same time, ultimately followed by the murder of the vast majority of the Jews of Latvia.
Pomorska is a building also known as Silesian House in Krakow, Poland. The word Pomorska was for the Krakow 1940s generation a synonym for Gestapo headquarters and operations.
Fort VII, officially Konzentrationslager Posen, was a Nazi German death camp set up in Poznań in German-occupied Poland during World War II, located in one of the 19th-century forts circling the city. According to different estimates, between 4,500 and 20,000 people, mostly Poles from Poznań and the surrounding region, died while imprisoned at the camp.
Mausoleum of Struggle and Martyrdom is a museum in Warsaw, Poland. It is a branch of the Museum of Independence. The museum presents the conditions in which Polish patriots and resistance fighters were jailed by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The NS-Dokumentationszentrum is a museum in the Maxvorstadt area of Munich, Germany, which focuses on the history and consequences of the Nazi regime and the role of Munich as Hauptstadt der Bewegung.
The NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne was founded by a resolution passed by the Cologne city council on December 13, 1979 and has become the largest regional memorial site in all of Germany for the victims of the Nazis. Since 1988, it has been housed in "EL-DE Haus," the EL-DE building, named for the initials of its owner, Catholic businessman Leopold Dahmen. This building was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo between December 1935 and March 1945. In the final months of the war, several hundred people, most of them foreign forced laborers, were murdered in the courtyard of the building. In a bit of historical irony, the EL-DE building remained largely untouched by the ravages of the war.
Arkivet is the established name of Vesterveien 4 in Kristiansand, Norway. The building was constructed in 1935 for the Archival Services in Kristiansand, and in the periods 1935–1940 and 1945–1997 used by this institution. Nevertheless, the building is known as the headquarters of the Gestapo in southern Norway in the period 1942–1945. The building is owned and operated by the foundation Stiftelsen Arkivet. Arikivet is located in the residential area of Bellevue overlooking the western harbor of Kristiansand. The building in the functionalist style was completed in 1935, and was 8 March of that year officially adopted by the local department of the National Archives.
The Aarhus Air Raid took place on 31 October 1944, when 25 Mosquitoes from 140 Wing Royal Air Force (RAF) of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, bombed the Gestapo headquarters at the University of Aarhus. After the Second World War, the RAF called the mission the most successful of its kind during the war.
Herbert Martin Hagen was a German SS-Sturmbannführer of Nazi Germany and a convicted war criminal. Hagen served as personal assistant to the SS police chief in Paris Carl Oberg, heading the Gestapo department. Hagen was captured in 1945, but released in 1948. In 1955 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in France, after he was found guilty of being instrumental in the deportation of the Jews from France, nonetheless he managed to avoid going to prison and became a prominent West German industrialist. In 1980 after a change in the law to allow retrial of cases handled abroad, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Cologne court, for his key role in the deportation of 73,000 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. Hagen was released after serving only 4 years of prison, he died in Rüthen in 1999.
The Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße, is a museum in Erfurt, Germany, which is housed in a former prison used by the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). It is informally known as the Stasi Museum.
