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The Topography of Terror (German : Topographie des Terrors) 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 buildings that housed the Gestapo and SS headquarters were largely destroyed by Allied bombing during early 1945 and the ruins demolished after the war. The boundary between the American and Soviet zones of occupation in Berlin ran along the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, so the street soon became a fortified boundary, and the Berlin Wall ran along the south side of the street, renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse, from 1961 to 1989. The wall here was never demolished. The section adjacent to the Topography of Terror site is the longest extant segment of the outer wall, as the longer East Side Gallery section in Friedrichshain was part of the inner wall, not visible from West Berlin.
The first exhibitions of the site took place in 1987, as part of Berlin's 750th anniversary. The cellar of the Gestapo headquarters, where many political prisoners were tortured and executed, was found and excavated. The site was then turned into a memorial and museum, in the open air but protected from the elements by a canopy, detailing the history of repression under the Nazis. The excavation took place in cooperation with East German researchers, and a joint exhibition was shown both at the site and in East Germany in 1989.
In 1992, two years after German reunification, a foundation was established to take care of the site, and the following year, it initiated an architectural competition to design a permanent museum. A design by architect Peter Zumthor was chosen. However, construction was stopped due to funding problems after the concrete core of the structure had been built. [1] This stood on the site for nearly a decade until it was finally demolished in 2004 and a new building begun.
The construction of the new Documentation Centre according to a prize-winning design by the architect Ursula Wilms (Heinle, Wischer und Partner, Berlin) and the landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann (Aachen) was finished in 2010. The new Documentation Centre was officially opened on 6 May 2010 by Federal President Horst Köhler on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. [2] The new exhibition and documentation building and the redesigned historic grounds were opened to the public on 7 May 2010.
After the demolition of the ruins in the 1950s, the area was used as a bumper car site and a dumping ground for rubble from the renovation of Kreuzberg. The plans for a memorial site on the former site of the Gestapo goes back to 1978, when Berlin architecture critic Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm was one of the first to note, in essays and surveys, the significance of the former site of the Gestapo, SD and RSHA headquarters.
The first exhibition on the site's history was created for the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987. The research continued after it, leading to a documentation centre that collected some more evidence for the terror of the National Socialists in Germany. In 1992, a foundation was created for the construction and maintenance of the centre with an associated permanent exhibition. The managing director is Rabbi Andreas Nachama.
A tender in 1993 to design the museum complex was won by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Based on the temporary exhibition building, his design was likened to the skeleton of a barracks, allowing light through the glazed gaps in the concrete beams. Although critically acclaimed, the structure proved expensive to build and when the original contractor became insolvent in the middle of construction, no other contractor willing to continue the project for the fixed fee could be found. With the city of Berlin unwilling to pay an additional three to five million Euros for a reduced design and funding from the federal government delayed until more progress was achieved, the site was left with just the concrete stairwells of the design. Having spent 13.9 million Euros already, these were demolished, despite the protests of Zumthor and other architects, in 2004. [1]
In June 2005 a new architectural design competition was launched following the aborted partial construction of Zumthor's design. Out of 309 submitted and 23 chosen drafts, architect Ursula Wilms from the Berlin architects office Heinle, Wischer and Partner and landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann from Aachen won in January 2006 the final round. The draft included a two-storey, ashlar-formed, paned building with an available surface of 3,500 square metres. For the construction around €15 million was available. Another five to nine million Euro was used for the interior and the redevelopment of the historical site. These costs were defrayed jointly by both the federal government and the federal state of Berlin, each contributing 50%. The architects estimated construction costs at a maximum of €20 million and a construction period of two years.
The construction was finished on time and the new building was opened to the public on 7 May 2010.
The open-air exhibition in the trench alongside the excavated segments of cellar wall on Niederkirchnerstraße (formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Straße) was retained and sheltered with glass. The room for the permanent exhibition is 800 cubic metres and presents the development and functions of the security apparatuses during the Nazi regime. A room for events at the back of the building can accommodate 200 participants. In the southern part of the area outside is a copse of black locust trees, the remains of "Harrys Autodrom" from the 1970s, whereas the rest of the open space is covered with greywacke. Around the flat-roofed building is a façade made of metal lamellae, which opens the building in a way that it is possible to look out of it to the surroundings anywhere on the ground floor of the building. In the basement is the seminar centre, the library with about 25,000 volumes, the memorial department and offices for 17 employees of the Topography of Terror Foundation.
With the inauguration of the new Documentation Centre, three permanent exhibitions are open to the public. All three are presented bilingually in German and English.
The "Topography of Terror" permanent exhibition was shown in the open air until the new Documentation Centre opened. The thoroughly revised and redesigned "Topography of Terror" permanent exhibition is presented over 800 square meters in the new building. The focus of the exhibition is the central institutions of the SS and police in the "Third Reich" as well as the crimes they perpetrated throughout Europe. Attention to the Nazi regime's many victim groups will assume a central place alongside the portrayal of the system of terror.
A permanent exhibition about the capital Berlin during the "Third Reich" will be on display in the exhibition trench alongside the excavated segments of cellar wall on Niederkirchnerstraße (formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Straße). It will address National Socialist policy in Berlin and its consequences for the city and its population.
With the opening of the new Documentation Centre, the grounds of the "Topography of Terror" are once again completely open to the public. The site tour, which mainly follows the exposed building remnants, encompasses 15 stations. Informational signs provide an overview of the historic location and the site's use during the Nazi period and the postwar era. The tour also integrates remains of the Berlin Wall, which have been designated a historic monument.
This special exhibition will be presented in the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre from 23 June 2010 on. It was developed by Dr. Ingo Loose and Dr. Thomas Lutz in cooperation with the State Archive in Łódź.
A bilingual German-English exhibition on the "House Prison" at the Gestapo Headquarters was shown in a special open-air exhibition area and included the 'ground memorial' including remains of former basement prison cells.
With altogether 400 photos and documents, for the first time the exhibition comprehensively related the history of the prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8 and reminded the fate of numerous detainees.
This presentation lasted from August 2005 to April 2008 on the site of the 'Topography of Terror'.
This exhibition was presented on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials and comprised around 110 photo and 50 text documents as well as 15 audio stations. It outlined the genesis, process, ambition and importance of the trial led by the Allies at Nuremberg focussing on the accused, whose culpability for the war crimes is demonstrated.
The presentation was located on the construction hoarding at the area of the Topography of Terror from October 2005 to April 2007.
German-English documentation on occasion of the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the people's court.
The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the Memorial to the German Resistance.
The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Stiftung Neue Synagoge - Centrum Judaicum. The cooperative project presented on the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom presents historical documentation of the attack, seen around the world, on German Jewry after five and a half years of Nazi dictatorship.
The presentation was displayed from November 2008 to March 2009 in the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin.
The library of the Topography of Terror Foundation is a special library focusing on the police, SS, Gestapo in the Third Reich and on the National Socialism in general. It currently comprises about 25 800 media elements, about 120 regularly and 100 closed magazines. It is situated around a fountain reminding of Zen gardens and freely accessible. [3]
The Topography of Terror Foundation provides comprehensive advice and coordination tasks in the field of national and international memorial sites. In Germany, the Memorial Museums Department is the central coordination office for memorial sites and initiatives for memorial sites and increasingly promotes the international collaboration.
The last well-preserved former Nazi forced labour camp is located in Niederschöneweide. In the Second World War it served as one of the more than 3000 collective accommodations dispersed throughout the city for forced labourers. The Documentation Centre on Nazi Forced Labour opened in the summer of 2006 on a part of historical grounds that once belonged to the camp and which are today protected as a monument. The Documentation Centre offers two permanent exhibitions: "Forced Labour in the Daily Round 1938-1945" and "Between two stools. The History of the Italian Military Internees 1943-1945". Entrance and guided tours are free.
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In several Russian cities activists of Memorial have organised alternative tours, showing visitors locations, buildings and monuments associated with the political terror of the Soviet period, especially of Lenin and Stalin. Such tours are regularly held in Ryazan (Central Russia), Krasnoyarsk (Siberia) and Khabarovsk (Far East) while Moscow has tours and a website devoted to the theme, "It happened right here" (Это прямо здесь). [4]
The Geheime Staatspolizei, abbreviated Gestapo, was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
Wewelsburg is a Renaissance castle located in the village of Wewelsburg, which is a district of the town of Büren, Westphalia, in the Landkreis of Paderborn in the northeast of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The castle has a triangular layout, with three round towers connected by massive walls. After 1934, it was used by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, and was to be expanded into a complex which would serve as the central SS cult-site.
The Reich Security Main Office was an organization under Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS, the head of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel (SS). The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a 1.9-hectare (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Edgar Julius Jung was a German lawyer born in Ludwigshafen in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was a leader of the conservative revolutionary movement in Germany that stood in opposition to not only the Weimar Republic, whose parliamentarian system he considered decadent and foreign-imposed, but also National Socialism. Jung was murdered in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge.
Peter Zumthor is a Swiss architect whose work is frequently described as uncompromising and minimalist. Though managing a relatively small firm, he is the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize and 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.
Wilhelmstrasse is a major thoroughfare in the central Mitte and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Germany. Until 1945, it was recognised as the centre of the government, first of the Kingdom of Prussia, later of the unified German Reich, housing in particular the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office. The street's name was thus also frequently used as a metonym for overall German governmental administration: much as the term "Whitehall" is often used to signify the British governmental administration as a whole. In English, "the Wilhelmstrasse" usually referred to the German Foreign Office.
The Nazi party rally grounds covered about 11 square kilometres (1,100 ha) in the southeast of Nuremberg, Germany. Six Nazi party rallies were held there between 1933 and 1938.
Prince Frederick Henry Albert of Prussia was the fifth son and youngest child of King Frederick William III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. His parents had fled to East Prussia after the occupation of Berlin by Napoleon, and Albert was born in Königsberg. Two of Albert's elder brothers were Frederick William IV, King of Prussia from 1840 till 1861, and William I, King of Prussia from 1861 to 1888 and German Emperor from 1871 until 1888.
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 East 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.
Fabrikaktion is the term for the last major roundup of Jews for deportation from Berlin, which began on 27 February 1943, and ended about a week later. Most of the remaining Jews were working at Berlin plants or for the Jewish welfare organization. The term Fabrikaktion was coined by survivors after World War II; the Gestapo had designated the plan Große Fabrik-Aktion. While the plan was not restricted to Berlin, it later became most notable for catalyzing the Rosenstrasse protest, the only mass public demonstration of German citizens which contested the Nazi government's deportation of the Jews.
Martin-Gropius-Bau, commonly known as Gropius Bau, is an important exhibition building in Berlin, Germany. Originally a museum of applied arts, the building has been a listed historical monument since 1966. It is located at 7 Niederkirchnerstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg,
The neoclassical Brienner Straße in Munich is one of four royal avenues next to the Ludwigstraße, the Maximilianstraße and the Prinzregentenstraße. The boulevard was constructed from 1812 onwards, during the reigns of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria and his successor Ludwig I, in accordance with a plan by Karl von Fischer and Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell. The avenue is named after the Battle of Brienne.
Europahaus is a large high-rise office block in Berlin, Germany, located in the Kreuzberg district on Stresemannstraße, facing the remains of the former Anhalter Bahnhof railway terminus across Askanischer Platz. It was one of the first modern high-rise office buildings to be constructed in the city.
The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais was a Rococo city palace in the historic Friedrichstadt suburb of Berlin, Germany. It was located on Wilhelmstrasse 102 in the present-day Kreuzberg district, in the vicinity of Potsdamer Platz.
Albert Widmann was an SS officer and German chemist who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program during the regime of Nazi Germany. He was convicted in two separate trials in the West German courts in the 1960s for his criminal activities during World War II.
Gustav Adolf Nosske was a German lawyer and SS-Obersturmbannführer. In 1941–42, he commanded Einsatzkommando 12 within Einsatzgruppe D, under the command of Otto Ohlendorf. Tried in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948, Nosske was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released early in December 1951.
The Reich Ministry of Transport was a cabinet-level agency of the German government from 1919 until 1945, operating during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Formed from the Prussian Ministry of Public Works after the end of World War I, the RVM was in charge of regulating German railways, roadways, waterways, and the construction industry - a kind of infrastructure agency in today's understanding. In the 1920s, the Ministry's involvement in the rail sector was limited to administrative and technical supervisory functions. The National Railway was initially organized as an independent state-owned company to guarantee that Germany paid war reparations according to the provisions of the 1924 Dawes Plan.
The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre is located in the Berlin district of Niederschöneweide in the Treptow-Köpenick district. It documents the fate of the forced labourers during the National Socialist era and is the only one of its kind in Germany.
Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4, known as RSHA IV B4, was a sub-department of Germany's Reich Security Head Office and the Gestapo during the Holocaust. Led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, RSHA IV B4 was responsible for "Jewish affairs and evacuation" in German-occupied Europe, and specifically for the deportation of Jews from outside Poland to concentration or extermination camps. Within Poland, the liquidation of the ghettos and transport of Jews was handled by the SS and local police departments.