Topography of Terror

Nazi history museum in Berlin

The Topography of Terror (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. 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. 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.

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.

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).

Schaltzentrale der Hölle. Was passiert mit der "Topographie des Terrors" in Berlin? Documentary, Germany, 2004, 7'08 Min., ZDF aspekte, 20 July 2004
Dokumentationen des Terrors. News programme, Germany, 2007, 1'52 Min., Production: ZDF heute, first run: 2 November 2007