Topography of Terror Berlin

The Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) is a documentation centre and museum in Berlin on the site of the former Reich Security Main Office, the headquarters of the Gestapo, the SS, the Reich Security Main Office and the Reich Criminal Police Office during the Nazi period. It occupies a long, low building completed in 2010 and the surrounding open-air site between Wilhelmstrasse, Niederkirchnerstrasse and Stresemannstrasse, in central Berlin near the surviving section of the Berlin Wall. The institution is one of the principal German national documentation centres on the Nazi regime’s instruments of terror and one of the most-visited free Berlin museums, with around 1.4 million visitors per year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The site and what was on it

The site between Wilhelmstrasse and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (now Niederkirchnerstrasse) had been, from 1933 to 1945, the central administrative complex of the Nazi regime’s terror apparatus. The buildings on the site included the Hotel Prinz Albrecht, requisitioned in 1934 as the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under Reinhard Heydrich; the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais next to it, requisitioned by the SS in 1934; and most importantly the building at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 that housed the headquarters of the Gestapo, the secret state police, from 1933 onwards. The Gestapo cellars in this building were used as a holding and interrogation facility for prisoners; many of the regime’s principal political opponents passed through these cells, and the surviving testimony from those who came out includes accounts of the conditions and the torture they witnessed. From 1939 the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the central administrative body that integrated the Gestapo, the SD and the Criminal Police under Heydrich’s command and from 1942 under Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was headquartered on the site.

The buildings were heavily damaged in Allied bombing in 1944 to 1945 and largely demolished in the post-war period. The site lay derelict through most of the post-war decades, in part because it sat on the western edge of the Soviet sector and then the Berlin Wall (the Niederkirchnerstrasse boundary was the line of the Wall from 1961 to 1989). The substantial cellar foundations of the Gestapo headquarters survived under the rubble.

The development of the documentation centre

Public attention to the site as a historical place dated from the early 1980s. A grass-roots citizens’ campaign organised by the Aktives Museum Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin pressed for the site to be developed as a documentation centre, and a temporary exhibition was opened on the site in 1987 to mark Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The exhibition was housed in a temporary structure and used the excavated Gestapo cellar foundations as part of its display. The exhibition was intended to be temporary; it remained in place, with successive renovations, for over twenty years, while the question of a permanent building was debated.

The current permanent documentation centre, designed by the Berlin architect Ursula Wilms (Heinle, Wischer und Partner) with the landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann, was opened on 6 May 2010 after several years of construction. The building is deliberately understated: a long, low, glass-and-steel rectangular structure, partially transparent, that allows the visitor to see the surrounding open-air site through the building. The permanent exhibition inside the building documents the institutional history of the Gestapo, the SS, the SD and the RSHA, with substantial use of the original German records and post-war investigations.

The exhibitions and the open-air site

The permanent indoor exhibition, titled “Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse”, uses around 800 photographs and document reproductions to set out the institutional history of the Nazi terror apparatus from 1933 to 1945. The exhibition is structured chronologically and traces the development of the agencies, the careers of the senior personnel, the operational record of the killing programmes carried out by these agencies (in particular the Einsatzgruppen, which were RSHA-administered), and the post-war reckoning with the personnel who survived.

The open-air site outside the building, on the excavated foundations of the Gestapo cellars, includes a long trench-side exhibition titled “Berlin 1933 to 1945: Between Propaganda and Terror” that uses 400 photographs and documents to set out the wider Berlin experience of the Nazi period. The trench follows the line of the original Gestapo cellar wall and allows the visitor to walk along the surviving foundations.

The indoor and open-air exhibitions, together with the surviving section of the Berlin Wall along Niederkirchnerstrasse (which runs along the northern boundary of the site), produce an unusual layered historical effect: the visitor stands on the foundations of the Nazi terror headquarters, looks at exhibits documenting the killings the agencies on the site directed, and sees the Wall of the post-war German division running across the same ground.

The standing of the institution

The Topography of Terror is the principal German national documentation centre on the Nazi regime’s instruments of terror, complementing the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (which addresses the destruction of European Jewry) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre at the Bendlerblock (which addresses the resistance to the regime). The three institutions together constitute the core German national documentation infrastructure on the period; visitors to Berlin who want to understand the regime are typically directed through all three. The Topography is the institution that addresses the perpetrators most directly.

See also

Sources

  • Reinhard Rürup (ed), Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände”, Verlag Willmuth Arenhövel, multiple editions from 1987
  • Andreas Nachama (ed), Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm- and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse: A Documentation, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2010 (the catalogue of the current permanent exhibition)
  • Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, University of Minnesota Press, 2005 (chapters on the site’s development)
  • Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, University of Chicago Press, 1997
  • Caroline Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France, Cornell University Press, 1999
  • Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, https://www.topographie.de