BERLIN’S
TOPOGRAPHY OF TERROR
Nazi SS and Gestapo Headquarters Documentation
In today’s
heated political discourse, the word “NAZI” is
tossed about as a pejorative descriptor, often having little relation
to the real historical meaning, risking making it meaningless. In Berlin,
is a site where the very real vestiges of the National Socialist means
of control by terror and murder was almost wiped away. An empty piece
of ground in the no-man’s land next to the Berlin Wall where buildings
once formed the dark heart of the Nazi machine stood vacant for 42 years
after the end of World War II. In 1987, an exhibit was founded on the
spot, christened “The Topography of Terror”.
All that
was left of the former Nazi Government Quarter buildings which served
as
the headquarters of the Third Reich’s security apparatus, Adolf
Hitler’s SS and the Nazi Gestapo secret police was a strip of tile
lined subterranean walls. This was originally the basement of the Berlin School
of Industrial Arts and Crafts, taken over by the Nazi party's State Secret
Police in 1933, becoming the Gestapo’s house prison, where thousands
of Nazi regime opponents (see Bendler Block Nazi Resistance Museum),
Jews and others where interrogated and tortured before being sent off
to death
camps or to summary execution hanging in the courtyard.
In
May of 2010 a new documentation center opened, focused less on
the victims
of the Nazi
terror machine, memorialized elsewhere, in Berlin
at the Jewish Museum and Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg gate
and former Concentration Camps, but more
on the perpetrators; faces and names listed and mounted on display panels
of the administrators, officers and functionaries who served the party
in the dark heart of its deadly purpose, the daily work of planning the
murder of millions.
It was
from the offices in the Reich Security Quarter on Prinz Albrecht
Strasse that the labor and concentration camps were
administered, the meticulous records of the death mechanism and
regime opponents kept, as well as the records of the workers within
the offices
where the Nazi’s “final solution” was finalised and
implemented. Where other countries with oppresive and murderous
regimes tend to hide or deny their dark pasts, Germany struggles to embrace
and understand its own. How repression and wholesale muder could become
as commonplace for its everyday practitioners as delivering the post
(see Berlin
Communications Museum).
The modern concrete and glass cube exhibition hall of two levels, one
above ground and the other below was designed by Architect Ursula
Wilms to maintain the reference between the indoor exhibition space
and the
outdoor historic open air space with its walkway along the basement
cells against the remaining intact section of the Berlin Wall (see Fall of the Berlin Wall).
The displays above tell the story of the Nazi security apparatus,
with texts in English and German accompanying
the photographic record. The lower level holds the research library,
state-of-the-art event and lecture halls, and exhibition halls for
temporary exhibits.
Visiting the Topography of Terror Exhibition
The
grounds of the Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) are
located on
Niederkirchner
Strasse, between Potsdammerplatz and Checkpoint
Charlie (see Checkpoint
Charlie Mauer
Museum), next to the Martin-Gropius Bau
Museum. Some of the buildings around the site also served in the era
of the Third Reich. The current German Finance Ministry is located across
the way in the huge building fronting Wilhelmstrasse from which Hermann
Göring
ran the Nazi Luftwaffe Air Ministry. Admission
to the Topography
of Terror exhibit
is free, open daily from 10am to 8pm. © Bargain
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Topography
of Terror
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See Also:
CHECKPOINT CHARLIE WALL MUSEUM
DRESDEN'S FIREBOMED FRAUENKIRCHE
KAISER WILHELM MEMORIAL CHURCH
