Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, “The Topography of Terror” exhibition center will open in the area where the SS, Gestapo and other Nazi organizations masterminded Adolf Hitler’s deadly police state between 1933 and 1945.
The old facility, built in what for decades became an empty quarter in central Berlin, will now be accompanied by a $34 million museum that targets Nazi criminals.
According to the Associated Press:
The center adds a museum and a library to the previously Spartan exhibit known as the "Topography of Terror," which has attracted as many as 500,000 annual visitors for the last two decades to the former Prinz Albrecht Strasse. New exhibits document how Hitler's Reich operated and how Germans dealt with the dark chapter of history in the aftermath of World War II.
The museum’s site once housed the feared Gestapo and its prison, SS leaders, the Nazi’s paramilitary unit and the Reich Security Main Office, which coordinated the many Nazi police agencies.
“The building is meant to hover over the site. The foyer is intended as a viewing platform, from which you can see the layers of history,” said Andreas Nachama, who heads the Topography of Terror foundation.
The exhibition overviews the role of the SS and Gestapo as the coercion instruments of the Nazi regime, explaining how the agencies destroyed the rule of law through racist and anti-Semitic policies.
In addition to a 27,000-volume library, the buildings include meeting rooms to research and discuss the history of the site. Nachama said that the museum hopes to eventually compile a database of Nazi officers and criminals.
Nachama also said that it was the authenticity of the site that has attracted visitors to the area.
“People coming to Berlin still want to know ‘Where were the agencies of terror? Where was the capital of the Third Reich?’” Nachama told The Associated Press.
He added that the new exhibit opens up the whole site.
“Now, they can see the whole area for the first time, all 4.5 hectares (about 11 acres) not just one-eighth of it. They can see the layers of history on the site and they can come in and learn where the terror against millions was initiated and planned,” he said.
While the Nazis had the option to headquarter the agencies in more convenient locations, they deliberately chose to build them in the center of the capital.
“Repression was used for political purposes,” he said. “Fuehrer, Gestapo, and concentration camp were the key words of the Third Reich.”
Just a few minutes’ walk from Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial and Jewish Museum, “The Topography of Terror” exhibit will open on May 7.
