Where: Appellhofplatz 23-25, D-50667 Cologne - Germany
What: Museum and memorial
When: 13th December 1979
Admission: Adults: 4,50 €
Concession: 2,00 €
The building: The NS-Documentationszentrum is located at the EL-DE
house, in Cologne. The house is named after its first owner and founder Leopold Dahmen
(L-D). It had residential and commercial use, he lived there with his family,
and sold clocks and gold. In 1934 it had a major renovation, led by the German
architect Hans Erberich, still with both commercial and residential use, it has
a strictly neoclassical style. From 1947 to 1949 annexes were built, replacing
the residential part of the house and the other house next to it, and also one
floor was added in the entire building. In 1991 the Cologne City Council
decided to transform the place in a museum and memorial, the Germans, Professor Peter Kulka,
Konstantin Pichler and Professor Gerd Fleischmann worked together to design the
exhibition. In 1997 the place was opened for the public. In 2009 and 2010 some
other modifications were made, but mainly to update some data (it is also a
research centre, so they had new findings and material), and to update the
media stations, that still had the 1997 technology, and were outdated.
Context: The Documentation Centre of the National Socialism is
located at EL-DE house, in Cologne, Germany. Is considered de largest regional
memorial site in Germany. It is the former prison and headquarters of the
Gestapo, which had been located in this place from 1935 until 1945. Nowadays it
has a prison memorial, a museum and an educational centre. The place opened as
a memorial in December of 1991, and is dedicated to remember the ones who died
during the Nazi regime, to communicate and to research the National Socialism
regime. Before being used by the Gestapo it had had commercial and residential
use. Then the living space was turned into offices and the EL-DE house prison
was installed on the upper basement level. The Gestapo chose this building
mainly because of its location, close to the city centre, near the Police headquarters
and the central prison.
During the time Gestapo used it, the house suffered
many interventions, but after this period it remained almost untouched, at
least until it was turned into a memorial and museum. The house was used by
tenants again immediately after the end of the war, mostly by the City of
Cologne (The Occupation Office, the Pricing Authority, the Office for Defence
Expenses, the Registry, the Pension Office and the Legal and Insurance
Authority had their offices there).
The house is still owned by the same family that had
it before the war. In 2010, its tenants were the NS Documentation Centre,
the Legal and Insurance Office as well as the staff council of the Culture
Department. The ground floor of the house used to host a gallery but became a
part of the NS Documentation Centre by July 2012. The most significant changes
were the refurbishments between 1993 and 1997 to accommodate the permanent
exhibition ‘Cologne during National Socialism’ and the installation of the
library, a meeting room as well as offices for the NS Documentation Centre. In
2009, two rooms on the ground floor were added to the entrance of the memorial
and a multi-functional meeting room was created on the second floor, right
behind the end of the exhibition. Once the ground floor premises of the
building have been taken over, more refurbishments were necessary: The special
exhibition space was moved and a pedagogical centre was created in its current
space. The library was extended and the inner court as the former execution
place was included in the memorial. It was only at the beginning of the 1980’s
that the EL-DE House became a historically protected monument.
The exhibition: The prison is really well kept, it still has the
inscriptions of the prisoners who were kept there. Some cells and the corridor
are filled with panels, both in English and German, that explains who were some
of the people that were kept there, and some transcriptions of the walls
inscriptions. The exhibition, on the upper floors consists of a range of panels
explaining what happened in the EL-DE House during the National Socialism in
Germany, it also has a lot of documents, not only in paper, but also audios and
videos, displayed through the rooms. The exhibition is only in German.
Personal impressions:
The prison is really well kept and it is quite big,
but the ceiling is really low, which gives the feeling of enclosure. It is
actually really impacting. The museum it self is really well organized and has
a vast range of information, the three floors in which it is located are really
big, and the panels give a great panorama of the time. The only problem with it
was that this part is only in German, so many times you are not quite aware of
what’s the message they are passing. The whole building gives the
impression that it hasn’t been touched after the war. The walls have an old
look, like they were abandoned, which enhances the feeling of being in a
historically important place. What kept me intrigued was why they only had
English explanations for the memorial prison and not the permanent exhibition,
I imagine that this has to do with what they want to remember the most, maybe
is more important to remember the ones that were kept there and tortured. They
weren't Jews but also suffered with the Nazi regime.
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