Topography of Terror Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm-and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse

Resumo

"During the years of so-called Third Reich, the buildings of the former School if Industrial Arts and Crafts, Hotel Prinz Albrecht, and Prinz Albrecht Palais on Prinz-Albrecht and Wilhelmstrasse housed the most important institutions of Nazi terror: the Secret State Police Office, the Reich SS leadership and the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Heinrich Himmler, Reich SS Leader and Chief of German Police, and Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of Security Police and SD and head of the RSHA, established the SS state’s power center site on the edge of the government district. The terrain known today as the "Topography of Terror" was the central site of the planning and direction of most of the Nazi regime’s large-scale crimes and acts of terror. After 1945, this historic site was soon forgotten. Its material remains were removed even before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – a prime example of how traces from a part of German history, long repressed by most German people, were disposed of and rendered invisible. Rediscovered in the early 1980s, the site was gradually reestablished in the historical memory of Berlin and the Federal Republic. What for decades was neglected wasteland in the shadow of the Berlin Wall became a site documenting National Socialist crimes in the center of Berlin, which now attracts visitors from all over the world." -- Editora