The city of Cologne´s Documentation Centre on National Socialism

The EL-DE Building was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo (secret state police) from December 1935 to March 1945. The name (pronounced L-D Building) is taken from the initials of the man who had had it build, the businessman Leopold Dahmen. The Gestapo rented the building while it was still being completed and modified it for their own purposes.

The office of the Cologne Gestapo was originally responsible for the district of Cologne. The district of Aachen and the occupied areas around Eupen and Malmedy in Belgium were added in 1943. The job of the Gestapo was to keep the population under surveillance and to persecute the political and “racial” opponents of the Nazi regime. The Gestapo in Cologne were responsible for the deportation and murder of thousands of people. Several hundred were executed in the inner courtyard of the EL-DE Building during the last months of the war, particularly foreigners condemned to forced labour.

As if by an irony of fate, the war left the EL-DE Building largely unscathed. After the end of the war the building was occupied by various council offices, including the pension office and, for a time, the registry office. In December 1981 the Gestapo Prison Memorial was opened. In 1988, following a council decision taken the previous year, the city of Cologne´s Documentation Centre on National Socialism moved into the building. The permanent exhibition “Cologne under National Socialism” was added in June 1997. The Centre also puts on a range of special exhibitions and organizes different events. As well as collecting source materials and keeping its extensive databases up-to-date, it has in addition a specialist library open to the public. This enables the Centre to devote itself to commemorating the victims of National Socialism and to researching and transmitting the history of Cologne under the Nazis.

(http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dok/)