It's a fairly nondescript building that is less than 5 minutes walk from the Koln Dom.
But from 1935 to 1945 this was the home to Kolner Gestapo (Geheime Staatpolice) or Koln's secret police; the rightly feared Gestapo.
The building is kept pretty much as it was during the war, right down to the retention of the holding cells in the basement. The air raid shelter, which is at an even lower level, was built before the Gestapo rented the place. So the cells were built above the shelter but underground by the Gestapo to their own specifications.
The upper floors are filled with artifacts and paraphernalia from the late 20's to the end of the war. The images, newspaper clippings and movies track the rise of Nazism and Hitler specifically in and around Koln. There are pictures of Hitler visiting Koln in the early 1930's.
Within the building itself, the stair cases are marble and the banisters are painted black and peeling now so I'm assuming these items are as they were seventy years ago. In the upper floors, the walls and floors have been stripped back to the bare paint heightening the senses; this might actually look and feel as it was.
As the text and verbage on the upper floors are all in German it is difficult to read and understand everything. Curiously, walking along bare corridors to move from room to room or to return to the staircase again bring a heightened awareness; of being somewhere unpleasant and uncomfortable. This is not a nice place.
Moving to the basement brings exposure to the cells. If upstairs is 'not nice' then down here it is diabolical. Here people were held in solitary confinement or crammed so tightly that people were unable sit or lie down. The reports make it difficult to tell which was worse.
The horrors of the Gestapo are well documented elsewhere but here it is the voices of the victims that tear most at the heart. The walls are covered in the victims' images and histories (in German and English) providing simple, compelling and heart rending accounts of what transpired in this basement. The simple fact that most of the questioning and torture was conducted in the air raid shelter so that the screams would be less likely to be heard form the street probably best indicates what happened here.
To open this place as a museum does the German nation a lot of credit; how much easier would it be to close this off and pretend it never happened? To confront the past and to be open in this way speaks to a nation that may not like all of its history (and which countries would?) but is willing to deal with its history.
I took this picture from the street.
On a wall inside, there is almost the same picture; taken from the same angle across the street. Only that picture was taken in 1942. In 1942, this office was responsible for the deportation of thousands of political and ‘racial’ enemies of the state. As times became even more desperate toward the end of the war, hundreds of foreign forced labourers and slaves were hanged in the rear courtyard.
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