Cologne City Documentation Center for National Socialism

Brief information

The EL-DE House was hardly damaged during the war, although from 1935 to 1945 it housed the Cologne headquarters of the Gestapo. Because of this preservation, the building became not a neutral shell for a museum, but the main document itself: here, the former administrative site of terror was transformed into an urban center of remembrance and research.

The center was established by the city council in 1979 and later grew into Germany's largest regional museum-memorial dedicated to the victims of the Nazi regime. Its permanent exhibition is devoted to Cologne under National Socialism, but the place derives its sharpest meaning not from the scale of the subject, but from the convergence of address and history: the museum tells of the system in the very place where part of that system operated.

What to notice right away

It is worth considering three parts of the EL-DE House together. The building's name comes from the initials of its first owner, Leopold Dahmen, meaning that an ordinary commercial building preserved in its name a trace of its prewar private history. The former Gestapo prison is open as a memorial: in ten cells, around 1,800 inscriptions and drawings by prisoners have survived. These traces matter not as museum captions, but as the voices of prisoners left in the place itself.

The inner courtyard is connected with executions carried out in the final months of the war: several hundred people were killed there, above all foreigners deported for forced labor. The permanent exhibition inside the EL-DE House presents the political, social, and everyday life of Cologne at that time. In this way, the building is read from bottom to top: the cells and courtyard speak of direct violence, while the exhibition explains the urban environment in which it became possible.