Topography of Terror

This unassuming lot on Niederkirchnerstrasse was, from 1933 to 1945, the most feared address in Germany: the headquarters of the Gestapo, the SS command under Heinrich Himmler, and the Reich Security Main Office that planned the Holocaust. Prisoners were interrogated and tortured in its 'house prison'. Bombed and then bulldozed after the war, the site lay forgotten under rubble beside the Berlin Wall until a 1987 dig unearthed the cellar walls. The open-air and indoor documentation centre, opened in 2010, uses the excavated foundations to trace how ordinary bureaucrats organised persecution and genocide from these very rooms. A surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall runs along its edge.