NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

In the location's words:

Stop: Appellhofplatz

The NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne was founded on December 13, 1979 by resolution of the Cologne Council. It developed into the largest local memorial to the victims of National Socialism in the Federal Republic of Germany. Since 1988 it has been based in the EL-DE-Haus, named after the initials of its builder, the merchant Leopold Dahmen.

The headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo was located there from December 1935 to March 1945. In the courtyard of the building, several hundred people, mainly foreign forced laborers, were executed in the last months of the war. As if by an irony of fate, the EL-DE-Haus was largely spared during the war. The NS-DOK also sees itself as a distinctive research center. The library with literature on Cologne during the Nazi era as well as on general Nazi history and right-wing extremism contributes to this, as does the documentation, which secures the extensive collections of photographs, posters, objects, documents and memoirs, evaluates them in databases and makes them accessible. Numerous research projects deal with Jewish history, eyewitness accounts and interviews, forced labor, police, youth, press and associations, various victim groups and the commemoration of National Socialism, as in the "Stolpersteine" project by Cologne artist Gunter Demnig.

The permanent exhibition "Cologne under National Socialism," which has been on display in the EL-DE House since June 1997, covers the entire political, social and societal life of Cologne during the Nazi era: the seizure of power and the power apparatus, propaganda and "Volksgemeinschaft," everyday life, youth, religion, racial persecution and the murder of Cologne's Jews and Sinti and Roma, as well as resistance, war and wartime society. "Haut, Stein" Jakob Ganslmeier's artistic work focuses on the way National Socialist symbols are dealt with to this day and questions the persistence, use and obliteration of relevant signs from two perspectives: In the form of architecture and structural ornaments, the symbolism of National Socialism continues to be written in public space. As tattoos, these signs serve the individual's commitment to right-wing extremism.