Work on Gestapo victims memorial to begin in Berlin

[Kyt]

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/134268.html

Berlin - After years of discussion and one false start, work begins Friday on a "Remembrance and Documentation Museum" in Berlin - on the site of the former Prince Albrecht Palais where the Gestapo and the SS had their notorious interrogation and torture cells during World War II. Unlike the city's 2005-built Holocaust Memorial honouring the murdered Jews of Europe, and Daniel Libeskind's daringly designed 1999 museum dealing with Berlin's Jewish tradition and history, the "new" museum - when completed in 20 months' time - is to focus attention on the gruesome machinery of espionage, torture and liquidation used by the Nazis to enforce their 1933-45 reign of terror in Germany.

"Here, the emphasis will be on the perpetrators of Nazi crime, not the victims. Here we speak about the centre of evil," says Andreas Nachama, director of the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin.

"This was where Nazi terror across Europe was conducted. We don't talk about one victim group here, we talk about terror and about how a democracy was, in the period between January and June 1933, turned into a totalitarian dictatorship, able to subordinate all of the institutions of the state to its purpose."

In 1993 there were ambitious plans for a Berlin memorial to Gestapo victims. An international competition was arranged and Swiss architect Peter Zumthor commissioned to design the building from 23 submitted proposals.

But uncertainty dogged the project from the outset.

A start was made on it, with initial dreams of completing the museum in time for the 60th anniversary in 1998 of the "Reichskristallnacht" in 1938 when countless synagogues and Jewish- owned shops were ransacked or burned down by Nazi mobs in Germany.

That museum didn't happen. Work on the project got stalled, as uncertainty increased about its cost.

Around 15 million euros had already been spent on the structure when the Berlin authorities, battling whopping budget deficits, suddenly got cold feet and brought a halt to the project in the year 2000.

Revised estimates were predicting that an additional 26 to 28 million euros would be needed to complete the building, the cost of which had originally been put at 38 million euros.

Later, a second architects competition was held. This time round it was won by local architect Ursula Wilms of Heinle, Wischer & Partner in Berlin.

Her cost-conscious design, foresees a rectangular hall sheathed inside a metallic mesh, allowing people inside to look at other parts of the exhibit, but prevents those outside from peering in.

For decades the Berlin authorities were in a quandary about what should be done with the plot of land near the Wilhelmstrasse where the Gestapo headquarters had been, so loaded it was with the memories of the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich concocting plans for Nazi concentration and death camps.

Hitler's nearby underground bunker where he brought an end to his life as the Russians moved in to capture Berlin in early 1945 was for years another conveniently "forgotten" former Nazi plot of land near Potsdamer Platz.

For years the only visible evidence of it was a grassy mound in the communist "no-man's land" - caused, when the Russians made a vain effort to blow it up in the early post-war years.

In communist East Berlin most citizens grew up without ever knowing where Hitler's bunker was located, so anxious was the communist East German regime to disassociate itself from the Nazi past.

Nowadays, a kindergarten is found on the site.

After Berlin was reunited in 1989-90, big-name architects flocked into the city - Philip Johnson, IM Pei, Richard Rogers, Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano among them - eager to help "reinvent" prominent areas of Berlin such as the Potsdamer Platz and Alexander Platz.

Once completed, Ms Wilm's circumspect steel-and-glass designed "Gestapo" museum will be the third memorial to Germany's Nazi past to get built in Berlin in the past decade.

Berlin's current mayor, Klaus Wowereit, who is also the city's cultural senator, Bernd Neumann, the German government's culture affairs minister, and Topography of Terror Foundation chief Nachama, plan a press conference Friday when work on the "new" museum is due to start.

[spidge]

Good venture.

Maybe they should send the plans to the government in Tokyo.

[morse1001]

Good Idea but the sad thing is that is that it might have to be so large that no one will want it or that they cannot find enough land to build it on!

[Kitty]

They'll manage it. And good for them setting up an institute to teach the future what man can do. And now as Spidge said, send the plans to Tokyo with our regards.