Topographie des Terrors

A few blocks south of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews lies a museum dedicated to the various manifestations of terror that swept this city in the 20th century.  More than 1.3 million people visited the Topographie des Terrors, the “Topography of Terror” in 2018, making the documentation center one of the most frequently visited places of remembrance in Berlin. During the “Third Reich” the headquarters of the Secret State Police, the SS, and the Reich Security Main Office were located at the site.

The permanent exhibition “Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm- and Prinz-Albrecht-Straße” focuses on the central institutions of the SS and police during the “Third Reich” and the crimes that they committed throughout Europe.

With the help of mostly photographic material on a “ribbon of panels” and documents (facsimiles) presented at subject-oriented lecterns, visitors are led through the major themes of the exhibition’s five main segments: The National Socialist Takeover of Power (I); Institutions of Terror (SS and Police) (II); Terror, Persecution and Extermination on Reich Territory (III); SS and Reich Security Main Office in the Occupied Countries (IV); and The End of the War and the Postwar Era (V). Computer stations and reading folders provide in-depth information, often addressing subjects beyond the scope of the exhibition.

A few audio and film recordings are deployed within the exhibition. The media units contain both temporal and spatial stages of development: Maps show the location of SS and police command stations (Leitstellen) and the sites where atrocities occurred. A diagram of the National Socialist concentration camp system, as the central component of the terror system in the “Third Reich,” is also presented.

Since its establishment in 1992, the Topography of Terror Foundation has produced several special and temporary exhibitions that were presented in Germany and abroad to great acclaim. A current example is an exhibition with the title “The Cold Eye”. Final Pictures of Jewish Families from the Tarnów Ghetto 27 November 2021, to 18 April 2022, in the Special Exhibitions Space

A joint exhibition of the Topography of Terror Foundation, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the Natural History Museum Vienna. In late 1941, two Viennese scholars developed a project “to research typical Eastern European Jews.” The following March, using the “cold eye of science,” they took photographs of more than a hundred Jewish families – 565 men, women, and children – in the German-occupied Polish city of Tarnów. Only 26 of these people were able to survive the Holocaust and recount what happened. Pictures and brief biographies of those murdered have been preserved.

This exhibition documents the work carried out by the two scholars while also depicting the lives of Jews in Tarnów before 1939 and their murder under German occupation. This story is typical of how hundreds of Jewish communities were persecuted and destroyed in parts of Poland under German rule and terror. More