Topography of Terror

Why go

visitBerlin, the city's official tourism website, describes the Topography of Terror as a permanent exhibition and documentation centre on the crimes of National Socialism, on the site where the headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Reichsführung-SS and the SS Security Service (SD), and from 1939 the Reich Security Main Office, stood between 1933 and 1945. It says the permanent exhibition on these institutions and their crimes is arranged in five sections, and that a second permanent exhibition along the excavations on Niederkirchnerstraße, 'Berlin 1933–1945: Between Propaganda and Terror', covers Nazi policy in Berlin and its consequences for the city. According to the same page, the Gestapo held a total of 15,000 opponents of the regime in its 'house prison' here; the site lay derelict after the war until a temporary exhibition in 1987 became a permanent project, and the grounds include a surviving section of the Berlin Wall. This record is the documentation centre and its grounds, not the foundation that runs it.