NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne

The NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne (NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln) was founded by a resolution passed by the Cologne city council on December 13, 1979, and has become the largest regional memorial site in all of Germany for the victims of the Nazis. Since 1988, it has been housed in "EL-DE Haus," the EL-DE building, named for the initials of its owner, Catholic businessman Leopold Dahmen. This building was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo (secret police) between December 1935 and March 1945. In the final months of the war, several hundred people, most of them foreign forced laborers, were murdered in the courtyard of the building. In a bit of historical irony, the EL-DE building remained largely untouched by the ravages of the war. The NS Documentation Centre (NS-DOC) is dedicated to memorializing the victims of the Nazi regime, as well as research and teaching about Cologne's history during the Nazi era. The former Gestapo prison was inaugurated as a memorial site on December 4, 1981. Some 1,800 inscriptions and drawings done by prisoners have survived on the walls of the ten cells. The Gestapo prison memorial site is one of the best preserved prisons from the Nazi era, representing a historical asset of national and European importance. Since June 1997, the permanent exhibition in the EL-DE building has depicted political, social and

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