Nazi Reich’s ‘evil centre’ laid bare

A KNEE-HIGH wall, a rusty gate, the brick foundations of razed buildings – such are crumbling remnants of the Nazi empire in the heart of Berlin known by historians as the “centre of evil”.

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, a new exhibition centre is opening on Friday on the site where the feared Gestapo, SS and other Nazi agencies ran Adolf Hitler’s police state from 1933 to 1945.

The centre adds a museum and a library to the previously Spartan exhibit known as the Topography of Terror, which has attracted as many as 500,000 annual visitors for the last two decades to the former Prinz Albrecht Strasse. New exhibits document how Hitler’s Reich operated and how Germans dealt with the dark chapter of history in the aftermath of World War II.

The area – adjacent to the Martin-Gropius-Bau arts museum – once housed not only Hitler’s secret police Gestapo and its prison, but also the leadership of the SS, the Nazi party’s paramilitary unit, and the Reich Security main office, which combined and coordinated all different police agencies.

Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann all had offices on the street.

The authenticity of the site is what draws people’s interest, from the casual visitor to the detailed academic, said the centre’s director Andrea Nachama.

“People coming to Berlin still want to know ‘Where were the agencies of terror? Where was the capital of the Third Reich?’” Nachama told The Associated Press.

In addition to the new buildings, the new exhibit opens up the entire site, he said.

The site is a few minutes’ walk from the capital’s Holocaust memorial, which opened in 2005, and the Jewish Museum.