Qualla: NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:34 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: Introduction https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne/ Photo credit Bryan MacKinnon, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the walls of ten small basement cells in central Cologne, there are around 1,800 inscriptions. They were scratched and written into the plaster between December 1935 and March 1945 by people who had been arrested by the Gestapo and brought to the EL-DE Haus, the secret police headquarters for the Cologne region. Some of the writings are names. Some are dates. Some are messages to loved ones the writer knew might never read them, or prayers, or single defiant words. The Allied bombing campaign reduced most of central Cologne to powder, but the EL-DE Haus was barely scratched. The walls held. The writing held. And since 1988 those ten cells have been the heart of the largest regional memorial site for victims of Nazism anywhere in Germany.

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Image: Bryan MacKinnon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/u1hc-ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: The Building That Should Not Have Survived https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne/ Photo credit Elke Wetzig (User:Elya), CC BY-SA 4.0. The EL-DE Haus takes its name from the initials of its original owner, a Catholic businessman named Leopold Dahmen. Construction finished in 1935; that same December the Gestapo moved in and made it the headquarters for their operations across the Cologne region. For the next nin...

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Image: Elke Wetzig (User:Elya) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/u1hc-ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-the-building-that-should-not-have-survived.mp3 0:06 2 full NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: The Cells https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne/ Photo credit Adam Jones, Ph.D., CC BY-SA 3.0. After the war the building cycled through other uses for decades. It was the Cologne city council, in a resolution on 13 December 1979, that decided this place would become a memorial. The former Gestapo prison was inaugurated as a memorial site on 4 December 1981, and the perman...

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Image: Adam Jones, Ph.D. | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/u1hc-ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-the-cells.mp3 0:06 3 full NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: A Centre for Memory and Research https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne/ Photo credit © 1971markus, CC BY-SA 4.0. The NS Documentation Centre, or NS-DOK, does more than preserve the building. Its permanent exhibition, "Cologne During the Nazi Era," works systematically through the seizure of power, the propaganda machine, daily life under dictatorship, youth culture and the Hitler Youth, the...

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Image: © 1971markus | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/u1hc-ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-a-centre-for-memory-and-research.mp3 0:06 4 full NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: Carrying It Forward https://qualla.com/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne/ Photo credit © 1971markus, CC BY-SA 4.0. Since 1989, the city of Cologne has run a visitor programme for surviving former forced labourers, bringing them back to the place where they were held and giving them the dignity of recognition. For more than a decade the programme has been led by Elzbieta Adamski, who in 2004 r...

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Image: © 1971markus | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/h/c/ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-wp/u1hc-ns-documentation-centre-of-the-city-of-cologne-carrying-it-forward.mp3 0:06 5 full