Place of terror

Known by the initials of its founder, Leopold Dahmen, as EL-DE-House (‘LD House’), the building was the headquarter of the Cologne Gestapo from 1935 to 1945 and a byword for Nazi terror. It was the centre from which Gestapo officers organized the systematic surveillance of the population and operated their reign of terror. Political opponents of the regime, forced labourers and members of minority groups stigmatized by the Nazis as ‘inferior’ were brutally interrogated and tortured in the prison cells, and from 1944 to the end of the war prisoners were executed in the courtyard of the building.

Some 1800 drawings and inscriptions of former victims can still be seen on the cell walls, testifying to the brutality of the regime’s henchmen and the inhumaneprison conditions.