National Socialism Documentation Center of the City of Cologne

About this audio guide

This guide to the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne centers on the EL-DE Haus, a building a jeweller put up in the early nineteen thirties that the Gestapo took over before it was even finished, turning its basement into a ten-cell prison beneath office space above. It follows the roughly eighteen hundred inscriptions prisoners scratched into the basement walls, names, dates, farewells in Russian and Ukrainian, and asks how this one building survived bombing that flattened most of the city around it. Stand in the courtyard out back, where the building's ordinary daily life above ground sits over what its walls remember below.