10
Telling the story of this place
In the last three rooms you walked through, the exhibition explains how Jews in Cologne were gradually stripped of their rights, persecuted, and murdered. However, the active role played by the Gestapo and the significance of this building in the murders are not made clear.
Here we show you again three exhibit items that may already be familiar to you from the previous rooms.
We use them to tell you something crucial that was previously left out: how the Gestapo officers of the ‘Jews, Naturalisation and Denaturalisation’ department, who had their desks here on the second floor of the EL-DE Haus, organised the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population of Cologne and the surrounding area.
In the days around 9 November 1938, Jewish places of worship, cemeteries, shops, and homes were destroyed throughout the Reich, and several hundred Jews were murdered. During and after this ‘Reich Pogrom Night’, it was the Gestapo that supervised the riots, transported hundreds of Jewish residents of Cologne to the Dachau concentration camp, and confiscated the property of the Jewish communities, like here in the Glockengasse Synagogue.
Starting in spring 1941, Gestapo officers organised the systematic transfer of the Jews in Cologne from their homes to special ‘Judenhäuser’ (Jewish houses), like here at Cäcilienstraße 18-22, and to a large internment camp in Cologne-Müngersdorf.
It was also the Gestapo that ultimately organised the deportations from Cologne to the ghettos and extermination camps in occupied territories of Poland and the Baltic states: the officials identified the people who were to be deported. They ensured that the Jews of Cologne gathered at the city’s trade fair grounds in Deutz, where they confiscated their last remaining possessions, and they supervised the transports.
The Gestapo was far more deeply involved in the crimes against Cologne’s Jewish community than the exhibition has previously made clear. The same applies to the crimes against foreign forced labourers, which you will encounter later. The violence perpetrated by the Gestapo escalated particularly at the end of the war: in the last few weeks of the war alone, they arbitrarily murdered several hundred people behind the EL-DE Haus, mainly forced labourers.
Credits:
1. © NS-DOK; 2. Glockengasse Synagogue © Rheinisches Bildarchiv rba_137810; 3. House at Cäcilienstraße 18-22 © Rheinisches Bildarchiv rba_004671; 4. Visualisation of the deportations from Cologne to the Łódź Ghetto © NS-DOK