Town house (Hamburg)
The town house was built in 1814 as the seat of the city administration and the police in Hamburg , between the Neuer Wall and the Bleichenfleet through the renovation and expansion of the Görtz-Palais built in 1710 , which had already served as the Mairie (town hall) from 1811 to 1814 during the French occupation . During the National Socialist era , the building served as the headquarters of the Hamburg Gestapo ; after the Second World War , it housed the building authorities and the Senate Department for Environmental Protection. The privatization of the complex and its conversion into a hotel, restaurant and shopping area led to a controversy over the possibilities of commemorating the crimes of the Nazis committed in the town hall.
Construction phases
With the construction of the Stadthausbrücke in 1889, a transition between the old town and the new town was created. This bridge construction went hand in hand with considerable extensions of the town hall between 1888 and 1892, according to plans by the architect Carl Johann Christian Zimmermann . The conspicuous corner building Neuer Wall / Stadthausbrücke was created with strong reliefs and a round tower with a high dome and tambour that recedes slightly behind the facade level . The representative main entrance of the building was relocated to this rotunda, in the overlying balcony parapet of the tower base is a stone Hamburg state coat of arms and in the arched frame of the door a medallion with stylized olive branches and an inscription inlaid in gold: Salus Populi suprema lex esto (German: “The good of the people be (us) supreme law”). In 1914–23, Senior Building Director Schumacher built another extension over the Bleichenfleet.
use
secret State Police
After the parliamentary elections March 5, 1933 , in which the Nazis had won the majority, were already in the night of 5 to 6 March 1933, the officials of the residents of the building State police NSDAP -members, SA - and SS -Angehörige replaced and the town hall was declared the headquarters, from December 1935 the Gestapo headquarters . Between 1933 and 1943 the house became a “place of torture and persecution”, numerous people were brought to the headquarters after their arrests or arrests and there were mistreated, murdered or driven to their death. In the basement there were rooms specially set up for these "interrogations". In 1943 the building was largely destroyed by bombs. There is a touring exhibition at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial on the role of the town hall's police authorities during National Socialism .
Building authority
After the Second World War , the buildings were rebuilt in a simplified manner and the Hamburg building authorities moved in. The entire ensemble Neuer Wall 86/88, Stadthausbrücke 4–10 and Bleichenbrücke 17 a / b has been a listed building since 2009 , with the Goertz-Palais in Neuer Wall 86 already being protected in 1928.
Ministry of Urban Development and Environment
The authority for urban development and the environment was based in the town hall until summer 2013 before moving to Wilhelmsburg .
modification
The building was given to the real estate company Garbe Group, which is carrying out a comprehensive renovation. So should u. a. the corner tower at the corner of Neuer Wall and Stadthausbrücke, which was destroyed in the war, will be rebuilt. But the building's past should also be taken into account and, following the intervention of numerous municipal institutions, an appropriate memorial should be set up in the basement.
Commemoration
A request made by the employees of the building authorities in 1980 led to the unveiling of a memorial plaque on October 29, 1981 by Senator Volker Lange , as President of the building authority and Heinrich Braune, who was persecuted during the Nazi era . The plaque at the entrance to Stadthausbrücke 8 commemorates the building's National Socialist past and the victims who were tortured and murdered at this location. Three stumbling blocks were set in the sidewalk in front of the house . They remember the shipyard worker Gustav Schönherr , who was one of the first victims to be "thrown" to death from the window in April 1933, the ship's carpenter Carl Burmester , who "was thrown to death" in the stairwell in this house in 1934, and the seller and decorator Wilhelm Prull , who was arrested, abused and driven to death by the Gestapo in 1943 as a homosexual .
The third stumbling block is reminiscent of Wilhelm Prull (born 1910). He comes from Zetel in Oldenburg and worked in Hamburg as a salesman and decorator. Wilhelm Prull was arrested on March 6, 1943 by the Criminal Police Office “to combat homosexuality” and charged with “unnatural fornication”. Wilhelm Prull is one of a total of 54 homosexual Nazi victims in Hamburg who killed themselves before or during the police investigation.
When the building was privatized by sale to Quantum Immobilien GmbH , the black-green Senate obtained an assurance in 2008 that the investor would set up a memorial to the victims of National Socialism at its own expense, with a gross floor area of 750 square meters. The chairman of the Association for Hamburg History, Joist Grolle , then called the handling of the town house "a practical test" for Hamburg's culture of remembrance and hoped it would pass. A bookstore with an adjoining café was built in 2018 ; around 50 square meters remained for the actual memorial to the victims of the Hamburg Gestapo. The bookseller, who takes over the shop rent-free, sees it as "a unique opportunity to deal openly with memories and to reach people who are otherwise not interested in it". The head of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, Detlef Garbe, criticizes the very small exhibition space, which is already "tight" for a single school class. The former Hamburg police president and chairman of the working group of formerly persecuted and imprisoned social democrats Wolfgang Kopitzsch reacted indignantly, also because the victims' associations were not included in the planning. He doubts that dignified commemoration is even possible in the turmoil of the café and shop, and calls the whole idea "absurd". Since then, a Hamburg citizen initiative has been protesting under the motto “Consumption instead of commemoration? Never! ”In weekly vigils in front of the town hall.
literature
- Herbert Diercks : Documentation Stadthaus - The Hamburg Police under National Socialism , publisher: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, Hamburg 2012
- Das Stadthaus in Hamburg - Center of Terror and Oppression 1933 to 1943, publisher: Initiative Gedenkort Stadthaus, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063221-1
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Architecture Hamburg. Volume 2: Facades (PDF; 6.4 MB), accessed August 17, 2010.
- ↑ Detlef Garbe: Institutions of Terror and the Resistance of the Few ; in: Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg (Ed.): Hamburg in the Third Reich , Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-903-1 , pp. 520 f.
- ^ Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial: Documentation City House. The Hamburg police under National Socialism. Traveling exhibition. Hamburg 2012.
- ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt of July 2, 1980 and Hamburger Abendblatt of October 30, 1981: Nazi victims honored www.abendblatt.de, accessed on April 12, 2018.
- ^ Wilhelm Prull * 1910 at stolpersteine-hamburg.de, accessed on March 6, 2018.
- ↑ Matthias Schmoock: Schumacher-construction and Gestapo headquarters . Hamburger Abendblatt dated February 12, 2008, accessed on March 6, 2018. Registration required.
- ^ Marc Widmann: Stadthaus: Dignity and Burden . zeit.de from February 28, 2018, accessed January 29, 2019; Wolfgang Kopitzsch on Gestapo memorial "Not to take part is tough". taz of January 4, 2019.
Coordinates: 53 ° 33 ′ 2 " N , 9 ° 59 ′ 11" E