Exhibition showing Nazi-era Berlin reopened

Germany's main exhibition of ruins of Nazi-era Berlin reopened to visitors Tuesday in the excavated, inner-city basement where the Gestapo headquarters used to stand.

The whole site - half a city block - is popular with tourists and is located just across the street from Hermann Goering's old air ministry, the monumental, Nazi-style Luftwaffe headquarters, which survived the Second World War intact.

All that is left of the offices of the Gestapo and two other Nazi secret services is the foundations and some paving. An indoor documentation centre opened in May and has now been complemented by 77 plaques which guide visitors through the Topography of Terror park.

Museum executives said two million people have visited the site since it opened to visitors in 1987.

Wooden placards put up 23 years ago in the excavated basement of a building once known as the Prinz Albrecht Palais had become tacky and needed replacing.

The new exhibition is a wider-ranging depiction of Nazi-era Berlin from 1933 to 1945, which many visitors asked for.

The site was formerly used by three organisations notorious for torture and callous killings: the Gestapo, or secret national police agency; the SS, the Nazi Party's own paramilitary organisation; and a national security agency set up in 1939.

Visitors learn how the Nazis ran a Europe-wide campaign of terror from the site, and even tortured or killed some people there.

The interpretation building and park, now landscaped with gravel and paths and fringed by trees, are within walking distance of the Holocaust Monument and the Checkpoint Charlie crossing in the now razed Berlin Wall, which most tourists also want to see.

The new outdoor exhibition, based on detailed research in German records, depicts Berlin's evolution from a left-leaning city in 1933 to a showcase for the Third Reich.

"We've never actually had a comprehensive display in Berlin before about the city under the Nazis," said Andreas Nachama, the head of the museum, who is a historian.

Several government agencies lined one city street, Wilhelm Strasse. The exhibition quotes Joseph Goebbels, soon to be Nazi propaganda chief, writing in his diary Jan 30, 1933: "It's a dream come true. We've taken over Wilhelm Strasse."