Niederkirchnerstraße

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Niederkirchnerstraße, formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, is a street in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The street runs west from Wilhelmstraße to Stresemannstraße. It is best known for being the the location of the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS in Nazi Germany. The site is now marked by the Topography of Terror museum.

Niederkirchnerstraße is also the site of two other Berlin landmarks, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, built by Martin Gropius in 1881 and now an exhibition centre, and the Abgeordneten Haus von Berlin, formerly the seat of the Preußischer Landtag (legislature) and since 1993 the meeting place of the Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, the parliament of the State of Berlin. The Communist Party of Germany was founded in this building.

The street was originally named for Prince Albrecht of Prussia, son of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, who owned a large house called the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais on the corner of this street and Wilhelmstraße. This building formed the nucleus of the complex of buildings which was taken over by Heinrich Himmler in 1933 and developed into the centre of Gestapo and SS administration for the whole of Germany and occupied Europe, where many political prisoners were tortured and executed. The buildings were destroyed by Allied bombing in early 1945 and demolished after the war.

After World War II, in 1951, the socialist authorities of East Berlin renamed Prinz-Albrecht-Straße to Niederkirchnerstraße in honour of Käthe Niederkirchner, a member of the communist resistance to the Nazis. The Berlin Wall ran along the southern side of the street from 1961 to 1989, and a section of the wall is preserved at the western end of the street.

[edit] Literature

• Erika Bucholtz: Die Zentralen des nationalsozialistischen SS- und Polizeistaats. Gebäudenutzung und Bauplanung in Berlin 1933-1945, In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 52 (2004), H. 12, S. 1106-1125. online als pdf

[edit] Weblinks

• Topographie des Terrors
• Stätten des NS Terrors in Berlin und rund um den Potsdamer Platz

Coordinates: 52°30′26″N, 13°22′57″E

[edit] References

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