There’s a new temporary museum at the former site of Reich Main Security Office in Mitte, Berlin called Topography of Terrors, which documents the history of the organizations who used the site as a base of operations, including the Gestapo and the SS.  It was at this location that the transports and concentration camps were organized, and enemies of the state were detained and tortured.  The museum building (by architect Ursula Wilms) is, appropriately, a banal and chilling one, a flat glass ring layered with metal scrims that sits within fields of rubble-like gravel.

The exhibitions themselves are powerful, with lucid text and graphic photographs.  But they’re the kind of materials that could be displayed at any holocaust memorial at any place in the world. When I visited, on a brilliant summer afternoon, there were crowds gathered inside, on the very ground where these atrocities originated.  We wanted to know about the place itself.  What was the building like?  What were the detaining cells, the conference rooms, the bathrooms, like?  What was the architecture of the regime, how did it empower those in charge, and how was it complicit in what happened?