NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne The NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne () was founded by a resolution passed by the Cologne city council on December 13, 1979 and has become the largest regional memorial site in all of Germany for the victims of the Nazis. Since 1988, it has been housed in "EL-DE Haus," the EL-DE building, named for the initials of its owner, Catholic businessman Leopold Dahmen. This building was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo (secret police) between December 1935 and March 1945. In the final months of the war, several hundred
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne municipal archive and library was erected between 1894 and 1897 to a Gothic revival design by Friedrich Carl Heimann: it was inaugurated in December 1897. The new building was large enough to accommodate the archive at a time of accelerated growth when the city of Cologne was absorbing many previously independent towns and villages. During World War II the building suffered damage from bombing. However, since all records and manuscripts had been moved into secure storage from as early as September 1939, the archive did not suffer any substantial loss. Since the archive moved to its new location in 1971,