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 the 1897 building has been used as a private library by Gerling, a large insurance company. In 1971, a six-story archive building by architect Fritz Haferkamp was built on Severinstraße in the southern part of Cologne's city center. An underlying principle of the design was to protect archival records from fluctuations in weather and climate while creating a balanced room climate. In a move away from the contemporary popularity of electromechanical air conditioning, Haferkamp preferred a structural-physical, self-regulating solution that needed only little additional climate technology. As the "Cologne Model", the building became a model for many later archive buildings