Historical Archive of the City of Cologne up at the site of the collapse (a large hole in the ground), where around 95% of all archival items could be held until August 2011, albeit scattered and in many cases badly damaged. Archive repositories all over Germany offered space to store the damaged and only roughly cleaned documents: wet materials were flash-frozen to prevent mold growth. "Itinerant archivists" worked in the receiving archives all over the country and began the task of re-identifying and re-cataloging. A newly installed centre for restoration and digitization on the outskirts of Cologne started working in 2011, with a total cost for restoring
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture and photography in Cologne and the Rhineland. The plan was to build the “safest and state-of-the-art city archive in Europe“ by 2017. After the decision of the city council, a detailed concept was worked out and approved. In 2013, in the context of the city's financial crisis, local political debate began to move towards re-considering this decision, and even to imposing a planning moratorium. Protests by local support groups as well as national archive organizations followed. In 2017, the total damage from the collapse was estimated at 1.2 billion euros. Before