Nazi Torture Chamber Converted Into Housing In Germany, Holocaust Survivor Families Upset

The relatives of thousands of Nazi victims gathered in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday to protest the development of a Nazi torture center into flats with inadequate memorial about its past.

The relatives of victims appeared enraged when they accused German authorities and property developers Quantum Immobilien of besmirching the memory of the victims who were tortured in the Hamburg headquarters of the Gestapo — Nazi Germany’s secret police — by touting to build attractive properties with inadequate mention of the past to honor the victims subjected to torture in Nazi Germany.

People opposing the scheme say the authorities have been remiss in commemorating the memory of the tortured victims. The opponents of the plan proposed by the property developers, who believe the new edifice will infuse life into an otherwise underdeveloped part of the city, state that the reference to the tortured victims who were interrogated in the property before they could be taken to a concentration camp is restricted to a small room on the ground floor, the Guardian reported.

The protesters gathered to confront the authorities on the 85th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor. The crowd amassed in the front of the building were mostly families of the victims who perished in the concentration camps. Some were clutching on to portraits of loved ones while pictures of other victims were projected on to the newly painted walls of the building, reports said.

One of the protesters Norbert Hackbusch protesting under the slogan “Commerce instead of Commemoration? Never!” told the Guardian: “We’re talking here about nothing less than the central place in this city where people were taken to be tortured.”

According to reports, the building, previously under the stewardship of the Christian Democrat-led Hamburg senate, was sold to the investors in 2009. When the sale was made, a clause in the contract included recommendation that the new owners spare 1000 square meters for a non-commercial space in the building for a “dignified historical evaluation of its (the building's) role between 1933 and 1943 as the Gestapo’s headquarters," the Guardian reported.

However, the place to commemorate the fallen significantly shrank in scale with a mere 70-square-meter space made available for the purpose. Apart from the space, the only other reference to the horrors suffered by the victims can be witnessed in two plaques and three Stolpersteine (bronze “stumbling stones”) set in the ground, which allude to the Jews bought to the site before being sent to the concentration camp.

Another protester at the site, Detlef Baade, whose father was tortured by Hamburg’s Gestapo in 1933 told German news paper Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Nobody who was brought here for interrogation came out unhurt.”

“We have a societal obligation to do this. We owe it to the dead,” he added.

Hamburg Cultural authorities said they will find a suitable way to pay homage to the victims of the Holocaust by working with the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial, as well as activists including the relatives of the victims.