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Germany

EL-DE Haus

Low
Verified 29 May 2026
Fresh · 0d ago

Data is aggregated from public sources and may be incomplete or out of date. Always verify with primary sources before acting on any figure. See data sources.

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Photograph of EL-DE Haus

Gallery

From Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA where not otherwise stated).

  • Cologne-EL-DE-House-Exterior.JPG

    Photo by Bryan MacKinnon via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

  • Eingang EL-DE-Haus, NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln-5972.jpg

    Photo by Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • EL-DE Haus Koeln - Testing Sigma 8-16.jpg

    Photo by A.Savin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

  • EL-DE-Haus Köln (0631-33).jpg

    Photo by Raymond - Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

  • EL-DE-Haus Köln - Eingangsbereich (0634-36).jpg

    Photo by Raymond - Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

  • EL-DE-Haus Köln.jpg

    Photo by © 1971markus via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • EL-DE-Haus, Köln-8743.jpg

    Photo by Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • EL-DE-Haus, NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln-0703.jpg

    Photo by Raimond Spekking via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Background

EL-DE Haus, officially the NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne, located in Cologne, is the former headquarters of the Gestapo and now a museum documenting the Third Reich. The building was at first the business premises of jeweller Leopold Dahmen, and the building takes its name from his initials. In 1934, the Nazis rented the building from him and turned it into the headquarters of the secret police, the Gestapo. Surprisingly, the building survived the Allied bombing of Cologne during World War II, while 90% of the city was destroyed. After the bombings, the basements of the building, which had been used as prison cells and torture rooms for forced labourers and political enemies, were used to store wartime files and paperwork.

Source: Wikipedia article lead, CC-BY-SA.

Capacity

Current population

Occupancy

Year opened

Operational

Facility profile

Operator

Population held

Mixed/unknown

Opened

Region

Security level

Death-row facility

No

Conditions

No conditions summary available yet.

Visiting

No visiting information available.

Mailing

No mailing information available.

Practical info

Contact the operator's website for inmate-specific procedures.

Known issues

No major issues documented in our database.

Contact & address

Conditions Risk Score

Derived signal — not a judgement. How it's calculated

Insufficient data
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Data completeness

20%

How many of our profile fields are populated. We surface this so families and researchers know the limits.

Sources