At the request of the Topography of Terror, the remaining 200m of the wall at Niederkirchnerstrasse, which marked the border between the districts of Mitte (East Berlin) and Kreuzberg (West Berlin), have been preserved with all the traces of destruction that occurred during the transitional period.
This fragment of the wall, designated a historic monument in 1990, now forms part of Topography of Terror Documentation Centre.
The permanent exhibition is located inside the Document Centre and focuses on the central institutions of the SS and police during the “Third Reich” and the crimes that they committed throughout Europe, from the rise of Nazi power including Hitler, Himmler and a number of key individuals, how Jews and the minority population (Sinti, Roma, Gypsies, handicapped) were persecuted and exterminated, WWII and the end of war and prosecution of the individuals involved in the German Nazi regime.
There's a lot of information in a small space, with many shocking pictorial images. An audio guide is strongly recommended as it helped me zoomed into key information while walking through the exhibits.
A very heavy hearted exhibit, which took me about 1.5hrs to cover the document centre.
The outdoor exhibit provides a much more summarised history of Germany from 1933 all the way to the Cold War and the rise of Socialism and when the Berlin Wall came down. I didn't spend much time here, since most of the history had already been covered inside the Document Centre and also the Cold War period had already been covered in the visit to other musuems that I had been to over the last few days.
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