The relatives of some of the thousands of Nazi victims who were tortured and murdered in the Hamburg headquarters of the Gestapo have accused authorities and property developers of insulting their memory following the transformation of the building into a luxury complex with scant reference to its past.



The Stadthöfe (city courts) in the centre of the German port city, has been marketed under the title Hommage to Life by its owners, Quantum Immobilien.

Opponents of the scheme, which authorities and developers say will inject new life into a hitherto underdeveloped part of the city, object to the fact that reference to the thousands who resisted the Nazis and were interrogated there before often being deported to concentration camps has been restricted to a small room in a shop on the ground floor.

“We’re talking here about nothing less than the central place in this city where people were taken to be tortured,” said Norbert Hackbusch, one of the protesters who gathered in front of the building on Tuesday for a showdown with authorities on the 85th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor.

They included relatives of those tortured there, some of them clutching portraits of their loved ones, while others victims’ faces were projected on to the freshly painted walls of the complex.

“Nobody who was brought here for interrogation came out unhurt,” said Detlef Baade, whose father was tortured by Hamburg’s Gestapo in 1933. “We have a societal obligation to do this. We owe it to the dead,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Protesting under the slogan “Commerce instead of Commemoration? Never!” the demonstrators also brought attention to the wrought-iron greeting over the entrance to the Stadthöfe, which they say is chillingly reminiscent of the Arbeit Macht Frei slogan at Auschwitz and should be removed. The greeting reads: “Bienvenue (welcome) /Moin moin (a colloquial phrase for hello)/ Stadthof”.

Brochures for the 100,000 sq metre (1,076,000 sq ft) Stadthöfe complex, which boasts 88 luxury flats, 15,000 square metres of office space, a hotel with 126 rooms, a restaurant, bars, boutiques and a roof terrace, describe the development as one of unendliches Plaisir (eternal pleasure).

When the building was sold to the investors by the Christian Democrat-led Hamburg senate in 2009 for an undisclosed sum, the sales contract included a recommendation that the new owners make available a non-commercial space of about 1,000 sq metres in the building for a “dignified” historical evaluation of its role between 1933 and 1943 as the Gestapo’s headquarters.

Since then the space available has drastically shrunk to 70 sq metres in the back of a bookshop. Otherwise, only two indistinct plaques make reference to the horrors that took place there, and three so-called Stolpersteine (bronze “stumbling stones”) set into the ground make reference to individual Jews who were deported from the site.

Hamburg’s cultural authorities have said they will work with the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial, as well as activists including the relatives, to find a suitable commemorative concept.