After the First World War, the Hamm police administration was housed in an old half-timbered building, the former Landmann furniture factory at the intersection of Südstraße and Königstraße, in rooms that had been simply converted into offices using light brick and cardboard walls.
When the idea of nationalizing the municipal police force came to the fore, the unworthy accommodation of the police administration offices also had to be changed. After an extensive search for a building suitable for conversion, the decision was finally made to construct a new building at the current location at Hohe Straße 80 in Hamm.
On April 1, 1925, the Minister of the Interior agreed to the purchase of a plot of land and the start of construction. Construction of the new police building began in early November 1926 on a 2,900 square meter plot of land. Almost all of the work and materials were supplied by local companies from Hamm and the surrounding area. On 1 April 1928, after a construction period of just 17 months, the building was handed over to the nationalized police authority on 1 March 1927.
An area of 1,200 m² was built on several floors. Office space of 2,300 square meters, corridors and stairwells of 1,100 square meters, six apartments with a total area of 1,100 square meters as well as 650 square meters of basement and 1,100 square meters of floor space were created. An angular building complex with a tower structure was created from hard-baked clinker bricks to house administrative police departments (residents' registration office, police cash office, motor vehicle department, criminal investigation department, the command of the protective police and a police prison with up to 40 detention places). Six built-in apartments offered the possibility of being converted into office space at a later date through minor structural alterations. Today, the atrium of the police building is used for historical and political education for the Hamm police and surrounding authorities. The exhibition installed there deliberately poses the question of the significance of yesterday for today - and what this means in concrete terms for the work of police officers in the Federal Republic.
For more information on the topic, please visit our themed page "Police history".