The research project "Places of Police History" was launched at the North Rhine-Westphalia University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration (HSPV) in 2020 at the suggestion of the Ministry of the Interior of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The project is being carried out by a research group from the Institute for History and Ethics (IGE) of Police and Public Administration at the HSPV NRW. The aim of the project is to collect, systematize and present relevant sites of police history in North Rhine-Westphalia and to enable their didactic use. The project focuses on the role of the police in the context of the history of the Weimar Republic and National Socialism in particular.
Of particular importance is the creation of a virtual map of relevant sites of police history and their public presentation on the project website (in German only). This includes a digital map that is linked to dossiers (learning pages) of the individual locations. The available information on the individual places of police history is systematically prepared and presented on the project homepage using texts, original documents, historical and modern photographs and film footage. The dossiers on the individual sites contain, depending on the type of site and the degree to which it has been made accessible for historical didactics or the culture of remembrance, extensive material, some of which is unknown to the general public, from the Federal Archives, the NRW State Archives and the numerous municipal archives.
The systematic inventory of sites of police history is linked to the task of developing general criteria on the basis of which the suitability of these sites for teaching police history can be assessed. The project focuses not only on places where professional commemorative institutions (museums and memorials) are located today, but also on places that are important for the history of the police, but where only limited or no historical didactic or cultural remembrance activities have taken place to date. This is seen as an opportunity to make a wider public aware of these places, which are known locally at best, and thus also provide impetus for (further) remembrance work at these locations. The decisive factor for the selection is that these are material testimonies to the history of the police, from which the development of the police in these eras can be read and, in particular, the instrumentalization of the police by the Nazi regime can be vividly conveyed. The places covered range from historical police buildings (police headquarters, police stations and police accommodation) to the sites of police arbitrariness and violence during the Third Reich (police prisons and execution sites).
Didactic utilization concepts are developed for each place of police history. These will primarily be used in the context of excursions to the places of remembrance, but can also be used as part of online access to the virtual map and for blended learning formats. The aim is to make historical police behavior appropriately accessible and, based on this, to reflect on possible lessons for police practice today.
Further information on the topic can be found on our theme page "Police history" (in German only).