The Wuppertal Police Department is ideally placed for a confrontation with its own history: The presidential building - planned in 1922, built from 1936 and completed on 01.09.1939, the day of the invasion of Poland - was a place of terror for the Nazi apparatus and is still used as an office building today. Every day, our colleagues walk past preserved architectural evidence of Nazi ideology. Be it the large murals, Room 300, floor mosaics, decorative windows or frescoes. The Rhenish-Bergisch Centre for Police History (RBZ), which was founded in 2019, aims to ensure that police officers, employees and visitors no longer just walk past these historical traces, but also engage with them and thus with the role of the police.
In addition, we have a pool of documents and images from the period since 1922 at our disposal, which facilitates regional historical analysis. Finally, the RBZ has been working for decades with competent partners and institutions, such as the Alte Synagoge meeting place, who are designing this project together with the RBZ, so that the police station can fulfil several functions at once - as a place of learning, a documentation center and a memorial where all victim groups of Nazi terror can be commemorated with dignity.
The Wuppertal Police Department offers individually tailored guided tours with historians through the permanent exhibition "Order and Destruction. The police in the Nazi state" in conjunction with a tour of the historic building.
Further information on the topic can be found on our themed page "Police history"
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