Hotel Silber
This is an unpublished article I wrote for the website Atlas Obscura. They are a website full of interesting and mostly off the beaten path sites.
It was an unremarkable, unnoticeable hotel facade on a busy street before, and the same now, but in between it took on a menacing presence now memorialized with a commemorative exhibit.
Originally built as a residential building, fifty years later, the building underwent a conversion to a hotel. The Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, ADAC, was founded in the lobby in 1903. A few years later, the state of Württemberg purchased the hotel and re-did the facade. In 1928, the hotel took a turn toward the dark side.
The Criminal and Political Police were headquartered there and aided in the transition to dictatorship in 1933. By the next year, the entity that became the Gestapo took the entire building over. Prisoners were brought in because of their political views, national origins, sexual orientation, or their faith and sent on to work education camps. It was a central location for the deportation of Jews from the state as well.
After the war, it kept its menacing status. The state criminal police moved in after 1945, even hiring some of the former Nazi police to continue the persecution of Roma, homosexuals, and members of the German Communist Party. This remained the purpose until the 1980s.
In 2008, as plans to demolish the building became known, a group formed to defend the building and demand it become a memorial to the former prisoners. One of the former prisoners under the Nazis had campaigned for a memorial in the 80s and for that, a plaque was installed commemorating the building’s history—albeit hidden inside the building. As a part of the new movement to save the site as a memorial, they moved the plaque to a position of honor and made the building’s history known.
The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Admission is free. It is located at Dorotheenstrasse 10 and across the street from the U-Bahn stop Charlottenplatz. Exhibits are all in German but there are audio guides in English or french available.
Website: https://www.geschichtsort-hotel-silber.de/