The construction of the EL-DE House

The EL-DE House (pronounced: L-D-House) owes its name to the initials of the building owner Leopold Dahmen. The Catholic wholesaler of gold articles and clocks lived with his family on Appellhofplatz 21, from where he also ran his business. In order to build the house next door, he had two residential buildings torn down on the corner lot on Elisenstraße. Then, during 1934/35, a larger house with both residential and commercial space was built. According to the design by the architect Hans Erberich, this constituted a four storey building with originally six axes along its main shop front on Appellhofplatz (still part of Langgasse during the time of construction) and a twelve-axis front along the relatively narrow Elisenstrasse. The building was designed in a strictly neoclassical style and had a tufa facade as well as a rounded corner. The building style was commended as ‘modern’ by the NS-paper ‘Westdeutscher Beobachter’. The original door remains in place to this day, the owner’s initials were engraved upon it, thus giving the house its name. The well-preserved wall relief on the corner of the house is also a reference to its owner. It shows two crests, the city arms on the left and an emblem with the letters EL DE engraved on the right with two pendula of a longcase clock underneath and the letters L and D for Leopold Dahmen hewn into the two circular bottom parts, respectively. There is a winged helmet in the centre, as a symbol of Hermes, the god of trade and commerce (also known as god of thieves, liars and guide of the underworld). In both upper storeys and also in the fully built former attic behind the cornice, twelve three-room flats and shop rooms on the ground floor had originally been planned. The rooms, designed as bedrooms, had safes on the wall for valuable items such as jewellery which are displayed in the current exhibition. The house had its own well system that remains in place today. Apart from garage space, an air raid shelter holding about 60 people was part of the original design.

Use by the Gestapo

After a delay in the construction work, the unfinished house was seized by the Gestapo in summer 1935. Existing rental agreements had to be terminated; the new tenant was the Third Reich. For the Gestapo, the representative building right at the heart of the city provided an excellent location. It was virtually around the corner from the Police headquarters on Krebsgasse, the court building and the Klingelpütz central prison. The Gestapo had the building converted according to its purposes: The living space was turned into offices and the house prison with its ten cells was installed on the upper basement level. On 1 December 1935, the Cologne Gestapo branch started to operate from there and only ceased working on 2 March 1945, a few days before the arrival of the American troops on 6 March 1945. It seems a particular irony of history that this house remained standing after the war whilst most other surrounding buildings had been destroyed.

Reconstruction after the end of the war

In terms of the history of its construction, the house only acquired its bulky appearance after the war when numerous extensions were added. During the years 1947 to 1949, annexes were added on Elisenstraße, replacing the destroyed residential building of the Dahmen family and one other house next to it, completely merging with the surviving Gestapo house: The tufa stones were from the same quarry, the layout of the storeys, window sizes and cornices were precisely copied. The number of window axes doubled from six to twelve. The additional entrance was supplemented with the two cast iron lamps from the Elisenstraße entrance in order to create a symmetrical and representative building on Appellhofplatz. On Elisenstraße, the house was extended and now has sixteen instead of the original twelve window axes. The entire building was raised by one storey on top of the attic. Only because of the additions after 1945, does the EL-DE House reflect the image of the feared, all-dominating Gestapo by way of its dimensions.

Use after 1945

The carefree approach that was adopted to the history of the house, and to its NS past after the war, becomes apparent in other ways. The house was used by tenants again immediately after the end of the war, mostly by the City of Cologne: The Occupation Office, the Pricing Authority, the Office for Defence Expenses, the Registry, the Pension Office and the Legal and Insurance Authority had their offices there. Also some of the people who had been interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo in these very rooms had to get married here or submit their pension applications.

The house is still owned by the Dahmen family today. In 2010, the tenants are the NS Documentation Centre, the Legal and Insurance Office as well as the staff council of the Culture Department. The ground floor of the house on Appellhofplatz 21 hosts a gallery; these rooms, how ever, will also become a part of the NS Documentation Centre by July 2012, at the latest. There is one residential flat on Elisenstraße. The most significant structural changes after the completion of the annex in 1949 became necessary for the Gestapo prison memorial, which was inaugurated in 1981 (extended in 2009): the refurbishments between 1993 and 1997 to accommodate the permanent exhibition ‘Cologne during National Socialism’ and the installation of the library, a meeting room as well as offices for the NS Documentation Centre. In 2009, two rooms on the ground floor were added to the foyer within the scope of the redesign of the memorial and the permanent exhibition and a multi-functional meeting room was created on the second floor, right behind the end of the exhibition. Once the ground floor premises of the Appellhofplatz 21 building have been taken over, more refurbishments will become necessary in the near future: The special exhibition space will be moved and a pedagogical centre will be created in its current space. The library will be extended and especially the inner court as the former execution place will be included in the memorial. It was only at the beginning of the 1980’s that the ELDE House became a historically protected monument.