Work has finally begun on the creation of a "Remembrance and Documentation Centre" in the German capital Berlin for victims of wartime Gestapo terror, according to dpa. "I am delighted we now have a start on the project," Klaus Wowereit, Berlin's governing mayor, said Friday. Berlin architect Ursula Wilm's projected low-slung-designed museum building, on the former Prince Albrecht Palais site where the Nazi regime's secret police, the Gestapo, and the SS had their notorious wartime interrogation and torture cells, is expected to be completed within two years and officially inaugurated in May 2010. In Berlin, huge significance is attached to the "Topography of Terror Foundation" project, which for more than a a decade was dogged by delays and nervousness over funding. But on Friday, Mayor Wowereit was all smiles: "It's true. We are going to build the remembrance and documentation centre - finally, perhaps, some people will say." The mayor, in no mood for looking back at the problems that had plagued the project for years, said: "I'm just happy we have a made a start. Today is not only a symbolic beginning, the work is already underway." Engelbert Lueke Daldrup, a state secretary in the German government's building ministry, said realisation of the Topography of Terror site project would mean that the "darkest capital" in German history was to be confronted. "I am confident that with the documentation centre and the new fashioning of the area we will be able to open the museum on May 8, 2010 - precisely 65 years after the ending of World War II," he said. Andreas Nachama, director of the "Topography of Terror Foundation," told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that since 1987 an exhibition focussed on the Gestapo's grisly wartime activities had been staged at the site. "More than 500,000 people have been arriving in recent years to see it." "With the creation of new premises we expect still more visitors to come here," he said, adding that the bigger premises would enable them to "better inform visitors of what was planned and set in motion here during the Nazi era." Years ago, a first competition for a building on the Gestapo site was won by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, but the project was abandoned in the year 2000 when it could not be kept within budget. Later a second competition was won by local architect Ursula Wilms. Her design is for a sleek rectangular hall sheathed inside a metallic mesh. The Gestapo site is really the exhibit, she explains. The building merely provides an entry to it. There will also be exhibit spaces underground, where some of the original Gestapo headquarters is still intact, she says. The new "Remembrance and Documentation Centre" is scheduled to cost 19 million euros (28 million dollars), shared equally by the German government and the Berlin city authorities.
