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The new documentation center on the former site of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin is the design work of Architect Ursula Wilms and landscape architect Heinz Hallman. A 170-meter section of the Berlin Wall (left) still stands, as do remnants of the original brick building of Gestapo Headquarters. The large building on the other side of the wall is the former Air Ministry of Hermann G??ring.

The new Topography of Terror Center on Niederkirchnerstrasse, built on the former site of the Nazis’ Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin where the fates of millions of victims were decided, was dedicated May 6, 2010.

In 1933, the Gestapo made an art school building at Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 its headquarters. Some 15,000 people were imprisoned in the ground-floor cells of number 8.

The adjacent Hotel Prinz Albrecht became the SS headquarters in 1934, and the SS intelligence service (SD) commandeered the Prinz Albrecht palace on nearby Wilhelm Strasse. It was from these buildings that Hitler's bureaucrats administered the concentration and extermination camps and the SS death squads.

SS leader Heinrich Himmler and SD chief Reinhard Heydrich had their offices here.

The bomb damaged Gestapo buildings were demolished between 1949 and 1956.

"No place is more connected with the Nazi crimes than this," said German President Horst Koehler during the dedication ceremonies.

Pictures of SS and Gestapo victims are a sobering component of the center.

There are also handwritten notes on cards detailing personal information on some of the 7,000 former Reichssicherheitshauptamt (SS) members. Only three of the 7,000 managers/bureaucrats who administered mass murder from the Berlin Gestapo offices were ever convicted of war crimes.

Andreas Nachama, director of the center’s archives, said the site is “for learning, for today and the future," noting there are “still places in the world where not all people are treated equally under the law."

Not fare from the center is Germany's main Holocaust memorial.