NS-Dokumentationszentrum, on the site of the Brown House

In front of you is a silent white cube. This is the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, opened on 30 April 2015, exactly seventy years after American troops entered Munich. Its location is no accident.

1The Brown House

A Neoclassical mansion from 1828, the Palais Barlow, once stood here. In 1930 the Nazi Party bought it, moved its national leadership in at the beginning of 1931 and called it the “Braunes Haus”, the Brown House. Munich was the cradle of the movement: the party was founded here, attempted its putsch here in 1923 and kept its headquarters here until 1945. In 1935 the regime gave the city the official title of “capital of the movement”.

2A whole party quarter

All around you rose offices, archives and representative buildings. Next to the centre still stands the former Führerbau, now a university of music, where on the night of 29–30 September 1938 the Munich Agreement was signed, handing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Hitler. Some twenty kilometres away, in Dachau, the regime opened one of its first concentration camps in March 1933.

The square is named after Max Mannheimer, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who devoted his life to bearing witness.

The Brown House was left in ruins by the bombing and demolished in 1947. For decades the site lay empty. The present building, by the Berlin practice Georg Scheel Wetzel, is a cube of white concrete measuring 22.5 metres on each side. Its fins frame views of the places whose history is explained inside: the exhibition never lets you forget where you are.

3What to look for

• The vertical fins of the façade, which act as windows onto the surroundings.
• The Führerbau, to the north, with its balcony above the entrance.
• The empty square in front of the cube, beneath which the underground rooms extend.