Berlin is a city rich in history, with its vibrant present often built on the remnants of a complex and, at times, troubling past. While iconic landmarks like the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag attract millions of visitors, there are quieter sites that hold equally profound stories. One such site is the memorial dedicated to the former Columbia-Haus, situated on Columbiadamm near the expansive grounds of the former Tempelhof Airport.
This unassuming monument marks the vicinity of what was once Berlin’s only official SS concentration camp, a place of immense suffering hidden in plain sight.
I have been passing by the Columbia-Haus Memorial on my way to work by bike for years. It took me a stop at a traffic light to wonder what that unusual sculpture meant. That is how I learned about the story I will share below.
Remembering Columbia-Haus: Berlin’s Forgotten Concentration Camp Near Tempelhof
Walking along Columbiadamm, near the corner of Golßener Straße, you’ll encounter a steel sculpture erected in 1994. Designed by Georg Seibert, this structure isn’t grand or ornate and can be easily ignored by those who pass by the area on the way to Tempelhof. Instead, its power lies in its stark symbolism.
Almost three meters high, it evokes the shape of a house, yet it feels fractured and incomplete. Facing the busy street, it presents a closed facade, but towards the sidewalk, where pedestrians pass, it opens up.
The design features four parallel steel walls, creating narrow, confined spaces. This evokes the oppressive feeling of cramped prison cells, hinting at the grim reality within the original Columbia-Haus. The outer wall and roof are deliberately missing, suggesting violation and exposure.
Adjacent to this structure stands a free-standing gable wall, directly addressing passersby with its inscription:
“Remember / Commemorate / Warn / The Columbia-Haus was a prison from 1933 and a concentration camp of the Nazi rulers from 8.1.1935 to 5.1.1936. People were held captive, degraded, tortured, murdered here.”
However, historical records indicate that the actual site of the Columbia-Haus was about 150 meters west of the memorial, on the opposite side of the street, on land now part of the former Tempelhof Airport grounds.
For years, the exact location lacked any marker. However, plans were set for September 2024 to install a “no longer visible” installation directly on the embankment at the historic site, finally marking the precise location where the atrocities occurred. This addition further solidifies the area as a place of memory.
Today, if you pass by the area, pay attention to the signs right by Tempelhof. The memorial plaques are shown in the pictures below. They share historical images of what Columbia-Haus used to look like and the history behind everything.
Echoes of Terror: The Story and Memorial of Berlin’s Columbia-Haus
To get what the memorial is all about, you need to look into the tough history of the building it represents. The story of the Columbia-Haus began not with the Nazis but in 1896 when it was constructed as Berlin’s third military detention center, known at the time as Militär-Arrestanstalt. Part of a larger barracks complex, it punished soldiers garrisoned in southern Berlin for acts of disobedience. It contained 156 single jail cells, a guard room, a courthouse, and official living quarters.
After World War I, Tempelhofer Feld Prison was repurposed and renamed in 1919. Its final pre-Nazi identity came in 1927 when it was christened Columbia-Haus. This name honored the “Columbia,” an aircraft that famously landed on the adjacent Tempelhofer Feld after a transatlantic flight that same year. The street outside was renamed Columbiastrasse (today’s Columbiadamm) in 1929.
By the late 1920s, the prison was deemed outdated, falling short of the Weimar Republic’s sanitary standards, and was closed.
The Nazi Era: From Gestapo Prison to Concentration Camp
However, the closure was short-lived. The rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 brought waves of arrests targeting political opponents, including Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, intellectuals, and anyone suspected of resistance. Existing prisons quickly became overcrowded.
The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police), established in April 1933, needed space. Their notorious “house prison” at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 (now the site of the Topography of Terror museum) was filled beyond capacity. And, in the summer of 1933, the dilapidated, empty Columbia-Haus was reactivated for them to use. It became an auxiliary prison under Gestapo authority, guarded by the ruthless SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler’s fiercely loyal paramilitary organization.
Initially guarded by the SS Death’s Head Unit Brandenburg, the conditions were immediately horrific. The 156 single jai cells soon held up to 450 prisoners under inhumane circumstances. Screams from within were reportedly audible outside.
Columbiadamm’s Hidden History: The Memorial for the Columbia-Haus Victims
Kurt Hiller, a Jewish writer, pacifist, and socialist, provided an early account of exile. Imprisoned in July 1933 as “Protection Prisoner 231,” he described the Columbia-Haus as a “blood and filth hole” where he spent nearly three and a half months. His testimony, like others, paints a picture of arbitrary brutality, constant fear, humiliation, and torture.
Jewish prisoners, from the outset, faced particularly vicious treatment, singled out for abuse and mockery. Homosexual men were increasingly imprisoned from mid-1934 following raids related to the “Röhm affair“..
The Columbia-Haus operated in a sphere of complete lawlessness. Though technically a prison, it functioned as an early, brutal concentration camp. The terror inflicted by the Gestapo and SS was so extreme that, incredibly, in September 1934, official orders were issued banning “harassment” and “torture” – a directive utterly out of step with the reality of the Nazi camp system but indicative of the particularly unchecked sadism practiced there. Hitler’s personal intervention ensured the judiciary turned a blind eye.
In December 1934, a significant shift occurred. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, placed the Columbia-Haus under the authority of Theodor Eicke’s Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. It was officially designated Konzentrationslager Columbia. This integrated it into the burgeoning, centralized concentration camp system being established across the Reich, governed by Eicke’s brutal regulations first implemented at Dachau.
Konzentrationslager Columbia became the only official SS concentration camp within Berlin’s city limits.
It maintained a precise function as a detention center for prisoners interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters, with transports running between the two locations multiple times a day. Over its three-and-a-half-year existence as a Gestapo prison and then concentration camp, more than 8,000 men passed through its doors.
Many prominent figures were incarcerated here, including Social Democrats Ernst Heilmann and Franz Neumann, Communists Erich Honecker (later leader of East Germany) and Werner Seelenbinder, lawyer Hans Litten, Rabbi Leo Baeck, cabaret artist Werner Finck, and Robert Kempner, who would later serve as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
The commandants used the Columbia-Haus as a proving ground. Karl Otto Koch, infamous for his later command roles at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Majdanek, honed his cruelty here. His meticulously kept “service album,” filled with photos, offers a chilling perpetrator’s view of daily life and the prisoners within KZ Columbia. The SS guards, too, received their brutal training at this facility.
Konzentrationslager Columbia closed down in November 1936. Its demise was driven by two factors. Firstly, the newly constructed Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg was ready. Designed partly within the Columbia-Haus itself and built by prisoners from Columbia and Esterwegen, Sachsenhausen represented the “modern,” expandable model camp Himmler envisioned, replacing older, dilapidated facilities. The remaining Columbia-Haus prisoners were transferred there.
Secondly, the Columbia-Haus building stood directly in the path of the Nazis’ grandiose plans to expand Tempelhof into a monumental “world airport.” In the spring or summer of 1938, the former prison and concentration camp was demolished, erased from the landscape to make way for the airport expansion and the widened Columbiadamm.
The exact number of people murdered within the Columbia-Haus through torture, execution, or calculated neglect remains unknown, and it might be impossible to calculate. The perpetrators largely escaped justice for the specific crimes committed there.
Beyond the Park: Visiting the Memorial to the Columbia-Haus Today
Standing by Georg Seibert’s sculpture today, near the edge of the now-public Tempelhofer Feld Park, requires a conscious imagination. The sounds are of city traffic and people enjoying the park, starkly contrasting the screams that once echoed here. The memorial doesn’t replicate the horror but strongly prompts visitors to acknowledge the history embedded in this ground.
Visiting the Columbia-Haus memorial is an opportunity to confront a less-discussed aspect of Nazi terror within Berlin itself. It highlights the pace with which the regime established sites of brutal repression and the transition from chaotic early terror to a systematized network of concentration camps. It reminds us that history’s darkest chapters often occurred not in remote locations but amid urban life, later obscured by development and the passage of time.
The Columbia-Haus may no longer be standing, but its story lives on through the memories of those who experienced it. This memorial helps keep that story vital to Berlin’s identity. It serves as a place to remember, commemorate, and warn against the recurrence of such barbarity.
Echoes of Terror: Visiting the Memorial to Berlin’s Columbia-Haus
Columbiadamm 77, 10965 Berlin
