German Resistance Memorial Center

The visitor enters the museum from Stauffenbergstrasse through an archway, on the wall of which is inscribed: "Here in the former Supreme Headquarters of the Army, Germans organized the attempt of 20 July 1944 to end the Nazi rule of injustice.

Ihr gabt das große ewig wache Zeichen der Umkehr, opfernd Euer heißes Leben für Freiheit, Recht und Ehre.

The museum consists of a series of displays chronicling the history of Nazi Germany and of all those individuals and groups who opposed the single party state of the era and its ideology, for whatever reason.

Every 20 July, the German government and armed forces perform a joint memorial ceremony and military funeral for the executed officers, during which a wreath is solemnly laid at the site of their deaths before a Nazi firing squad.

[4] At the museum, refugees living in the comparative safety of the German diaspora, including dissident intellectuals, like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Hannah Arendt, who published anti-Nazi Exilliteratur or who, like Hollywood actors Marlene Dietrich and Conrad Veidt, otherwise assisted the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany, are also treated not as traitors, but as heroes who also sought to rescue the German people from tyranny.

The museum also makes a particular point of both demonstrating and criticizing how Hitler manipulated, exploited, and weaponized anti-Semitism, Eugenics, ultra-nationalism, and scientific racism to seize absolute power and then led the German people to the ruin and starvation of the Second World War and its aftermath as their dictator.