I've never been inside the museum itself, because it was closed for renovation and/or filming…read moreand/or some sort of protest when I visited more than a decade ago, but I did visit its famous courtyard, which left a very deep impression on me despite the facts that it was broad daylight and that there were a bunch of police idling around, ostensibly to keep a group of demonstrators with a NIE WIEDER ("NEVER AGAIN") banner away from the building itself. (The police outnumbered the protesters.)
The courtyard is historically significant because it was the location of the 1944 executions by firing squad of resistance figures who attempted to assassinate Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS), and Hermann Göring (head of the German air force and president of the German legislature).
The plot failed to kill any of its three main targets (though it did kill three other Nazis), and while Claus von Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften, the two men most responsible for setting the bomb, escaped successfully back to Berlin and began putting into place the carefully planned coup plan that resulted in the immediate arrest of many Nazi leaders, word that Hitler had survived reached the area, and some members of the resistance were afraid to continue the plot, while others demanded it commence. After a time, General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Reserve Army (whose mobilization against Nazi leadership was necessary for the plot to succeed in wresting power from Hitler), got cold feet. He was part of the plot, but in order to save his own skin, he turned on his co-conspirators and hastily convened a kangaroo court, which found four conspirators guilty, and they were killed by firing squad on the spot in the courtyard. (Fromm's murderous cowardice didn't help him; he was quickly arrested and executed himself.) In all, almost 5,000 individuals were executed for participating in the plot, even though many had nothing to do with it. Seven thousand people were arrested, and many who weren't actually executed died either by Allied bombing or by suicide, including well known General Erwin Rommel, whose suicide the Nazis hid and who received a state funeral even though Hitler threatened to imprison his wife and family if he (Rommel) did not kill himself.
It is not known exactly where in the courtyard the execution occurred, but there's a spot on a wall near where it likely occurred that is commemorated by plaque and a large peg on which a memorial wreath is normally present. When I visited, the wreath was red and orange, but I've seen in photos that green wreaths are laid as well. There's at least one poem etched into the tiles of the courtyard, and then there's its most striking inhabitant, a statue of a totally nude man, supposedly in the spot where the conspirators stood when they were killed by firing squad. Wherever you stand in the courtyard, you're aware of the statue's presence, and it can be unnerving in the most effective of ways that art can be unnerving.
It is a heavy heavy place. In general, most of the official monuments in Germany to the horrors of what occurred because of Nazi rule are done well. There's no sugar-coating of what occurred. Some might find the title of the plaque ("Here died for Germany," followed by the names of the killed) very uncomfortable, as the motivations for the plot and those who joined it weren't necessarily the moral evil of Nazism or the Holocaust but rather for Germany's continued survival as a nation state without further bloodshed in a war that was, by summer 1944, already long lost. To be sure, nationalism drove many of the plotters, but it's difficult to argue that the plot itself wasn't daringly brave. Success might have meant hundreds of thousands of lives saved, but failure meant certain arrest, torture, and death.
I'd love to visit the museum's indoor displays. The area around the Bendlerblock (the building in which the memorial sits) is where most of Berlin's foreign embassies are. This was true during World War II as well, and while there are more embassies now than then, many that are nearby, including the Japanese embassy, were in the exact same spot in 1944. (Interestingly, the street on which the Japanese embassy sits has been renamed Hiroshimastraße, in memory of the first Japanese city on which the United States dropped a nuclear bomb at the tail end of World War II.)
