Protesters have clashed with a developer over plans to transform the聽Hamburg townhouse where the Gestapo interrogated victims during the second world war into a new urban quarter designed by David Chipperfield Architects.
Developers Quantum enlisted Kuehn Malvezzi Architects, Stephen Williams Associates, and Agn Leussmann alongside聽Chipperfield's practice to convert a group of four buildings centred around eight courtyards into luxury shops, restaurants, homes and a hotel.
One of the buildings in the Stadth枚fe complex was the headquarters of the Secret State Police. It was here that victims of the Nazis were held in the cellars during the reign of the Third Reich.
"Anyone who came here for interrogation did not come out of it," protestor Detlef Baade, whose father was tortured by Hamburg Gestapo in 1933, told local paper the S眉ddeutsche Zeitung. The headquarters were eventually bombed by allied planes as part of Operation Gomorrah in May of 1943. The scheme is due to open in May 2018.聽Its opponents are unhappy that a planned memorial space has been repeatedly shrunk and reduced to a small exhibition space with a commercial front in the form of a bookshop and cafe.
There has also been outrage in the local press and the Guardian over the "insensitive" signage over the entrance, which critics claim closely resembles the black ironwork letters hanging over the entrance of the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

Cornelia Kerth, the chairman of...