Hamburg Police Museum

The museum opened in the grounds of the Hamburg Police Academy in 2014 and covers the 200-year history of the police in Hamburg. Part of the exhibition focuses on the National Socialist period and reveals how the police played a decisive role in enforcing National Socialist tyranny.

The exhibition also addresses the crimes committed by police battalions in the occupied territories during the Second World War. These battalions were heavily involved in expelling and deporting the civilian population, especially in the Soviet Union and other regions of East and South-Eastern Europe. Their duties included guarding and clearing the ghettos, systematically murdering the Jewish population, deporting forced labourers, and combatting resistance movements.
More than 3.1 million men and women were murdered in Poland and the Soviet Union on account of their Jewish ancestry. Between 30,000 and 40,000 policemen participated in these crimes. Several battalions of the Hamburg Order Police were involved in the war from the very start. Police Battalion 101 (known as Reserve Police Battalion 101 from 1941), which counted some 500 policemen and reservists, was responsible for 38,000 shootings and the deportation of 45,200 Jewish men, women, and children.