As Europe commemorates this week 65 years since World War II, focus in Germany is on two events solemnly remembering the horrors of the Nazis: one about the perpetrators, the other for their victims. On Thursday, the new 'Topography of Terror' museum will open in central Berlin on the site of the former headquarters of both the Gestapo secret police and Adolf Hitler's elite killers, the SS. And a few hundred metres (yards) away, Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, a solemn maze of concrete slabs commemorating the six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis, on Wednesday was due to mark five years since its construction. Between Hitler coming to power in 1933 and his suicide in a ruined Berlin 12 years into his '1,000-year Reich' in 1945, the address Prinz Albrecht Strasse was synonymous with the Nazi reign of terror. It was here, a stone's throw from Hitler's chancellery, that the Nazi leadership united the Gestapo, the SS and the Reich Main Security Office. Around 15,000 people, Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other real or imagined enemies of the Fuehrer were held here, many of them brutally mistreated on their way to a concentration or extermination camp. After 1945, what was left of the various buildings was razed and nothing much was done -- part of it was used by West Berliners learning to drive -- until the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ran along the site's edge, in 1989. Now, 21 years later, interest in the actual sites where Nazis committed their crimes -- the topography -- has culminated in this new museum, said director Andreas Nachama, a rabbi, historian and a former Jewish community leader. The 25-million-euro (33-million-dollar) museum replaces a provisional facility drawing half a million people each year and uses cellars of the former buildings, which is all that remains except for a few pavement stones. 'We wanted to make the history visible,' Nachama said. 'The 'Topography of Terror' isn't a memorial but somewhere to learn, a place associated with the perpetrators.' Its two steel-and-glass storeys, giving the feeling of 'floating' above the site, provide an insight into the main players of the Nazi police state such as Reinhard Heydrich -- including him making the cover of Time magazine in 1942. There are also Gestapo mug shots of many former inmates, gruesome photos of executions and information on post-war efforts to achieve justice. The Holocaust Memorial, meanwhile, a private initiative comprising of a field of 2,700 grey concrete blocks resembling gravestones and an accompanying museum, has not been without controversy these past five years. A combination of cold winters, inferior building materials and building flaws have resulted in cracks in more than two-thirds of the columns. When it was unveiled in 2005, critics questioned why it did not also pay tribute to the Nazis' many non-Jewish victims. Organisers responded that no group was targeted for extermination in the same way. Uwe Neumaerker, director of the foundation that manages the memorial, says it is now an unqualified success, attracting 2.3 million visitors in the past five years, half of them from outside Germany. It is among the city's top 10 tourist attractions and even a big draw on the Internet, with many visitors uploading photos and clips onto websites such as Facebook and YouTube. 'We always thought that it was something that had to be built, but we never dreamed that it would be such a success,' Lea Rosh, who initiated the memorial, told reporters this week. 'In world history there is no comparable crime. But nowhere else either is there a country that has documented its own crimes so thoroughly like Germany has done.' 