Agreement has finally been reached on a site for the International Center for Documentation and Research into Nazism and its Consequences here, but it is not the site that the center’s sponsors wanted. The center’s director, Joseph Wulf, has agreed to take over a 20-room building on Limonenstrasse in Dahlem, West Berlin, which belongs to the Free University of West Berlin.
Originally, Mr. Wulf and the organizers wanted to house the center on the premises of the notorious Wannsee Villa where, on Jan. 20,1942, Nazi leaders gathered to map plans for the implementation of the “final solution” – the mass extermination of European Jewry. It was considered that the building in which the Nazi holocaust was engineered was symbolically the most appropriate site for an institution that will remind future generations of the crimes of the Nazis. But opposition developed locally and Mayor Schutz objected that he did not want the documentation center “to become the center of a macabre cult.”
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, proposed that the center be moved out of West Germany entirely if it couldn’t occupy the Wannsee house and suggested an alternative site in Geneva. This plan will apparently be abandoned now, sources said.
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