The „Universum Landes-Ausstellungs-Park“ (ULAP) was opened in 1879.
Until the 1930s it was one of the most important exhibition areas in Berlin.
In december 1972 the skeletons of Martin Bormann and Ludwig Stumpfegger, who committed suicide in may 1945, were found on the property.
The mortal remains of Hitler’s private secretary Bormann and Hitler’s last personal physician Stumpfegger were the last of several dreadful discoveries on the „ULAP“-area. Their self-chosen death separates them from probably all the other dead found there.
As far back as in 1919 bodies of murdered people coming from the nearby prison Lehrter Straße, the Moabit barracks and the court were buried on the property. 126 of them were found in 1927.
In february 1933 the „SA“ built a torturechamber underneath the „Glaspalast“, which was erected in 1883 after the initial exhibition building burnt down in 1882.
Numerous antifascists were deported and tortured there.
In April 1945, shortly before the liberation of Berlin, numerous political prisoners were shot on the stairways.
When I was photographing there only the large perron, that led onto the property, did still exist. Invisible from the street, the perron - by then leading nowhere - lay amid the overgrown property. Trees at the beginning of the stairways, trees at the end of the stairways and - after years of abandonment - trees growing on the stairways. Nothing else.
It was summer when I was there and amidst all that green it almost seemed, that dust had settled on history. Or as the german saying goes: it almost seemed as if gras had grown over history.
Since 2008 a park, in which the perron is integrated, is open to the public.
