The collapse of the Cologne city archive ten years ago, according to current estimates of the city total damage of 1.33 billion euros. This alone includes more than 700 million euros for the restoration or loss of some of the spilled archival materials, as the city administration announced. The expert preparation of the damaged archival material should take another 30 years.

The archive building in the south of Cologne had fallen in the early afternoon of March 3, 2009 in subway construction work in a huge underground excavation and had torn two neighboring houses in the depths. In one of these houses died two young men whose bodies could only be recovered from the rubble days after the catastrophe.

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Cologne: The collapse of the city archives

The archive was up to the misfortune as one of the most important institutions in Germany. During the collapse, about 30 linear kilometers of archival documents were buried, including valuable documents such as the Nobel Prize certificate of Heinrich Böll and the Cologne Council Protocol since the Middle Ages.

Is the city suing the construction companies for damages?

Although 95 percent of the archives could be salvaged - but sometimes badly damaged. Overall, experts fished about 1.6 billion individual fragments and scraps of paper from the rubble. Around 9,000 documents have so far been completely restored.

In the debate on the exact cause of the collapse, various positions of the city and the working group of the companies involved in subway construction had become clear in the past. The Cologne city director Stephan Keller announced now that the city of Cologne wants to reclaim from the companies the financial loss in full amount.

It remains to be seen whether an agreement can be reached with the construction companies or whether the city must assert its claims in a civil case. Regardless of a possible future civil proceedings, two criminal cases involving the archival collapse, including two suspended sentences and three acquittals, were recently completed.

Just over a week before the tenth anniversary of the catastrophe, Cologne mayor Henriette Reker (without party) said that horror, sadness and bewilderment over the archival collapse would continue in Germany. "It's disasters like these that make us aware that in the blink of an eye, life can be different."

For the anniversary on Sunday of next week, a memorial service with a minute's silence for the victims is planned at the collapse site on Waidmarkt.