How the police work: very slowly raise your hands in the air

"Now tell me you don't know;

who's turn

man, grandma!

Do I always have to do everything alone?” “Marko, is that you?” “Of course, who else?

But seriously now, grandma.

I urgently need your help.”

So that's what it sounds like, the famous grandchild trick that you often read about in the newspapers.

But on the upper floor of the Hamburg Police Museum, in the rooms dedicated to forensic technology and prevention, this is of course not an attempt at fraud, but an installation.

"Twenty-five thousand euros?" calls the distraught grandmother into the receiver.

But what is too much for grandma is not enough for others, and so a visitor at the other end of the room asks: "And then upstairs are the murders, right?" Hamburg police opened museum.

There may be people who maintain a somewhat more distant relationship with the police and have experienced them less as the proverbial "friend and helper" and perhaps in more robust situations.

But any reservations, maybe even prejudices, can be dissolved on the tour through the three floors of the police museum.

This is due to the many exhibits that tell more interesting stories than any TV crime thriller can, but also to the interactive offers.

With the helicopter over the Hanseatic city

There is probably no other museum in Hamburg where you can hear so much excited chatter from children as here.

Little boys with bright red faces have their fingerprints taken or sit in a police car – in Hamburg it has always been called Peterwagen – and virtually drive through the city center at a hell of a speed.

The radio center had previously decided "operational journey with special privileges", and so it goes "on patrol" with blue lights flashing.

Or you can fly over the Hanseatic city with the "Libelle I", a decommissioned helicopter.

Of course, all this is not only extremely enjoyable for children.

However, the real attraction of this museum is not the many exhibits on the past and present of the Hamburg police;

it is – as strange as that may sound – the volunteers who look after the visitors.

All of them former police officers from a wide variety of police services, who are now retired and show you around the house on a voluntary basis.

And with a dedication and passion that is second to none.

They give the facility its charm.

While in museums one often feels followed by the suspicious looks of the supervisory staff, as if one were a potential criminal who is also being intimidated with distance markings and alarm systems as a precaution, this is completely different in the police museum.

"We want to get into conversation with people," says one of the employees, who looks paternal and heather gray as trustworthy as the traffic policeman in elementary school once did.

We are standing in a replica of a police station from the 1960s.

There is a prison cell, a typewriter, a public and school edition of the Bonn Basic Law on the shelf, next to it the penal code, a black-and-white photograph of Federal President Heinrich Lübke hangs on the wall, and an ashtray is actually full of cigar ash.

It all seems as old-fashioned as it is familiar, and if Erik Ode entered the police station as a commissioner, there would be little surprise.

Understanding grows from knowledge

After you have learned almost everything about the history of the Hamburg police on the ground floor and found out in front of a wall of shelves with files on the upper floor that the number 4 stands for capital crimes, the 41 for murder and the 42 for sexual offences, and then more was able to study the most common identification methods, it goes to the top floor, where eight unique cases in Hamburg's criminal history that have not been forgotten to this day are documented.