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Description [EN]
In the historical setting of the Speicherstadt in Hamburg, the Deutsches Zollmuseum offers insights into the history and current tasks of customs. It is located on the site of the former Hamburg customs office and is therefore closely linked to the city's historical goods handling.
The exhibition building was constructed around 1900 on the Zollkanal beside the Kornhausbrücke. Until 1984 the building housed the import customs clearance for carpets. In front of the museum lies a floating clearance building of a decommissioned Hamburg customs office; until the summer of 2005 the customs cruiser Glückstadt could be seen there as a museum ship, and after its scrapping it was replaced by the ship Oldenburg.
As the institutional successor to the Reichszollmuseum, which was destroyed in the Second World War, the Deutsches Zollmuseum brings together exhibits from earlier collections, among them a customs museum holding from Köln. In 2015 the collection of the former Steuermuseum in Brühl bei Köln was incorporated. The museum was opened on 21 May 1992 in the former Kornhausbrücke customs office; the permanent exhibition was modernised between 2006 and 2008. In 2001 the museum recorded 118,000 visitors.
On around 800 square metres of exhibition space approximately 1,000 objects are presented. The reference library comprises around 6,000 titles on customs history from antiquity to the modern era and is considered one of the most extensive collections on this topic in Germany. The ground floor is devoted to contemporary customs: a borderless Europe, world trade, product piracy, species protection, weapons and narcotics control, and excise duties are thematically linked; confiscated items and smuggling concealments illustrate the practice. The upper floor covers historical development, from the Roman provinces through the Middle Ages and the era of the German small states to modern customs structures, including the founding phase of the Deutschen Zollvereins, the Kaiserreich von 1871, the Weimarer Republik, the Dritten Reiches and the Teilung Deutschlands.