Berlin's central Mitte district is synonymous with a massive construction site. Near the TV tower and the Rotes Rathaus, or Red City Hall, one scaffold meets another. Most people don't realize that most of the property in this area was once Jewish-owned. Today, profits are being made without involving those who once owned the land. It's the topic of a provocative Berlin exhibition.

Of the 1,200 buildings in Berlin's city center, at least 225 belonged to German Jews before 1933. After Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Jews were systematically excluded from the "national community." As a result, discriminatory laws were adapted that required Jews to register their property, which was later confiscated.

One of the measures used to gain access to Jewish ownership was to strip Jews of their citizenship, force them to immigrate as enemies of the state, then confiscate their assets. Those who hadn't left Germany by 1938 suffered during the Kristallnacht pogrom, a night of wide-spread destruction of Jewish businesses and homes.

After 1938, the "de-Jewification of Berlin land ownership" was openly discussed. Unlike many other cities across Germany, the stolen property didn't fall into private hands, rather the state made itself the direct beneficiary. The exhibition "Robbed Center" in Berlin's Ephriam Palace shows the details. Even the very location of the exhibit had once been "Aryanized."

The reason behind the nationalization of the buildings? Hitler's favorite architecht, Albert Speer, was slated to built a new imperial capital - Germania. The historic city center was set to be replaced by a monumental administrative building. The center point of Germania would be the Great Hall, shown here in the picture to illustrate its massive dimensions compared to the Brandenburg Gate.

For this purpose, Hitler named the architect Speer as Berlin's General Bulding Inspector. All Jewish homes in the capital were registered and reported to Speer for consideration as to whether the state wanted to exercise its right to purchase. If the homes were located on the planned East-West axis, which ran through the middle of the city center, they were to be blown up.

Even private "Aryanization" occured in the city center. One prominent case included Wertheim. At the turn of the century, the famed Berlin department store had been mentioned in the same breath as London's Harrod's or Lafayette in Paris. Here, the Jewish department store appears in a sea of swastikas during the 1936 Olympic Games. On January 1, 1937, the company was declared "German."

During excavations of the Red Town Hall in 2010, 11 sculptures that had been defamed by the Nazis as "degenerate art" were discovered. The sculptures had been confiscated in 1937 from German museums and private collections and had been reported missing or destroyed. A Jewish home once stood at the site of the discovery, and the family had been expatriated.

Not only has its name changed, but the former Königstrasse, or King Street, near the Red City Hall is no longer recognizable. A vacant lot now gapes from where house Nr. 50 once stood, marked red in the photo. This is where Berlin's current problem of once-Aryanized homes begins.

Vacant lots have long gaped where Jewish homes once stood. Either the plans for Germania had already led to their destruction, they were bombed in the war, or the communist East German government had removed the ruins after the war.

East Germany did not pay restitutions after the Holocaust. The argument? In the communist country, there should be no private property anyway. So it was even better if the state already owned it. After German reunification in 1990, when heirs of the orginal property owners once again sought compensation, they received minimal, if any payment.

Those in charge based their value estimates off of 1990 appraisals, which measured the land's value in its current state. As a result, heirs of Jewish families were often only repaid 10 percent of the original value. If an empty field was all that was left of the property, the resistitution value was correspondingly low. Pictured is the once-famous Gerson furniture store, ca. 1890.

By now, however, those former vacant lots are becoming home to more and more new buildings in Berlin's Mitte - a prime location. The exhibition "Robbed Centera" questions whether or not the heirs' restitution should be renegotiated, or if the sales of the land should be funneled into a foundation.

Before World War II, 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland. Today, there are fewer than 4,000. Photographer Soliman Lawrence portrays how Poles rediscover Jewish culture and their country’s history. His pictures are on display as part of this year's Jewish Music and Theatre Week in Dresden. This picture shows the Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow, which was founded by Janusz Makuch, a non-Jewish Pole.

The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is the largest and oldest event of its kind in Poland. It showcases Jewish culture from around the world and attracts visitors all over the globe. It features internationally acclaimed musicians and includes workshops on Jewish dance, Israeli food and lectures. During the final concert "Shalom on Szeroka," visitors of the festival dance together.

The city of Chmielnik has a population of about 4,000 and is not home to any Jews. Nevertheless, Chmielnik has put on an annual Jewish cultural festival for the last 10 years. Before World War II, 80 percent of Chmielnik residents were Jewish. Today, remnants of the synagogue and cemetery are all that is left, though plans for restoration are in the works.

Of the synagogues that survived the war, many have been repurposed and used as community centers, museums and bookstores, while a few are still used for worship. In this picture, tourists visit the partially restored Izaak Synagogue in Krakow's Jewish district, Kazimierz, which is decorated with life-sized cutouts of pre-war Jews.

Not only synagogues need rejuvenating, but also Jewish cemeteries. Many of them have been neglected and become overgrown, but there has been a recent drive to restore more of the graveyards. Pictured is a worker clearing brush from the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. Photographer Soliman Lawrence, an American living in Berlin, is particularly interested in the relationship between past and present.

Another sign that Jewish culture in Poland is enjoying a revival is that souvenirs with Jewish themes are popular throughout Poland, from paintings and menorah key chains to figures mades of glass, wood and ceramic. The picture shows molds for menorahs that are made in Nova Huta - not for religious purposes, but as souvenirs.

Jews have been part of Polish folk art for hundreds of years. Today most figurines are sold to tourists at souvenir shops. Josef Regula, a Polish Catholic folk artist, carves a Jewish figure out of wood in this picture.

The Jewish community in Warsaw is the largest in Poland. During the Singer Cultural Festival, members of a Jewish group mark the Sabbath in front of a crowd of at least 200 people - most of whom are non-Jewish.

In memory of the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, in which Poles forced their Jewish neighbors into a barn and set it on fire, artist Rafal Betlejewski burned a barn in the small town of Zawada. The artistic "performance" was very controversial and stirred a heated discussion among Jews and non-Jews. Soliman Lawrence's photos are on show in Dresden through November 16.

Over the last decade Poland has been debating revelations about the Poles’ role during the Holocaust, which have undermined the previous consensus that Poles were largely victims and not perpetrators. Now more Poles are coming to terms with the past. Pictured here, a women peeks through a fence next to the Old Cemetery and Remuh Synagogue in Krakow.

A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.

The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.

Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.

Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.

The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.

Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.

Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.

In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.

Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.