Court Building at Appellhofplatz (Appellhof)

The name goes back to the Rhenish Court of Appeal. After the Congress of Vienna awarded the Rhineland to Prussia in 1815 and King Friedrich Wilhelm III allowed the Napoleonic codes to remain in force as "Rhenish law," a court of appeal for this legal area became necessary in 1819. Cologne, the largest and centrally located city of the Rhineland, was the natural choice. Since Prussia refused to fund the Rhenish "special path," the city of Cologne – with a grant from the local chamber of commerce – provided the site and covered almost all of the construction costs itself. The "Court of Appeal" (Appellationsgerichtshof) became colloquially the "Appellhof," a name that eventually passed to the square and the street as well.

After the National Socialists seized power, so-called "special courts" (Sondergerichte) sat in the Appellhof from 1933 to 1945. They ruled largely without regard to law in the regime's interest and, by the end of the war, had handed down more than 120 politically motivated death sentences, some on trivial pretexts and solely to intimidate. A story occasionally repeated – that an underground passage connected the court building to the Gestapo headquarters in the EL-DE House across the way – is supported by no verifiable sources and is regarded as an unproven legend: no traces of such a passage were found either during cellar renovations in the two buildings or during underground railway construction on Neven-DuMont-Straße.

The southern section, once home to the local court, is a three-storey, multi-wing building with a semicircular ground plan – an adaptation to the shape of the demolished Weyer building, whose curve can still be traced today along the bollards on Neven-DuMont-Straße. The building encloses an inner courtyard; the courtyard and street facades are executed in brick with tracery windows and natural-stone detailing. The glass-roofed atrium holds more than 400 people and also serves art and history exhibitions. Historic holding cells and separate spiral staircases for prisoners survive. During a heritage-sensitive renovation from 1988 to 1995 the main usable floor area grew to around 7,000 m²; in 2011 a new fire-safety scheme with a smoke-extraction system in the atrium followed, and in 2013/2014 extensive roof insulation work was carried out.