The intervention, presented as a video guide, led people through the courtyards using their mobile devices and headphones. It wove a playful narrative combining partly fictional musings and historical facts about spaces once associated with the supposedly upscale society and what remains from the past.

As this area is now populated with extremely expensive stores, hotels, galleries, and apartments, one quickly perceives a stark contrast between commemoration and capitalist consumption.

Until the air raids in July 1943, the Görtz-Palais and the other buildings of the Stadthaus housed central police command offices: the Hamburg police headquarters, the commander of the security police, temporarily the inspector of the security police, and the control centers of the criminal investigation department and state police (Gestapo) for Hamburg and northern Germany.

Under National Socialism, the police leadership was responsible for implementing the expectations, instructions, and orders of the Reich Security Main Office, the Main Office of the Order Police, the SS, and the NSDAP. Many hundreds of employees worked for the Gestapo and the criminal investigation department in the Stadthaus. They organized the persecution of political opponents, Jews, Sinti, Romnja and Roma, homosexuals, so-called asocials, and many others. Women and men were imprisoned in the cellars of the Stadthaus and suffered severe abuse during interrogations.

Police officers used "enhanced interrogation" to force confessions. Prisoners were humiliated, tortured, and driven to their deaths. The officers were involved in deciding the fates of thousands of men and women by sending them to concentration camps. The Stadthaus was a center of terror and violence, whose significance extended far beyond northern Germany.

The war deployment of North German police officers in Poland and the Soviet Union and their active participation in the genocide were also organized by the Hamburg police leadership from the Stadthaus. With the sale to the Hamburg-based project developer Quantum Immobilien AG, the city enabled the renovation and expansion of the building ensemble.

The Stadthöfe concept combined the revitalization of the historic building fabric with the renewal and connection of the courtyards. Between 2013 and 2020, the "Stadthöfe", a new urban inner-city quarter, was created on 100,000 square meters on one of the largest city construction sites during these years.