The memorial is located at the historic site of the attempted coup of July 20, 1944 in the former Army High Command. This was the headquarters of the conspiracy against Hitler. After the failure of the coup, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and three of his co-conspirators were shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock that very night.

The courtyard of honor has been a place of remembrance of the resistance against National Socialism since 1953, and the memorial and educational site was opened in 1968. The permanent exhibition, which was renewed in 2014, shows the entire breadth and ideological diversity of the fight against the National Socialist dictatorship with more than 1,000 photographs and documents.

It documents the resistance in the labor movement, in the church, in artistic and intellectual circles and in everyday life during the war, as well as the resistance of Jews, Sinti and Roma and young people. Separate chapters are dedicated to Georg Elser's assassination attempt on November 8, 1939, the Kreisau Circle (Kreisauer Kreis), the White Rose (Weiße Rose) and the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle).

The exhibition traces the fates of individual lives and shows how networks of resistance emerged, what motives and goals people had and how the National Socialist state reacted to the actions.