The Museums East Wing was destroyed in a bomb raid at the end of World War II. It was only in 2006 that the restoration process began. It took no longer than three years to transfer the ruined building, overgrown with birch trees, into a state-of-the-art building for the storage of the scientific wet collections. The building not only provides protection for this national cultural treasure and is a home for modern research, but is an architectural triumph in its own right.