The excavated neolithic monuments and Artifacts were transported to Berlin but, against Oppenheim’s hopes, the Pergamon Museum declined to acquire them. As a result, Oppenheim founded the private Tell Halaf Museum in the buildings of a former machine factory in Berlin. The museum would later be completely destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid. Its sculptures were shattered into pieces, and thousand of these fragments were held in storage at the Pergamon Museum until well after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, in 2001, the painstaking process of restoring the statues began.