One of the five marvelous museums that sit on Berlin's Museum Island, the Pergamon Museum is the newest, first opened in 1930. It is named after the Pergamon Altar, an enormous monument which occupies a whole room.Designed by Alfred Messel, and later Ludwig Hoffman, the Pergamon Museum was built to complement the nearby Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum (now the Bode Museum), which had grown too small to house the artifacts garnered from German excavations throughout the world. The idea for the new museum came about in 1907 and completion took twenty years - from 1910 to 1930. It opened during one of Germany's most turbulent periods and was subsequently largely destroyed in the bombing of Berlin during World War II. Fortunately, many of the pieces had been stored elsewhere for safe keeping and a number of the museum's larger pieces were "walled in" for protection. In 1945, a portion of the original collection was taken to Russia and is still housed in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museums there. Many items were returned in the late 1950s but, due to Russian restitution laws, some still remain in those two museums.