Munich's Adolf-Hitler-Straße and Schellingstraße

Brienner Straße (formerly Adolf-Hitler-Straße)

Brienner Strasse is one of Munich's four boulevards. From 1933 on, the area around Königsplatz and Ludwigstrasse in Munich's Maxvorstadt district served as the embodiment of the Nazi regime with the Wittelsbacher Palais becoming the Gestapo headquarters, and where in the Palace of Justice the People's Court under Roland Freisler sentenced the members of the “White Rose” to death. Here is an image from the Shell Stadtkarten of 1934. Numerous house owners in Maxvorstadt were forced to sell their buildings, such as that of the Jewish antiquarian Jacques Rosenthal located on Brienner Strasse 26, whilst others emigrated or were victims of deportation, disenfranchisement and the Holocaust. Apart from the numerous places of perpetrators and victims, there are also places of the resistance such as it was such as that of Hermann Frieb who lived at Schellingstrasse 78 and headed the resistance group “New Beginning” as well as that of Wilhelm Olschewski, the head of the communist resistance, who operated from Augustenstrasse 98.

Looking towards Odeonsplatz during the state funeral of Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, the so-called “despot of Munich” on April 27, 1944. The Nazis referred to this road the Via Triumphalis. Every aspect of the funeral, from the choice of location to the selection of speakers and the carefully choreographed procession, was carefully planned to maximise its impact on the audience. The presence of high-ranking Nazi officials such as Goebbels and Himmler, underscored the importance of the event and conveyed a sense of unity and purpose within the regime and served as a visible demonstration of the Nazi leadership's commitment to honouring one of their own and to carrying on his legacy. The rhetoric employed during the funeral speeches was equally significant. Speakers eulogised Wagner as a loyal party member, a dedicated public servant, and a true believer in the Nazi cause. They emphasised his contributions to the party and the nation, highlighting his role in promoting Nazi ideology and suppressing dissent. The sombre music, the elaborate decorations, and the presence of uniformed soldiers all contributed to an atmosphere of reverence and respect through which the regime sought to tap into the deep-seated feelings of grief and loss that were prevalent among the German population, using these emotions to rally support for the Nazi cause. The extensive media coverage of the funeral, including newsreels, photographs, and newspaper articles, ensured that the event reached a wide audience, both within Germany and abroad in a way that allowed the regime to control the narrative surrounding Wagner's death, presenting him as a martyr for the Nazi cause and using his funeral as an opportunity to promote its own agenda. The visual imagery of the funeral was particularly powerful, with images of the coffin draped in the Nazi flag, the solemn faces of the mourners, and the rows of uniformed soldiers conveying a sense of order, discipline, and national unity. These images were carefully crafted to project an image of strength and resolve, even as the war situation deteriorated. The funeral procession, which wound its way through the streets of Munich, was another key element of the ceremony. The procession was designed to showcase the power and authority of the Nazi regime, with soldiers, party members, and ordinary citizens lining the streets to pay their respects. The presence of military vehicles and weapons served as a reminder of the regime's military might, whilst the participation of ordinary citizens suggested widespread popular support.

Looking onto the street from Wittelsbacherplatz is Bertel Thorvaldsen's equestrian statue of Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria dating from 1830-1839 as seen in a photo from men of the American 14 Armoured Division just after they took the city. Throughout the site I followed their footsteps via these photos, trying to ascertain the actual locations shown. In this case, I was able to identify the stone base from the inscription "Maximilian Churfuerst von Bayern" on the front. Behind is the Palais Ludwig Ferdinand which, as seen here, had suffered considerable damage by the wartime air raids, and the Odeon to the right. The Odeon was built between 1826 and 1828 by Leo von Klenze and it too was destroyed except for the surrounding walls. From 1951 onwards, it was rebuilt as the Ministry of the Interior by the architect Josef Wiedemann. Named the "Liberators" in recognition of the Division's role in liberating large numbers of Allied prisoners of war, including several large sub-camps of the Dachau camp. Eventually elements of the Division were awarded two Presidential Unit Citations. A month before this photo was taken, the Division had broken through the Siegfried Line and advanced to the Rhine River after days of heavy fighting. Upon crossing the Rhine, the Division liberated Stalag XIII-C and Oflag XIII-B, two large prisoner of war camps at Hammelburg before rapidly advanced hundreds of miles across southern Germany, fighting numerous battles before crossing the Danube River and onto Munich. By April 29 the Division, liberated Stalag VII-A, one of the largest prisoner of war camps in Germany located in Moosburg.  

Café Luitpold and today. The Luitpoldblock was built in 1812; when Café Luitpold opened in 1888, it was considered comparable to the Vienna Café Central or the Café New York in Budapest. Writers, painters and thinkers met here, including Stefan George and Erich Mühsam, who wrote in the guest book at the beginning of the 20th century: "Das Leben ist eine Begleiterscheinung zum Kaffeehaus" (Life is a by-product of the coffee house). In 1932 Writer Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, observed Hitler eating strawberry tartlets with whipped cream to excess. 

I had repeated opportunities to study his physiognomy. Once at close range, for about half an hour. That was in 1932... The Carlton tearoom in Munich was one of his favourites back then. I chose this restaurant because the Café Luitpold – just opposite, on the other side of Brienner Straße – had recently become the meeting place for the SA and ϟϟ: a decent person no longer frequented it. The Führer, as it now turned out, shared my aversion to his brave men; he, too, preferred the intimacy of the distinguished 'tea room'. He expressed astonishment at how similar Hitler appeared to his later parodist Chaplin, although he made clear concessions: "Chaplin has charm, grace, spirit, intensity - qualities that were not noticeable in my whipping cream-smacking neighbour."

 In fact, the café would become a meeting point for the SA and ϟϟ, which was particularly tragic for Mann, who loved going to his Luitpold. On the night of December 18, 1944, after a 45-minute bombardment, the lights in Café Luitpold went out although it continued operating in the basement; fortunately for the site the bombs only hit the entrance area leaving the auditorium relatively unscathed. It eventually reopened in 1962.

Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
Square for the Victims of National Socialism

The site after the war with the monument to Schiller dating from 1863 which had been moved to the northeastern end of Maximiliansplatz for traffic reasons in 1959 and as it appears with me today alongside the so-called eternal flame. It's shown below on the right   after the war and in its current location. If you can squint you'll find located nearby since 1995 a recessed memorial stone to murdered Munich-based gypsies. The current name of the square was given in 1946 which caused - just one year after the end of Nazis - great resentment amongst the population, which went so far as to to the destruction of the street sign. As Ernst Grube, born in 1932 who spent his childhood as the son of a Jewish mother in Munich and was deported to Theresienstadt in 1945, put it, "[y]ou can forget the square. There is not even a house number. It's a place without houses." A temporary memorial was placed on the site in 1965. Until 1985 there was a memorial stone on the square dedicated to "The Victims in Resistance to National Socialism" designed by Karl Oppenrieder from granite and which is now located on Freedom Square in the Neuhausen district.

After Andreas Sobeck’s memorial had been erected in 1985 the granite stone was given a new inscription and moved to Platz der Freiheit (Freedom Square) in the district of Neuhausen, where it serves as a memorial to the members of the resistance who fell victim to the Nazi regime. The memorial is situated diagonally opposite from the former Wittelsbach Palace, Gestapo headquarters and gaol in Munich since 1933. The memorial information slab describes the site as "a place of destruction, intimidation and terror against political dissidents, against racially and religiously discredited minorities and against people who have been persecuted because of their sexual orientation or disability."  An eternal flame, trapped behind a bronze grate, burning day and night, burns in memory of victims of the Nazis which is supposed to represent the human that cannot be extinguished by oppression. In fact, when it was first erected it ended up being shut off each night until enough of a protest had been made. By October 2012 it was missing altogether but has since reopened. In March 2008 a Mexican tourist posed with the Nazi salute at Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus whilst her husband took a photo. A passer-by reported them to the police and they were fined €450. In April 2012, after a lengthy discussion about the visual upgrading of the square and the associated "dignified memory", the Munich City Council approved renovation measures.

 

Further down the street a prominent victim of the “Aryanisation” carried out between 1933 and 1945 which took the form of a looting campaign of enormous proportions was the “Modellhaus Adolf Rothschild”, formerly the Palais Eichthal,  a dressmaker’s and furrier’s shop located at Brienner Straße 12. Owing to a dramatic fall in sales, Adolf Rothschild was forced to stage a clearance sale in September 1938 and thus sell the business for well below its value. Although Rothschild himself managed to emigrate to London, most of his assets were confiscated. 

Himmler rented a flat nearby at Brienner Straße 9 at the start of November, 1921 when he'd resumed his studies in Munich, conveniently close to the technical college, the university (where he also attended courses) and the state library.

Munich Gestapo Headquarters

The Wittelsbacher Palais had been located on the north eastern corner of Briennerstraße and Turkmenstraße, and from 1887 to 1918 the palace was the residence of Queen Mary IV and III and her family. The red brick building at what was then Brienner Straße 50 and today's Brienner Straße 20, which has English Gothic elements on the outside, was built from 1843 to 1848 by Friedrich von Gärtner and Johann Moninger as the crown prince's palace for the later King Maximilian II. From 1848 to 1868, however, after its completion, the palace was the retirement home of King Ludwig, who abdicated in 1848 and didn'tt appreciate the building with its neo-Gothic architecture. From 1887 to 1918 the Wittelsbacher Palais served as the residence of his grandson Prince Ludwig, since 1913 as Ludwig III. At the beginning of August 1914 when the First World War broke out, the monarch spoke to the population from the balcony of the palace. It was here that the Bavarian Secret Police moved its offices in 1933 from the Polizeipräsidium on Ettstrasse, transforming itself into the GEheimeSTAatsPOlizei. The photo on the right clearly shows the Gestapo prison in the park of the former Wittelsbacher palace.

Shown after the war and today. From 1933 onwards the Wittelsbach Palais in Brienner Straße 22 was the headquarters of the Bavarian Political Police, which later became part of the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei or secret state police). This regional headquarters of terror spread fear and dread among the population. Anyone resisting the regime in Munich fell into the clutches of the Gestapo. The carpenter Georg Elser, for example, who attempted to assassinate Hitler on November 8,1939 by planting a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller, was interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after weeks of interrogations in Munich and Berlin. He was later taken to Dachau, where he was shot by the ϟϟ shortly before the end of the war. The Gestapo officials in the Wittelsbach Palais were also responsible for issuing orders to compile death lists and for dispatching the deportation orders that led to the annihilation of Munich’s Jewish community.

In 1919 it was the meeting place of the action committee of the Munich Soviet Republic . On April 5, 1919, in the Wittelsbacher Palais, representatives of the SPD , the USPD , the Bavarian Farmers' Union and the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils decided to proclaim the Munich Soviet Republic. From October 1933 it was the headquarters of the Gestapo . In 1934, on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich, a multi-storey prison with 22 cells was built in the northern part of the garden, which was connected to the palace by an underground passage. Sophie and Hans Scholl were also imprisoned in this prison from their arrest on February 18, 1943 until their trial on February 22, 1943.

In 1944 the building was destroyed by Allied bombing as seen in the GIF above and the central avant-corps of the south wing on Brienner Strasse collapsed. This plaque on its façade on the corner of Brienner and Türkenstrasse marks the former site. Although the site is infamous as a place of torture and imprisonment of the enemies of the regime, the plaque seems more concerned about ignoring this inconvenient fact to advertise the bombing by the British and Americans.  

[P]risoners had open wounds all over their bodies, primarily on their backs... They were forced to lie with such open wounds on dirty cots. I was often witness to such scenes, especially at the time when the focus was on the BZK. I know of some six people among this group of prisoners dying because they were so badly mistreated. And as I learned later, various others died whilst being transported to Dachau."

-1951 testimony by former Gestapo prisoner Josef Eberl about inmates being bull-whipped here at the Wittelsbacher Palais 

Today only two listed historical buildings remain at the site- the Dürckheim Palace at Türkenstrasse 4 and the building of the old Disconto-Gesellschaft here at Brienner Strasse 16 shown as it appeared during the Nazi era flying Nazi flags and today. Built between 1922–1923 by Max Littmann, now owned by the Bayerische Landesbank (BayernLB- Bavarian State Bank) it had formerly been owned by Disconto-Gesellschaft, one of the largest German banking companies.The Munich-Gestapo concentration camp external command was also located here. Although the façades remained largely undamaged during the war, the building was completely demolished in 1950 whilst the former Gestapo prison was only demolished in 1964 after years of commercial use. From 1961 to 1965, the state and city considered building a central memorial to the victims of the Nazis here; instead, one was built on the nearby “Square of the Victims of National Socialism.” The reconstruction architect Erwin Schleich lamented the total demolition of the Wittelsbacher Palais in his book The Second Destruction of Munich from 1978 with bitter words: "A large palace was erased from the Munich cityscape; the loss is comparable to the loss of the Braunschweig Palace or the Bauakademie of Friedrich von Schinkel in East Berlin.” At the end of the 1970s, the headquarters of the Bayerische Landesbank was built on the property. In 1955 there were discussions on building a cultural or popular education centre on the site, but it was sold to the BayernLB (Bank of Bavaria) in 1958.  

The stone lion in front of the northern entrance on Gabelsberger Straße shown with me on the left is a copy, placed here in 1980 with the inscription: “Copy of the lion destroyed when the Wittelsbacher Palais was bombed in AD 1944.” The two seated lions on the right and left of the portal of the Wittelbach Palace were made of sandstone, as was the base. They were made by the sculptor Johann Halbig on behalf of King Ludwig I and restored in 1909 by the Vilsingen-born sculptor Fidelis Enderle, who was commissioned by the Oberhofmeisterstab. The processed blocks, eight cubic meters in size and weighing 350 hundredweight, were made of Kirchheim shell limestone. One of the two lions has stood in front of the Catholic Academy on Mandlstraße since 1970 as a memorial to the publicist Fritz Gerlich , who was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp, another one (this one is a replica) in front of the north entrance of the Bayerische Landesbank on Gabelsbergerstraße  As Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, President of the Centre for Jewish History in New York and Professor of History at Fairfield University writes, this “clear example of the post-modern scorn towards artistic authenticity, this monument seems to have been meant to prevent any further commemoration at the site which might have addressed its Nazi past.”

 Directly behind was to have been the site of Hitler's mausoleum, the site of which is shown today on the right. Upon visiting Napoleon's tomb after the fall of France, Hitler commented, "My life will not end in the mere form of death. It will, on the contrary, begin then." His interest in immortality was shown in his plans for the gigantic mausoleum which would dwarf the Frauenkirche and last, he said, "until the end of time." His personal sketch of the plans dated June 21, 1939 may be found at the Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich. The mausoleum was to be connected to the planned Halle der Partei at Munich by a bridge over Gabelsbergerstraße (where, at no.37, the Nazis’ Main Office for Local Government played key roles in the unrestrained plundering of the Jews, directed at private property, art collections and libraries, houses, flats and land, but also at commercial enterprises.) to become a party-political cult centre in the city regarded by Hitler as the home of the Nazi party.

 Hitler relaxed with a sketching pad, deftly drawing a Party Forum that should grace Munich after his death – a parade square, Nazi Party office buildings, a bridge across Gabelsberger Strasse, and his own mausoleum, dwarfing the city’s famous Frauenkirche and built to ‘last until the end of time.’ It was a concrete sign of his optimism about the future.

Irving (178)

The dimensions were slightly smaller than the Pantheon but would dwarf the Frauenkirche and last, Hitler claimed, "until the end of time." The oculus in the centre of the dome was to be one metre wider in diameter than that of the Pantheon (8.92 metres) to admit more light on Hitler's sarcophagus, placed immediately under it on the floor of the rotunda. The modest dimensions of the structure and its lack of rich decoration are curious given Hitler's predilection for gigantic dimensions, but in this case the focal point of the building was the Führer's sarcophagus, which was not to be dwarfed by dimension out of all proportion to the size of the sarcophagus itself. Hitler had asked Giesler to plan his own mausoleum in Munich in such a way that his sarcophagus would be exposed to sun and rain similar to that of the other martyrs and placed in the Ehrentempel next to the Fuhrerbau, telling him to "[i]magine to yourself, Giesler, if Napoleon's sarcophagus were placed beneath a large oculus, like that of the Pantheon." Likewise, rich interior decoration would have distracted the attention of "pilgrims" Giesler's scale model of the building apparently pleased Hitler, but the model and plans, kept by Hitler in the Reichskanzlei, are are now probably in the hands of the Russians or have been destroyed.

House of German Doctors (Haus der Deutschen Ärzte)

Standing in front of the building and as it appeared during the Nazi era. The building was used as the headquarters for the Reich Physicians' Chamber (Reichsärztekammer), which was responsible for implementing the racial and eugenic policies of the Nazi regime in the medical profession. Dr. Gerhard Wagner, the Reich Physicians' Leader (Reichsärzteführer), had his office in the Haus der Ärzte. Wagner played a key role in the implementation of the T4 Euthanasia Program, which resulted in the murder of thousands of disabled individuals. Source The Reich Physicians' Chamber, based in the Haus der Ärzte, was responsible for the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring" (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) enacted on July 14, 1933. This law led to the forced sterilisation of approximately 400,000 people. The Haus der Ärzte was also the site where the guidelines for the participation of physicians in the "euthanasia" programme were formulated. These guidelines were used to justify the murder of those deemed "unworthy of life" by the Nazi regime. Source The Reich Physicians' Chamber, operating from the Haus der Ärzte, was instrumental in the exclusion of Jewish doctors from the German medical profession. By 1938, nearly half of all Jewish doctors had been forced to emigrate or had been arrested. One of the more unexplored yet frightening aspects of the Nazi years is the conduct of the doctors during those years. Many of them abandoned the traditional guiding norms for the practice of medicine, archaically expressed in the Hippocratic oath, and proposed, carried out, and cooperated with medical experiments without the consent of subjects and with little promise of any contribution to medical science. Many also participated in research and other medical activities, such as euthanasia and mass sterilisation, whose purposes had nothing to do with a contribution to medical knowledge that would eventually save or improve life, but were simply for the manipulation and killing of persons. These activities quickly fell under the control of Nazi ideology, with no protest on the basis of the norms of medical practice by societies of medical doctors and psychiatrists, and with little, albeit costly, protest by individuals.

Established after plans of Roderich Fick, this building was in the possession of the Nazis from November 3, 1935 when it was inaugurated in Hitler's presence.  Hitler liked the building so much that he made Fick a professor of architecture at Munich's Technical University; in 1939 he even appointed Fick Reich Architect for Linz and had been commissioned to work on a number of projects on the Obersalzberg. Bernhard Bleeker designed the emblem above the entrance which still sports the two snakes and faintly preserves the title. Located today on Brienner Straße 23, it now serves as Ober-Österreich-Haus. The emphasis on "German" proclaimed the medical group's status as a pure, 'aryanised' organisation by which time Jews had been prohibited from practising medicine. The members of this organisation included not only the ideologues of racially based medicine but also the advocates of medical experiments on humans, forced sterilisation and 'euthanasia'.
 In 1933 Jewish doctors were deprived of their licences to practise under health insurance plans. From 1938 onwards they were only allowed to practise as “providers of treatment” for Jewish patients and not permitted to use the title 'doctor'. The Association of Health-Fund Physicians of Germany, which had its Munich headquarters in the House of German Physicians, inaugurated in 1935, and the Association of National Socialist German Physicians at Karlstraße 21 played a key role in these measures. The members of these organisations included not only the ideologues of racially based medicine but also the advocates of medical experiments on humans, forced sterilisation and “euthanasia”.
The first Reich Doctors' Leader (Reichsärzteführer) was Dr Gerhard Wagner, in large measure responsible for euthanasia and sterilisation carried out against Jews and the handicapped, and who showed himself at the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1935 to be a staunch proponent of the Nuremberg Laws, and thereby also of Nazi Germany's race legislation and racial politics. Under his leadership before dying suddenly in Munich in 1939 at the age of 50, the Nazi killing institution at Hadamar was established. He instructed doctors to be less dogmatic in their approach to and understanding of medicine:

In his thinking and practice, the German doctor must become closer to nature. He should no longer swear solely and only by the dogma of his university acquired Schulmedizin-based knowledge. Rather, he should also master the methods of Naturheil, homeopathy, and Volksmedezin. We National Socialists subscribe neither to economic nor intellectual dogma, we only know one dogma: The well-being of the German Volk.

Chad Ross (78-9) Naked Germany

Wagner's successor as Reich Medical Officer was Berlin City Medical Officer Leonardo Conti who was among those who were shown the killing of people in a gas chamber and, for comparison purposes, the killing by injection in January 1940 at the Old Penitentiary in Brandenburg. Conti is said to have administered the injections himself. This so-called 'Brandenburg test gassing' was part of the preparations for Operation T4 as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme. Conti was also involved in typhus experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the ϟϟ, Conti was promoted to ϟϟ-Obergruppenführer on April 20, 1944. In August 1944, he resigned as Reich Health Leader. On January 17, 1945, he was appointed honorary professor in Munich. Another appointment as honorary professor at the State Academy for the Public Health Service in Berlin followed on March 3, 1945. On May 19, 1945, Leonardo Conti was arrested by the Allies in Flensburg. After the German surrender, he was to stand trial for his involvement in the euthanasia programme, but hanged himself in his cell at the Nuremberg Prison on October 6, 1945, before the start of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. Conti left a suicide note in which he explained that he was taking his own life because he had lied under oath during an interrogation, attempting to cover up his complicity in medical experiments.

Inside the inner courtyard in front of Bernhard Bleeker's Windsiele-brunnen created in 1935 and inaugurated on July 11, 1936. Bleeker probably received the order for the fountain from the medical centre association, which also commissioned him to paint a portrait of Hitler. On the edge of the pool stand three closely watched bronze greyhounds on their slender hind legs which seem to be picking up a scent: their heads are pointing upwards, their finely modelled ears laid back.  Tendons and muscles clearly stand out. The athletic, filigree animals are contrastingly set against the massive, overhanging fountain column. According to Otto Josef Bistritzki, the dogs serve as a reminder of Hitler's demand that young men had to be “tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel and quick as greyhounds”. It's not clear however why a connection to German youth, embodied by a dog fountain, should be made on the site of a medical centre. A reference to ancient healing arts would be more plausible: the dog was already an attribute of the healing god Aesculapius) in Greek and Roman antiquity. The animal was said to have healing effects with its saliva considered medicinal. This interpretation would also correspond to Bleeker's preference for using ancient iconographic models for his works. Bleeker also made two fish-shaped door handles on the main portal and two snakes with a chalice on topas well as a swastika band on the front of the building.

After the war the second floor swastika and laurel wreath were removed and the stone plaque altered to read Haus der Muenchener Ärzte. (Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich by Gavriel David Rosenfeld, page 80). The building was used for almost fifty years by the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, District Office Munich City and Country from 1955. In 2003 it acquired the Raiffeisenbank Oberösterreich branch and converted it into an “Oberösterreich Haus” with an adjacent restaurant; as a participant of one of my tours noticed, Hitler's birthplace of Braunau am Inn is located in Oberösterreich.

Ironically enough, directly across the street from the former Gestapo HQ and next door to the former House of German Doctors shown on the right was the site of the former Israeli Consulate on Brienner Straße 19 with Drake Winston standing in front, thus explaining the constant police presence at the time. When taking the Consul-General on a tour (whose son I was also teaching), I asked him if he knew of the significance of the location. He told me "Yes- we wanted to say "Fuck You, Hitler!". About an hour later whilst drinking at Park Cafe he admitted they they'd no idea. It wasn't until April 8, 2011 that Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman signed a joint declaration on the establishment of a Consulate General of the State of Israel here, and it began its work in September 2011. It had only been intended as a temporary solution from the start and in which no public access took place. By the beginning of 2014, the decision was made to permanently house the Consulate General in a rear building of the former state lottery headquarters on Karolinenplatz which was gutted , modernised and rebuilt for around eight million euros; the costs were shared between the State of Bavaria as the owner and the State of Israel as the tenant of the property. This time the location was stated as having been chosen due to its symbolic historical significance in the immediate vicinity of Nazi-era monuments. For example, the building of today's Consulate General is directly adjacent to the property on which the Nazi party headquarters in Munich, the so-called "Brown House," was located. To the north-west of the new Israeli consulate stands the former Führerbau, completed in 1937  where Hitler's office was located and from where the Munich Agreement was signed. Königsplatz was also the ideological centre of the Nazis, converted into a parade ground that they used for various ceremonies. The building immediately to the south of the General Consulate once housed the highest party court of the Nazi Party which today serves as the office of Acatech, the German Academy of Engineering Sciences. The various departments of the party had partly acquired numerous buildings in the area, whilst Jewish owners (including the Mann family) were forced to sell and the houses were then converted for the purposes of the party.

Looking down the street towards Karolinenplatz, much has changed postwar; only the gate on the left and the balcony offer points of continuity. 

  

Kraft durch Freude - München-Oberbayern

The site of the former headquarters of the Upper Bavarian branch of the German Labour Front (DAF) on the left, whose goal was to bring together in a single organisation all 'working Germans', regardless of their training, social status or actual profession, and indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology. The prestigious house at what was then Brienner Strasse 47 was built by Gustav von Cube in 1910 for the Jewish court antiquarian Jacques (Jakob) Rosenthal, born near Memmingen, as his company's headquarters. In 1935, Rosenthal had to sell his property to the German Labour Front, which housed the administration of the “Kraft durch Joy” organisation. Jacques Rosenthal died on October 5, 1937 in Munich; his wife Emma was able to emigrate to Zurich in December 1939. The DAF was made particularly attractive by the leisure activities and holidays offered by its Strength through Joy organisation (Kraft durch Freude– KdF). They were located here at Brienner Straße 26–28 when, 1935 the KdF took over the business premises and house of the Jewish antiquarian bookseller Jacques Rosenthal who was forced to sell the building to the Reich Leadership of the Nazi Party for well below its value. Rosenthal died on October 5, 1937 in Munich; his wife Emma emigrating to Zurich in December 1939.  Today there are representatives of various companies in the building.

Next door shown on the right is the former site of the German Labour Front and the offices of the Gau for Munich-Upper Bavaria, formerly the Palais Matuschka. Today, Emanuel von Seidl's palace houses legal and tax advisory offices in addition to the Monaco consulate.

After the free trade unions were disbanded in May 1933, their assets were confiscated and many trade-union functionaries were arrested. They were replaced by the German Labour Front (DAF), whose goal was to bring together in a single organisation all “working Germans”, regardless of their training, social status or actual profession, and indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology. The DAF was made particularly attractive by the leisure activities and holidays offered by its “Strength through Joy” organisation (“Kraft durch Freude” – KdF). The headquarters of the Upper Bavarian branch of the DAF were located at Brienner Straße 26–28, and in 1935 the KdF took over the business premises and house of the Jewish antiquarian bookseller Jacques Rosenthal at Brienner Straße 26. Rosenthal was forced to sell the building to the Reich Leadership of the NSDAP for well below its value.

ThemenGeschichtsPfad (57-58)

Looking towards Königsplatz from the base of the obelisk on Karolinenplatz during a march past the Brown House in 1932 and the scene today with Drake Winston. 

Karolinenplatz was created in 1809 as part of the grid plan for Maxvorstadt designed by Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell and Karl von Fischer connecting the Residenz and Nymphenburg Palace. It is named after Queen Caroline, the second wife of King Max I Joseph. Despite the destruction of the war, Fischer's concept of "a green garden suburb with pavilion development" can still be seen today. The obelisk in the middle of the square was erected in 1833 and commemorates the 30,000 Bavarian soldiers who died in 1812 on Napoleon's Russian campaign. Bavaria switched to Napoleon's opponents (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Sweden) at the beginning of October 1813. With the inscription on the obelisk ("They also died for the liberation of the fatherland") King Ludwig I tried to use sophistry to equate the death of the Bavarian soldiers in the Russian campaign as a contribution to the liberation from Napoleonic rule. This reinterpretation of an historical fact later repeatedly led to debates about the statement on the obelisk. 

The address at Karolinenplatz 5 (Prinz-Georg-Palais) represents one of the most notorious crimes in the course of the defeat of the so-called Bavarian Soviet Republic when, in the courtyard and in the cellar, government troops murdered 21 members of the "St. Joseph's Catholic Journeyman Association", whom they had previously arrested in their clubhouse on Augustenstraße. The Kolping journeyman had been denounced as "Spartacists", supporting Soviet Republic. The burial of the victims took place with great solemnity at the Westfriedhof; the funeral speech was given by Father Rupert Mayer, later a victim of the Nazis.

At the former site of the headquarters of the National Socialist Women's League  (Reichsführung der NS-Frauenschaft) which served as the office of the Woman's Bureau in the German Labour Front and, from 1934 onward, Reichsführerin of the National Socialist Women’s Association. The Nazi women's movement (NSF) was the women's organisation of the Nazi Party founded in October 1931. In fact, the political influence of the NSF within the Nazi Party and the power of the state tended to be zero, which may have been due to the national socialist image of women, which did not envisage a power and political participation for women. The "German woman" was defined as a housewife and mother, a roll distribution, which was also propagated by Nazi women. The general care and the education of the children were called "feminine habitat" and women's mothers' training courses, which had been attended by every fifth woman (over 20 years) until 1937, were formally established based primarily on the book Adolf Hitler, the German Mother and her First Child by Johanna Haarer, a copy of which our midwife lent me shown on the right.

From February 1934 to the end of the Second World War 1945, the Nazi women's leadership was led by the "Reichsfrauenführer" Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, who also headed the DFW. Scholtz-Klink had been charged with the responsibility of persuading women to work for the good of the Nazi government; its offices provided training programmes relating to women's domestic work. In 1938, she argued that "the German woman must work and work, physically and mentally she must renounce luxury and pleasure", though she herself enjoyed a comfortable material existence.

Unlike man, as Alfred Rosenberg once put it, woman thinks 'lyrically’ and not 'systematically’, 'atomistically’ and not 'synoptically’, whatever that may mean; and while he saw it as one of woman’s main tasks 'to preach the maintenance of the purity of the race’, the Reich Women’s Leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, in full agreement, complained especially of the absence in sober modern times of the sacred racial function and significance of women and called upon them 'to become once more the priestesses of the family and nation’.

Fest (316) The Face Of The Third Reich

She eventually served eighteen months in gaol after the war (only having been caught whilst in hiding in 1948 after witnesses had claimed she had died in the bunker with Hitler) and remained an unrepentant Nazi until her death in 1999, twenty years earlier In she had dedicated her book The Woman in the Third Reich to “the victims of the Nuremberg trials.”

The building itself today dates from 1957 after the original was bombed during the war.

On the left, the ruins of Palais Asbeck-Lotzbeck, located at Karolinenplatz 3, which had served as the Nazi accounting office (Reichrevisionsamt/ Rechnungsamt) until suffering damaged in 1944 and 1945 with its ruins torn down and made the site in 1955 of the Amerika-Haus when the ruin s were finally removed. After the Americans took (the politically-correct lingo is "liberated") Munich, the American Reading Room was opened as part of the reeducation in October 1945 as the world's first American library of its kind in the Medical Reading Hall on Munich's Beethovenplatz. From January 1946, the institution was opened to the general public by its director, Stefan P. Munsing with the stated aim of bringing democracy closer to the people of Munich (using the United States as its example). On July 12, 1948, the America House opened in the former Führerbau. By January 26, 1950, Die Zeit wrote of how “in Munich it is the children who have every reason to love the Americans: in the 'America House' they have a library, film screenings, storytelling hours and singing and playing groups set up for the children that no one would want to be without." In 1957, the current building, built according to plans by the architects Karl Fischer and Franz Simm, was moved into the site of the Lotzbeck Palace on Karolinenplatz, which was destroyed in the war. After the Soviet dictatorships across Eastern Europe the United States Information Agency, the sponsor of the house, was dissolved. The American government then closed many of its 'America Houses' throughout Germany, including this one in 1997. On the initiative of the former program director Christoph Peters and with the support of the Bavarian state government, the newly founded Bavarian-American Centre (BAZ) took over management as a supporting association, financed by grants from the Bavaria state , donations from private individuals, associations, companies and the state capital of Munich, as well as grants from the American government. 

On the left, taking my Bavarian International School students to the exhibition (consisting mostly of images and captions on paper taped to the wall) commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, curated by students of the Amerika-Institut of the Munich university under the direction of historian Dr. Andreas Etges, a leading expert on the Kennedy presidency, and Alexandra Schenke, in cooperation with the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.

Initially American cultural officials concentrated on the transmission of high culture so as to overcome inherited notions of German cultural superiority. Its chief instruments were the several dozen “America Houses,” which in the larger cities offered a rich selection of U.S. newspapers, journals, and books that would help curious Germans quench their thirst for information. Typical of their political message was the celebration of America by the poet Stephen Vincent Benet: “There is a land of hope, a land of freedom. There is a land in which the most different kinds of people live, descendants of all peoples of this earth living together under the same big sky.” Especially appealing were novels by Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, and others that furnished a key to understanding this land of contradictions, as well as art exhibits that brought back masterpieces of modernism from their exile in the United States. Attempts to convey the work of classical composers like Aaron Copeland and dramatists such as Thornton Wilder, however, proved more difficult. But when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne, one young English major noted enthusiastically: “Finally, [this is] another America than the one we’re used to from the U.S. newspapers, journals, and the occupiers.” 

Konrad H. Jarausch  (121)  After Hitler: Recivilising Germans, 1945–1995

The Amerika Haus flying the Canadian flag upside-down. Despite my antipathy towards this flag which replaced the red ensign under which so many Canadians died for Crown and Empire, it does represent a country instrumental in liberating Germany and Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. When informed of it, they replied that it was given to them by the Canadian consulate, could only be flown upside-down and that one shouldn't be "overly critical" about Germans choosing to fly the current flag of a country that lost 43, 600 men helping rid the world of fascism. Now openly partisan politically, its flags have been replaced by meaningless multicoloured flags and its CEO openly equates anti-Semitism in Germany with Roe v. Wade.

Formerly the site of Palais Törring built in 1812 from the plans of Karl von Fischer, this was the site of the Nazis' Supreme Court (Oberstes Parteigericht) headed by Walter Buch (whose daughter ended up marrying Martin Bormann). Located at Karolinenplatz 4, it was responsible for settling internal party conflicts and disciplining individual members whose behaviour might be damaging to the party. Through the Nazi Party constitution of July 21, 1921, a conciliation committee and a committee of inquiry were set up, which had to assess all new admissions and decision-making procedures. Hitler saw these committees as an instrument to prevent internal opposition. After the founding of the Nazi Party in 1925, the two committees were merged into the examination and conciliation committee (USCHLA). According to the statutes of  May 25, 1926, the main task of the new body was the examination of admission and exclusion procedures and the mediation of intra-party disputes.  On local and regional level local USCHLAs were formed, which the USchlA in Munich headed. The committees included a chairman and two assessors. In order not to bind the members of the committees as an executive organ of the party leadership, the exclusion was not precisely defined, which led to the judges having more liberties. In 1929, new guidelines were issued for USCHLAs, which were based on the criminal code of procedure.
In 1931 the jurisdiction was extended to the SA and ϟϟ. After the introduction of the Law for the Protection of the Unity of the Party and the State in December 1933 through which the Nazi Party was defined as the "bearer of the German idea of ​​the state" and transformed into a corporation under public law with its own jurisdiction over its members, the USCHLA was renamed with the Supreme Party Judge having several chambers. In 1934, the procedures were aligned more to criminal proceedings by means of new directives. The criminal catalogue of penalties was expanded and retrial was allowed. The party courts were regarded as a separate branch of the state courts, state courts had to provide legal assistance, and from 1936 judges who were jurists had the right to swear witnesses and experts. The party reports were regarded as a separate branch of the state courts, state courts had to provide legal assistance, from 1936 judges who were jurists were the right to sworn witnesses and experts. Efforts to create a separate jurisdiction for the SA failed due to the veto of Hitler and the resistance of the judiciary and the Reichswehr. The court played an important role after the November pogroms in 1938, as it helped to cover up crimes and cover up criminals, thereby strengthening the Nazi dictatorship.  After the trial against Josef Wagner, Gauleiter of Westphalia-South as well as the district of Silesia accused of allowing a "protective policy" towards the Polish population in Silesia owing to his Catholic sympathies in which the court did not see any grounds for condemnation against the will of Hitler for formal juristical reasons, the power of the court was considerably reduced, especially since every judgement had to be confirmed by the party. In 1944 almost all proceedings were suspended. The building itself was destroyed during the war and completely rebuilt in 1954.

 The SS had its own ‘court of honour’ in Munich, modelled on those of the Imperial officer corps, to adjudicate in cases where an SS man felt his honour to have been besmirched. In 1938 it issued a verbose set of regulations setting out his path to ‘satisfaction’. Should a ‘chivalrous’ (ritterlich) exchange between the dishonoured and the injurer not settle matters, the dispute might be settled by armed duel subject to the approval of Himmler, himself a former member of a duelling fraternity in Munich. The extent to which duels were actually fought in the SS is unclear; certainly there is no evidence that any were conducted by Dachau personnel despite countless amply rancorous quarrels.  

Dillon (187) Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence

Now the the location of the Sparkassenverband Bayern at Max-Joseph-Straße 4, this served as the offices of the Nazis' Legal Department, the Reichsrechtsamt der NSDAP.

According to The Hitler Pages, in the summer of 1927 Geli Raubal's history teacher, Hermann Foppa, asked her if she could arrange a class meeting with her uncle. In the beginning of July the class went here to the villa of Elsa and Hugo Bruckman on the Karolinenplatz where they had the meeting with Hitler. With benefactresses such as Elsa Bruckmann and Helene Bechstein vying for his favour, Hitler was able to gain introductions to numerous public figures, including Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred, who later became an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party. It was also in these circles that Hitler met his later personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who was to heavily influence Hitler’s public propaganda image.

Of Elsa, Hitler would later remark on the night of March 10, 1942:

One day I detected an unexpected reaction even in Frau Bruckmann. She had invited to her house, at the same time as myself, a very pretty woman of Munich society. As we were taking our leave, Frau Bruckmann perceived in her female guest's manner a sign of an interest that she doubtless deemed untimely. The consequence was that she never again invited us both at once. As I've said, the woman was beautiful, and perhaps she felt some interest in me—nothing more.

Hitler's Table Talk (359)

As a student in Munich, future Hitlerjugend leader Baldur von Schirach lived in the house of the publisher Bruckmann, who was friendly not only with his parents but also with Hitler." Fest (456), The Face Of The Third Reich.

It was also here that Hitler first met his favourite architect, Professor Ludwig Troost, in 1928,

and that same day he told the architect, "When I come to power, you will be my architect. I have great plans in mind and I believe you are the only one who can carry them out for me." Troost did not however live long. As Hitler gave the obligatory three taps to the foundation stone for the House of Art (which still stands in modern Munich), the shaft of the silver-headed hammer broke, an omen of ill fortune of the highest degree, as the local architect Schiedermayer tactlessly whispered to the Führer in his dialect: "Dös bedeudt a Unglück."

Irving (100) Hitler's War

Guard infantrymen at the obelisk on Karolinenplatz with an MG 08 during the 1918-1919 revolution. In the background the Prince George Palace built in 1812. On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed by the Central Council of the Bavarian Republic under Ernst Niekisch and the Revolutionary Workers' Council in Munich. The leadership of the Soviet Republic was initially dominated by pacifist and anarchist intellectuals such as Ernst Toller , Erich Mühsam and Gustav Landauer. After the so-called Palm Sunday Putsch, which was foiled by Red Guards under the command of Rudolf Egelhofer and was directed against the Soviet Republic, leading Comunist Party members such as Eugen Leviné , Max Levien and Egelhofer himself (as Munich city commander) formed the council government. From the beginning, the Munich Soviet Republic had to defend itself against paramilitary attacks by the Free Corps units mobilised from Bamberg, which were shortly later reinforced by regular army units deployed by the Reich government. By May 2, 1919, the Soviet Republic finally succumbed to their military superiority. In the following weeks, around 2,000 alleged or actual supporters of the Soviet Republic were sanctioned with prison sentences, sentenced to death by court martial or immediately murdered. After the bloody suppression of the Soviet Republic, Bavaria developed into a conservative-nationalist “order cell ” in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, in which the “breeding grounds” of National Socialism emerged. 

Münchners waiting around the obelisk to hear the result of the Munich conference of September, 1938 and my Bavarian International School history students at the site. If the Feldherrnhalle honours those who fought against Napoleon, this obelisk in the Karolinenplatz commemorates the 30,000 Bavarian soldiers who were sent to fight for Napoleon and died in Russia. Led by the generals Wrede and Deroy, only 5,000 of the possibly 35,000 men returned. In 1813, Bavaria finally turned against Napoleon and took part in the Wars of Liberation.  As early as 1818, Klenze had planned a stone obelisk for Odeonsplatz ; however, transporting it proved impossible. The equestrian monument to King Ludwig I of Bavaria was later erected on the originally planned site by the sculptor Max von Widnmann . It wasn't until 1833 that the simpler version of the memorial on the circular Karolinenplatz was realised. The bronze casting was carried out by Johann Baptist Stiglmaier ; it was the first work from the newly founded Royal Ore Foundry. The inauguration took place on October 18, 1833, the 20th anniversary of the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig. The green roundel around the pillar was created after 1870. For the bronze plates with which the obelisk is covered, 34.6 tonnes of scrap metal from mostly captured guns were used. It's actually a legend that these were cannons from Turkish warships recovered from the sea, which had been sunk in the naval battle of Navarino in 1827.

In some cases the unilateral celebration, that is, the uniquely anti-Napoleonic, requires a certain dialectic capacity and a particular creativity. One example concerns the thirty thousands of Bavarian soldiers who died in the Russian campaign fighting alongside Napoleon. It is impossible to completely ignore such a tragedy. But when in 1833 the obelisk dedicated precisely to these fallen troops was added to the central round of Briennerstraße, the commemorative inscription read: “Auch sie starben für des Vaterlandes Befreiung”. The paradox crosses over into indiscretion: the fallen for Napoleon are transformed into those fallen in the wars of liberation against Napoleon. Another example comes immediately thereafter, literally “right around the corner”. The aforementioned Marshal’s Hall is found in the square on the corner of Briennerstraße, that is, Odeonsplatz. The statue of Generalfeldmarschall von Wrede celebrates the commander of the Bavarian troops in the French campaign of 1814, but contemporaries well knew that the same Wrede had first fought with Napoleon, from Wagram up until the Russian campaign. 

 Zumbini (83) The Parthenon on the Danube

The four sides of the bronze base bear the following inscriptions: "To the thirty thousand Bavarians who died in the Russian war", "They too died for the liberation of their fatherland", "Erected by Ludwig I, King of Bavaria" and finally "Completed on 18 October MDCCCXXXIII".  Since the Bavarian soldiers had not fallen in the European wars of liberation, but in Napoleon's Russian campaign, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer commented on the strange inscription in 1836 with by declaring that "[to] erect a pillar for those who fell in Russia is to trumpet one's own shame." The Nazi leadership and Hitler himself would regularlky allude to these very words. In his final speech before the court on March 27, 1924 during his putsch trial, Hitler declared: "It will be said one day, I can assure you, of the young men who died in the uprising what the words on the Obelisk say: 'They too died for the Fatherland!' That is the visual proof of the success of November eight, that in its wake youth rises like a raging flood and is united. That is the great success of the eighth of November: it has not led to depressed spirits but has brought the people to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. I believe that the hour will come when the masses who today bear our crusading flags on the streets will join with those on November eight shot at them." In fact, when Hitler often maintained in party circles that the victims of June 30 had died “for the liberation of the Vaterland,” he was alluding to the same inscription and had actually granted substantial pensions to the survivors of those slain on June 30, 1934.
Just past Karolinenplatz on the former Adolf-Hitler-Strasse was the Brown House (Das Braunes Haus):

Das Braune Haus behind the Temples of Honour shown on the left with part of the Führerbau, now replaced by the Nazi Documentation centre, opened 2015.

The Brown House was the national headquarters of the Nazi Party. A large impressive stone structure, it was located at 45 Brienner Straße and was named for the colour of the party uniforms. By 1930, party headquarters at Schellingstrasse 50 were too small (with the number of workers increasing from four in 1925 to fifty that year). In April 1930, Elizabeth Stefanie Barlow (widow of William Barlow, an English wholesale merchant) offered the Barlow Palace for 805,864 marks to Franz Xaver Schwarz, party treasurer. Funds for renovation of party headquarters were provided by industrialist Fritz Thyssen. The house was converted from an urban villa to an office building by the architect Paul Troost. He and Hitler also redecorated it in a heavy, anti-modern style. It opened on January 1, 1931. Hitler kept a life-size portrait of Henry Ford next to his desk in the Brown House since Ford and Hitler admired each other's achievements. Hitler maintained an office in the Brown House, as did Hans Frank, Himmler, Göring, Hess, Philipp Bouhler, and Franz Xaver Schwarz. 

Hitler's office and the "Hall of Flags" at the entrance. On the ground floor was displayed the Blutfahne of the failed beer Hall putsch. Hitler, then-leader of the SA Ernst Rohm, and the party treasurer had offices on the top floor. After becoming Chancellor Hitler gave the building to Rudolf Hess. Also maintaining offices here were Hans Frank, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Philipp Bouhler, and Franz Xaver Schwarz. Architect Dr. Paul Ludwig Troost did the renovation. Sepp Dietrich had a room there, and sometimes the Führer stayed overnight. From the Brown House, Hitler executed his plans for the political conquest of Germany during 1929–33. During 1933–35, a tunnel reportedly was built connecting the Brown House with the nearby Fuhrerbau, and it was from the Brown House that Hitler went by car to arrest Rohm and the other dissident SA leaders on the so-called “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934. 

[Hitler] took over the Barlow Palace, an old mansion on the Briennerstrasse in Munich, and had it remodelled as the Brown House. A grand staircase led up to a conference chamber, furnished in red leather, and a large comer room in which Hitler received his visitors beneath a portrait of Frederick the Great. The Brown House was opened at the beginning of 1931, a very different setting from the dingy rooms in the Corneliusstrasse or the Schellingstrasse.

Bullock (149-150) Hitler: A Study in Tyranny

Sitting on the top floor of the centre overlooking Königsplatz, and as it appeared when used by the Nazis.

What Dietrich Eckart was to The Leader as far as the exchange of ideas of a philosophical nature was concerned, Professor Troost soon became for him as far as architecture was concerned. The first building to arise through the unique combination of these two men, and also the first small construction of the Movement, was the Brown House in the Briennerstraße in München. It was only a renovation, but for that time, as The Leader sometimes related later, a massive undertaking. Here one can already see everything that was to be expressed even more distinctly in the buildings which were to be constructed after he came to power: severe and austere, but never monotonous. Simple and clear, and without false decoration. Ornamentation used sparingly, but in the right place, so that it could never be considered as superfluous. Material, form and lines combine to create an impression of nobility.

From Adolf Hitler- The Life Of The Leader

The Brown House at that time was a pompous villa kitted out in a not unpleasant way in something approaching imperial style; but it was quite useless for the purpose it was meant to serve. It did not have the right office rooms. Hitler’s work room was on the first floor, in the corner. The entrance led through a little room in which Hess worked. I don’t know if this word ‘worked’ is actually suitable here. The first impression which I . . . had was of boundless disorder. Letters, newspapers, magazines, everything lay strewn around the room. . . .      At once I noticed that Hitler was notable in the Brown House by his absence. He ignored his colleagues and advisers completely and let them do whatever they wanted. He was only there to talk by chance about anything substantial, and only then about what interested him or about what he wanted to discuss. Already he had a special circle around him which was in no way identical with the office holders in the party. 

 H. Nicolai, Mein Kampf ums Recht.

Inside the Führer’s second floor office was a bust of Mussolini, red-brown walls, and high windows (a future typical room feature) looking out onto the Konigsplatz. Peter Adam in Art of the Third Reich noted, “[t]he standard for future Party buildings was set here . . . Much earnest wood panelling on walls and ceiling . . . A vast staircase led to Hitler’s office, with its portrait of Frederick the Great over a large desk. There were also pictures of Prussian battles ... a Senate chamber was constructed... 60 chairs in red leather, with swastikas on their backs for sixty Senators around a vast conference table.” The room itself is shown on the left, but a Nazi Senate never met however, as Hitler feared being voted out of Party office by such a body- something that happened to Mussolini in 1943 by the Fascist Grand Council in Rome.

During its period as the Nazi Party headquarters, the building was closely guarded. Because authorities sometimes brought arrested individuals to the Brown House for questioning, the structure also earned the nickname "Denuntiature," a pun combining the "act of denunciation" and the papal nunciature across the street.

In April 1945 and today. The Brown House was greatly damaged by Royal Air Force bombs on March 9–10, 1943, and in October later that year and by the time of its fall to the American Army in 1945, it was a mere shell of its former self. The rubble was cleared away in 1947, leaving an empty lot. It was eventually razed to the ground in 1947 and the plot remained empty for nearly 75 years.  It had proved a controversial choice as to what the final name of the new documentation centre would be. At the decisive city council meeting in March 2011, the city's cultural department and the SPD criticised the abbreviation 'NS' because it stood for 'National Socialism' and thus was a term of choice of the Nazis. The President of the Jewish Community, Charlotte Knobloch, agreed, stating that that the term 'NS' in this context was "absolutely inappropriate," since it was derived from the culprits' language. Moreover, 'NS' apparently would not have been a recognisable term abroad. Cultural adviser Hans-Georg-Küppers (SPD) went so far as to suggest some might think it would have been seen not as a Documentation Centre but actually a "National Socialist Centre."  However, the Political Advisory Council and the Initiative Committee had unanimously voted in favour of the name "NS Documentation Centre" with the scientific advisory board stating that it could not be imagined that anyone would assume that Munich would build a centre for the glorification of the Nazi era with Siegfried Benker of the Green Party declaring that "[e]ven the dumbest neo-Nazi understands that this is about the analysis of terror."

The site from atop the remains of an ehrentempel January 2012 before construction finally commenced on the Nazi Documentation Centre. I was unimpressed after bringing a school group. As a teacher, I hold to what Richard J Evans writes in the preface of his Coming of the Third Reich-"The principal task of history is to explain and interpret, not to issue moral judgements." I was therefore immediately made aware of what the focus of the tour was going to be when my students were asked, in light of the current economic conditions, which countries in Europe were moving to the extreme right. We looked at each other in puzzlement given that Franco's body had just been disinterred in Spain whilst at the other end of the continent Greece had voted in a mainstream government that week. When the guide helpfully offered "Britain", I- as one who voted for Brexit and campaigned to leave the EU since 1995 for distinctly non-Nazi reasons- could guess what the next 85 minutes would hold. And so it proved. After eliciting from students what the characteristics of Nazi ideology were, the guide proceeded to make direct references to Trump and the AfD. I find both distasteful and would never consider supporting either- my son, despite speaking Chinese as a first language, is German born, raised and educated in a local grundschule yet is not recognised as a citizen of this country, and so I am particularly concerned about increased xenophobia and parties like the AfD. But as I told my students, it is their right to vote for whichever legal party or individual they choose- that's the point of a functioning democratic system for which my grandparents 'liberated' this country. I don't think it's the role of an outside guide to conflate Nazism which from its very beginning advocated violence, terror and mass murder with a legally-recognised political party with distinctly distasteful views. I stress to students that Germany between the wars is not, in any way the United States or Britain today or at any time and am concerned by how any supposed populist movements can easily be conflated with fascism itself. I feel at times it has come to the point when anyone who disagrees with others is a 'Nazi' or 'fascist', negating the very meaning of the terms. The guide openly described herself as left-wing as the rise of Nazism was passed off in Bavaria as simply the result of anger over the loss of WWI, anti-Semitism and sheer stupidity without any reference to the Räterrepublic, fears of communism, violence on both sides or other significant historical context. A 1919 poster showing the threat from Moscow focused only on its foreign, Asiastic appearance without any mention of the Spartacists, KPD, et cet. The only time the USSR was mentioned was at the end in connection with the Battle for Berlin. When the guide criticised Britain for the Munich Agreement without offering any examples of what a democratic state which had just lost a million men in the previous war was supposed to have done without reliable allies or sufficient military strength -yet nevertheless in the end being able to send my grandfather among those who would liberate Belsen- I had wanted to posit that Hitler wasn't the only dictator we faced. I thus felt that such history that was being related was selective.

Finally, the tour ended with the guide telling my students that because they were all wealthy ("you must be as you all go to a private school") it was incumbent upon them to not make the same mistakes as during the 1930s. Such a patronising tone, besides doing my students a disservice (some aren't wealthy but have their parents' companies help pay for their tuition) contributes to the concerns that have been expressed that young people are less receptive to hearing about the past and engaging with its lessons; they're more apt to 'turn off'. It was never explained what, given the situation in Germany by mid-1933, anyone regardless of their class background could have done against a single-party state backed by a secret police and recourse to violence, torture and concentration camps. Besides, the present government isn't particularly leading the way in standing up to the type of nasty regimes the guide had referred to throughout- the regime that tortured/killed my wife's father forty years ago, perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre and which is currently building yet more concentration camps in Xinjiang and attacking people in Hong Kong fighting for freedom is the same the German government is happy to host state visits and do business with as it continues to pay the Russians nearly a billion euros a day in oil whilst preventing Ukraine- a country of which four million were exterminated by the Germans in the war- from obtaining the weapons it needs to defend itself from Nazi-like bestiality. 

In 2022 the new director of the centre, its mission to simply document the evils of the Nazi regime not sexy enough, went full-out Woke and decided to expand its scope by imposing someone's artistic and ideological pretensions over horrific images of people being hanged and shot whilst visitors were forced to listen to a woman with a North American accent constantly repeating the words "light touch". Interspersed amidst displays of hangings, massacres and bestiality were modern erotic cartoons, poems and images. Here on the right it seems to imply that Ernst Rohm's homosexuality led to his death during the Night of the Long Knives. Given that the idea of 'Queer' is still evolving, to have this take over every space pretensiously demanding "to be seen" amidst obscene cartoons over documentation of the Holocaust whilst visitors made their way calls into question the focus of a museum ostensibly dedicated to documenting the crimes of the Nazi regime. As an aside, as one of my students told me when I took my class to the monument to persecuted homosexuals, there's more to homosexuality than just sex which this latest victim of virtue signalling fails to recognise. For a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality in the Third Reich, please check out a student's research paper on the subject which received an 'A' from the International Baccalauerate.

"We have to assume that an attack on the Israeli Consulate General was possibly planned this morning," said Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) in the afternoon at the press conference on the large-scale operation by the Munich police on Thursday morning. Shots were fired in front of the Nazi Documentation Center and the nearby Israeli Consulate General. Israel's representation was closed at the time of the incident due to a memorial ceremony. The attacker exchanged fire with the police, was shot and later died of his injuries. The Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism at the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office has taken over the investigation. A press release states that they are currently assuming "a terrorist attack with a connection to the Consulate General of the State of Israel." One focus of the ongoing investigation is the suspect's motivation for the crime. At the press conference in the afternoon, the investigating authorities confirmed media reports that the man was 18-year-old Emrah I., who was born and grew up in Austria. He was registered with the police in Neumarkt am Wallersee, northeast of Salzburg. I. had Bosnian roots. He also apparently had connections to the Islamist scene in Austria. According to an NDR/WDR investigation, he is said to have been a devout Muslim since he was a schoolboy and to have gotten into arguments with other students on several occasions. The Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Salzburg has already searched his house. I. sympathized with the Syrian terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra. However, he was not known to the German security authorities until then, according to the report . According to information from the "Jüdische Allgemeine", Emrah I. had not previously been noticed for any other crimes. "Bild" reported that Austrian authorities had found Islamist propaganda on his cell phone, but that proceedings against him had been dropped. In the afternoon, police searched I.'s parents' house in Neumarkt. Long exchange of fire with the police Shortly after 9:30 a.m., the police on Platform X asked the public to avoid the Brienner Straße/Karolinenplatz area. They were trying to get an overview by helicopter. According to the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", a resident had previously reported gunshots. Journalist Ronen Steinke published a video of the exchange of fire on Platform X. The police announced shortly afterwards that a suspicious person had been shot. There was no evidence of other attackers. The authorities asked witnesses who had photos, videos or audio recordings from the scene to provide them to the police as soon as possible using an upload form . Citizens can also call the police with questions and information on 089/2910-1910. <em>The crime scene in Munich city centre</em> Photo: (c) dpa-infografik GmbH A police spokesman told the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" that police officers noticed a man carrying an older model of repeating weapon with a bayonet at around 9 a.m. Videos published on several online portals show the perpetrator fleeing from the police behind a house. The man opened fire on the police officers and fired several shots at them, the spokesman said. However, he was "stopped very quickly." According to an eyewitness, the officers shot him 30 to 40 times. This was reported by the "Bild" newspaper. Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann announced that morning that the man had succumbed to his gunshot wounds. The five police officers involved were unharmed. As the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and others reported, the shooter was apparently on his way to the building of the Israeli Consulate General and tried to smash the window of an annex with his rifle, probably to get into the building. After he failed, he continued towards the main entrance. Interior Minister Herrmann did not rule out a plan to attack the Consulate General. However, the background to the attack still needs to be clarified. Short-term lockdown Benedikt Franke, CEO of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), whose offices are located in an adjacent building, told the Bild newspaper: "At exactly 9:10 a.m. there was a loud bang. At least a dozen shots could be heard." According to information from this newspaper, the MSC office as well as Jewish institutions in the city temporarily went into lockdown. However, this was lifted a short time later. The European Rabbinical Conference (CER), which has been based in Munich for a year, said its employees were safe. A CER spokesman said the incident showed that the Munich police can always be relied upon and that they protect Jewish and Israeli sites very professionally. In Jerusalem, the Israeli Foreign Ministry confirmed the exchange of gunfire near the Consulate General. Diplomats or other consulate employees were not injured. Talya Lador-Fresher, Israel's Consul General in Munich, expressed her gratitude to the emergency services in an initial statement. "This event shows how dangerous the rise of anti-Semitism is. It is important that the general public raises its voice against it." This Thursday marks the 52nd anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich on September 5, 1972. Eleven athletes and coaches were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists and murdered a day later. »Munich held its breath today« The bike ride from Munich to Fürstenfeldbruck scheduled for this Thursday to commemorate the Olympic attack took place as planned. A memorial event planned by the Israeli Consulate General was cancelled. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the shooting in Munich as a "serious incident." The protection of Jewish and Israeli institutions is "the highest priority," said Faeser. It is bitter that the incident occurred on the anniversary of the attack at the Olympic Games. Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder said there may be a connection with September 5, 1972. "Munich held its breath for a moment today," said the CSU leader, making it clear: "We are once again making a promise of protection for Jewish citizens, for Jewish institutions, for Israeli institutions, that we will fight, confront and then eliminate every attack with great determination." The anti-Semitism commissioner of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and Munich MP Daniela Ludwig wrote on X: "As much as I am grateful that we protect Jewish institutions so strongly, it makes me angry and sad that it is even necessary. No one should doubt any more that our security is in danger." Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: "What we know takes our breath away. There could have been a catastrophe in Munich today. I thank the police for their quick intervention." Israel's ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, announced: "The events in Munich show that Islamists are a threat to us all. They interpret a misunderstood sense of tolerance as weakness. We must now do everything we can to effectively combat Islamism." The hate preachers in the background must feel "that we see them. Anyone who incites 18-year-olds to terrorism must not go unpunished." Israel's President Isaac Herzog also spoke out. He thanked the German authorities for their quick intervention, he wrote on X and spoke of a "terrorist attack". Herzog had previously spoken to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the phone. "Together we are strong in the face of terror," said Herzog.  

Across the street from the Brown House was the so-called Black House- Palais Degenfeld- that served as the Apostolic Nunciature to Bavaria. Under the Nazis, Bavaria was not to hold diplomatic ties of its own any more with the Vatican. Whilst its Apostolic Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the penultimate nuncio to Bavaria and future Pope Pius XII, managed to continue the nunciature to Bavaria as a kind of outpost of the nunciature to Germany, the Nazi government prompted the expulsion of the last nuncio to Bavaria, Alberto Vassallo di Torregrossa, who left Munich on October 23, 1936, after having been relocated to the Palais Seyssel d'Aix in the spring of 1934. The building was destroyed and demolished in 1944 during the war and the property remained undeveloped when it went to the state of Bavaria. When planning for the NS Documentation Center in 2003, the city council dealt with the green space on which Palais Degenfeld once stood although the project was not pursued any further. Therefore today there continues to be a large space where it was once located- the Verwaltungsbau is seen behind.

At the very corner of the street are the remains of the 'Temples of Honour'

Türkentor

Running off Briennerstrasse just outside the Alte Pinakothek within the Museumsquartier is the Türkentor, the only remaining section part of the Türkenkaserne barracks, built in 1826 for the Royal Bavarian Infantry Lifeguards Regiment between Barerstrasse, Gabelsbergerstrasse, Türkenstrasse and Theresienstrasse. At that time, this area was still almost undeveloped, but craft businesses, shops and pubs soon followed, and military personnel and their families settled near the barracks. After three regiments were initially stationed here, in 1894 the “Leiber” (Wittelsbach infantry regiment) became the sole residents. According to The Hitler Pages, on "October 8, 1914 a ceremonial farewell of Hitler’s regiment took place at the Türkenkaserne, with the king present." It later was renamed the “Prinz-Arnulf-Kaserne.” After the First World War the Bavarian State Police moved in, and then the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. After 1945 there were apartments, various shops and a legendary jazz cellar. ents, various shops and the legendary “Jazz Cellar” here. The only thing that escaped demolition in the 1960s was the former main entrance, the Türkentor”, which was restored as an exhibition building in 2009 after years of decay.Natural science institutes of the LMU, the "Reich der Kristalle" museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne have settled on the former barracks area. In May 2009 the "Museum Brandhorst" was opened on the corner of Theresienstrasse and Türkenstrasse which today shows works of contemporary art.

Just down the road on Türkenstraße 23 was the home of ϟϟ-Brigadeführer Reinhard Heydrich, at the time head of the Bavarian police and Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and also served as the main office of the SD, created primarily to identify and suppress plots Adolf Hitler personally and against the Nazi regime generally. Under Heydrich, the SD often exceeded its brief and conducted espionage abroad. The SD operated as a rival agency to the Abwehr, much to the degradation of the quality of German intelligence.

The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), “Security Service,” was the intelligence service of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (ϟϟ). From 1933 to 1939, the SD was under the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), then was transferred to the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Service Office, RSHA). The SD was created in 1932 by Reinhard Heydrich, who built it into a powerful organisation that became the exclusive Nazi Party “information service” on June 9, 1934. In 1938, the SD was made the intelligence organisation for the Reich as well as for the Nazi Party. It worked in parallel with the Gestapo, which it supported with intelligence information. The mission of the SD was primarily to detect and eliminate those who would subvert or otherwise harm the Nazi Party and the Reich. The SD cultivated and managed a network of several hundred agents and thousands of informants throughout the Reich and, during the war, in the occupied territories as well. The SD was always primarily an intelligence-gathering agency serving the Gestapo, which was the executive agency. Ultimately, therefore, the SD came under the control of Heinrich Himmler, who, as chief of the German police, headed the Gestapo and was also the senior officer of the ϟϟ.

Axelrod (728) Encyclopedia of World War II

Alte Pinakothek

The Alte Pinakothek situated in the Kunstareal is one of the oldest galleries in the world and houses one of the most famous collections of Old Master paintings. Hitler had declared on the night of January 15-16, 1942 that

The Munich Pinakothek is one of the most magnificent achievements in the world. It's the work of one man. What Munich owes to Ludwig I is beyond computing. And what the whole German people owes to him! The palace of the Uffizi at Florence does honour not to Florence alone, but to all Italy.

Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 (209)

The midsection had been destroyed during the war and was reconstructed in 1952 - 1957 by Hans Döllgast. The clearest example of a partial reconstruction in Munich, indeed perhaps in all postwar Germany, was the Alte Pinakothek museum. Built during the years 1826–36 by Leo von Klenze, the neo-Renaissance edifice was regarded as one of the world's most important art museums and one of the city's architectural jewels. Wartime bombing raids in 1943-1944, however, severely damaged the museum, especially its southern facade. Because of the shortage of funds to repair the structure, the Alte Pinakothek's fate remained undecided until 1949. Then controversy over its future erupted. The restored section can clearly be seen today as was the original intention, by opposing any exact reproduction of what once existed and thus to allow one to relate to the past and to somehow prolong human existence through architecture, translated as a solid reality. Döllgast chose to keep the parts that remained standing and fill the void created by the bombings with the continuation of same the style but reconstructed with a more 'updated' language by using bricks of different physical and chromatic characteristics from the existing structure in order to contrast two life stages of the building and reuse the debris. Angela Squassina argues that the contextual conservation of parts corresponding to different periods demonstrates a recognition of the irreversibility of time and the course of history, which cannot be erased, in the formative development of the building. The surfaces of the building must continue to convey the sense of temporality and communicate, according to Simmel, "the fact that life, with its wealth and its changes, has once inhabited here an immediately intuitive present." 

Predictably, traditionalists and modernists disagreed about the museum's postwar fate. Leading the traditionalist supporters of the building was the former director of the Bavarian State Painting Collection, Ernst Buchner, who in response to rumours of the museum's imminent demolition in mid-1949, organised a petition campaign on behalf of "all friends of the Alte Pinakothek” to oppose the state authorities' systematic "neglect” of the building. Supporting Buchner's assertion that Munich would be as "inconceivable" without the Alte Pinakothek as Paris would be without the Louvre, a wide variety of institutions, experts, and local citizens rejected the idea of replacing the Alte Pinakothek with a modern museum, insisting "we have lost so much, that we do not want to lose what can still be preserved." In their desire to prevent further loss, however, traditionalists resisted accepting the verdict of the past. Although reconstructing the museum necessarily involved entirely reproducing substantial sections destroyed in the war, Buchner completely rejected applying the term "copy" to the project. Instead, he compared the reconstruction of the Alte Pinakothek to the reconstruction of the Goethe house in Frankfurt, arguing that it would fulfill the "need for order and stability resulting from an "era in which everything shifted, collapsed, or fell into a state of agitation." Not surprisingly, traditionalists cared little that a rebuilt Alte Pinakothek, like a rebuilt Goethe house, would make it appear as if the war had never happened. In contrast, modernists offered many reasons against rebuilding the Alte Pinakothek. The modernist architecture critic Hans Eckstein cited not only the practical advantages of a new structure for exhibiting the museum's world-class art collection but argued that the building's fate would symbolically illustrate "how lively the modern spirit is for a new Munich." In the process of opposing the Alte Pinakothek's reconstruction, modernists largely accepted the loss caused by the war. Eckstein noted that while modernists held as many sentimental memories of the museum and were as “shaken” by its destruction as traditionalists, they viewed it as "irretrievably gone. “We have said farewell to it,” he declared, “as one says farewell to a deceased person who continues to live in our memory... but whom no amount of sentiment ... can call back." Denying this loss by reconstructing the Alte Pinakothek would only be rooted in self-deception. Eckstein concluded, "a... patched-up Pinakothek will not be the old one. ... What once charmed us is gone."

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (41-43) Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Outside the building on the western side is the sculpture of the horse tamer (Rosselenker) by Hermann Hahn from 1928, its bullet holes serving as "scars of remembrance." Hahn was noted mostly for his allegorical stone figures in Munich reference throughout this site, such as the Schönheit in the Bavaria Park or figures found on the Ludwigsbrücke. But within the environs of the Pinakotheken there is also a bronze sculpture by Hahn. The bullet holes were highlighted by Beate Passow and Andreas von Weizäcker through glass plates as part of the Wounds of Memory campaign. Corresponding to this sculpture is the Rosselenker (1931) by Bernhard Bleeker on the other side of the street.

The two horse tamers were placed in front of the Munich Technical College in 1931. Here they are after the war and how one appears today.

After... and in their new positions across the street from each other. Bleeker's Rossebändiger of 1931 was so badly damaged during the war that the horse was melted down.

Neue Pinakothek

The Neue Pinakothek focusses on 18th and 19th century art for which it is considered one of the most important museums in the world.

[W]ith the advent of war in 1939, the Alte and Neue Pinakotheken closed their doors to the public and the artworks were sent to the provinces for safekeeping. Although restoration work continued in the museums’ workshops through 1944, there were no wartime exhibitions to organise.

Jonathan Petropoulos (24) The Faustian Bargain - The Art World in Nazi Germany

It had been all but destroyed during the war when, on July 12, 1944, the building of the Neue Pinakothek was badly damaged in American air raids and burned out completely. The painting collection was largely outsourced at that time. Five years later, the first stage in the history of the Neue Pinakothek ended with the decision to demolish the ruins in 1949. After that, the site of the former Gärtner building lay fallow for almost three decades. Designed by architect Alexander Freiherr von Branca, the new postmodern building shown on the right opened in 1981.

Schellingstraße

Schellingstraße during the wartime bombing and today. The street has a number of sites associated with the Nazi era. 
Schellingstraße  was described as the Einfallstor der NSDAP in die Maxvorstadt- the entrance gate of the Nazis to Maxvorstadt. Named after the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, it is the longest continuous street in Maxvorstadt at roughly 2000 metres. Soon after the founding of the Nazi Party in 1925, Party members and supporters of Hitler imprinted their ideology and imagery within the university quarter. Heinrich Hoffmann, whose company had been in the rear building of No. 50 since 1924, left the Nazi Party in 1925 as a business centre. Until the move to the Braune Haus in 1930, the nation-wide party was organised from here. 

One legacy is a prominent relief of a Nazi-era coat of arms of Munich, with the eagle and swastika excised:

On June 5, 1936 Hitler awarded Munich, which had been rechristened the "Capital of the Movement" since 1935, a new coat of arms. Deemed the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, Munich was a significant place in terms of the Nazi ideology. The city was home to the Nazi headquarters, the Beer Hall Putsch and also saw the establishment of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. It was designed by party member and councilor Richard Klein who had opted for an open city gate flanked by two towers, which was reminiscent of Sendlinger Tor.
The city monk standing under the archway of the previous city coat of arms, who spreads his hands in a gesture of blessing, mutated into a "Kindl", which, with its hood, reminded some of a dwarf. It stood in front of the gate with arms spread horizontally, like a traffic policeman. The Bavarian lion, which had previously stood over the city gate was replaced with the Nazi eagle and swastika. The coat of arms was used until the end of the war in 1945.
Post-war designs were not pursued until 1949 with the current arms shown for comparison at right.

Nazi Party offices Schellingstraße 50

 With Schellingsalon and the former Nazi Party Headquarters behind me.

Schellingstraße 50 in 1937 flying the Nazi flag and today where the offices of the Nazi Party were housed between 1925 and 1931, the Reichsadler still above the door. This is where Hitler met Eva Braun for the first time as she worked in Heinrich Hoffmann's studio. They first met in 1929, when he was forty and she was 17. According to Hoffmann's daughter, Hitler's opening line was: "May I invite you to the opera with me, Fräulein Eva? You see, I'm surrounded by men and I know what a pleasure it is to enjoy female company." 

  Eva was the middle of the three daughters of Fritz Braun, a  master craftsman from Simbach on the Inn. She was a pretty, empty-headed blonde, with a round face and blue eyes, who  worked as a shop girl in Hoffmann's photographer's shop. Hitler met her there, paid her a few casual compliments, gave her flowers, and occasionally invited her to be one of his party on an outing. The initiative was all on Eva's side: she told her friends that Hitler was in love with her and that she would make him marry her.

Bullock (394)

Dates at the cinema and restaurants followed.

The Nazi eagle today. On February 27, 1925, Hitler announced the re-establishment of the Nazi Party in the Bürgerbräukeller. The party office was temporarily housed in the house of the Franz Eher Follower publishing house at Thierschstrasse 15, before rooms in the rear building at Schellingstrasse 50 were able to be moved into in June 1925 through the intervention of Hoffmann whose photo studio was also located in the building. The well-known photographer, who made a name for himself through his photo coverage of the 1918-19 revolution in Munich and in the "Völkischer Observer", had been part of Hitler's inner circle since the 1920s, having taken numerous portrait and propaganda photos of Hitler, to which he had exclusive rights, and was later appointed “Reich Image Reporter of the NSDAP”. Hoffmann had been born in Fürth in 1885, completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in his father's business and after several years of wandering (including a stay in London), he moved to Munich in 1909 and established his own studio at Schellingstraße 33 and then later here at Schellingstraße 50 where he developed different types of the Führer picture, sometimes depicting him as a charismatic party leader, determined general or even as a superhuman redeemer. Other times he stylised him as a down-to-earth, benevolent father figure or as a spiritualised private individual. Through his work Hoffmann became the decisive propagandist of this personality cult driven by Hitler. The connection to the “leader” and the movement was extremely close. In 1925 Hoffmann joined the Nazi Party with membership number 59. Above his studio here at Schellingstraße 50 was also located the “Hall of Honour of the SA.” In 1926 he was instrumental in initiating the party magazine, the "Illustrierten Beobachter." Two years later he was the Nazi representative in the Upper Bavarian district council, and from 1929 he was a member of the Munich city council. In his studio, Hitler met Hoffmann's employee, Eva Braun, who later became his lover and wife. In his studio, Hitler met Hoffmann's employee, Eva Braun, who later became his lover and wife. With the rise of the Nazis, Hoffmann's business also thrived, allowing him to lead an exceedingly luxurious lifestyle. His photo volumes alone, which he published in rapid succession from 1932 onwards and which dealt with Hitler's private life as well as the history of the "movement", sometimes reached print runs of several 100,000. In addition, he practically had a monopoly on Hitler portraits and photographs of his immediate surroundings, since Hitler continued to only accept him as a photographer in his immediate environment. From 1932 to 1943, his company grew from seventeen employees to over 300. In 1943, sales exceeded 15 million Reichsmarks. In 1938 Hoffmann was awarded the title of professor, but not as a photographer, but because of his participation in the selection of the exhibits for the "First Great German Art Exhibition", an order he had received directly from Hitler. His grave in Nordfriedhof shown on the right maintains this title. As one of the very few, he had direct access to Hitler to the end and, unlike other party leaders, did not have to submit to the strict ceremonies that the dictator increasingly expected from the highest representatives of the state and the party. 

Inside the site of the Nazi Party main office, with the Blutfahne flanked by two standards.

Philipp Bouhler initially worked in the office as managing director, Franz Xaver Schwarz as treasurer and Max Amann as head of the party publishing house. The membership register was kept here and from there the Nazi Party was to be built up throughout the Reich. In 1928, Gregor Straßer took over leadership of the party apparatus as “ Reich Organisation Leader"; he's shown on the right with Hitler conducting a meeting in the building in 1928 during a leadership conference. Also present in the photo are Rosenberg, Himmler, Streicher, and Ley. 

The party was also having financial difficulties. Traditionally it had raised much of its revenue through admission charges to Hitler’s speeches, an avenue now closed in much of the Reich. Expenses were piling up, for Hitler was never one to economise. In 1925 he moved the party’s headquarters into new offices at 50 Schellingstrasse, in the heart of Schwabing. An innovative plan to finance renovation of the headquarters by “selling” bricks to individual donors did not get very far. In the year after the move party income exceeded expenditures by a mere 534 marks. In 1927 party headquarters registered an income of 254,000 marks and expenditures of 252,000; largely because of election campaign costs from previous years, the party carried a debt of 14,000 marks.

David Clay Large (215) Where Ghosts Walked

 Standing inside with the courtyardbehind me shown from the time of its use by the Nazis.

The establishment of the NSDAP Reichsleitung in Munich was controversial within the party because the number of members did not increase as expected, internal party quarrels and financial problems characterised party life, and electoral successes failed to materialise. Only after the global economic crisis did membership numbers skyrocket. In January 1933 there were 850,000 members. The elections were correspondingly successful for the NSDAP: at the end of the 1920s, Nazi representatives were represented in almost all state parliaments, and from 1928 also in the Reichstag with a share of the vote of 2.6%. In the 1930 Reichstag elections, the Nazis were able to increase its share of the vote to 18.3%, and in the subsequent elections in July 1932 it was the strongest Reichstag faction with 37.3%. It was able to maintain this status in the November 1932 elections despite the decline in the share of the vote to 33.1%. The rooms on Schellingstrasse had long since become too small for the administration of such a large mass party, which is why the Reich leadership acquired the Palais Barlow on Brienner Strasse in May 1930 as a larger, representative building for the party headquarters. Hitler's principle, which had already been announced in 1921, “that the seat of the movement is and always will be Munich,” was thus followed.

The former office of the Völkischer Beobachter at Schellingstrasse 39 in 1937 and the site today. In the courtyard buildings, modern rotary machines printed the Nazi paper Völkische Beobachter, whose editorial office moved to the front building in 1922. Produced using the same machines and in the same format, the first newspaper licensed by the United States appeared here in 1945: the Neue Zeitung with Hans Habe as editor-in-chief, Erich Kästner as head of the arts section and editors Alfred Andersch and Walter Kolbenhoff.
Here the Munich Buchgewerbehaus printers, M. Müller & Sohn, provided its workrooms. From December 1920 to April 30, 1945, the Völkischer Beobachter served as the journalistic party organ of the Nazi Party . In sharp contrast to mainstream newspapers, the VB described itself as a "combat newspaper" and was programmatically more interested in agitation than in information. Press historians such as Sonja Noller and Hildegard von Kotzetherefore have described the VB "poster-like" and its style "more spoken than written".  Initially, the VB appeared twice a week and then from February 8, 1923 daily. Since the publisher had the VB printed on a used American rotary press from August 29, 1923, the sheet had a striking, oversized format. It also differed visually from other newspapers in that the main headline was underlined in red and the header was in antiqua type. From February 1941, the VB gave up the Fraktur typeface that had been commonly used in Germany up to that point and was set entirely in modern Antiqua, which the Nazis described as “tasteful and clear” and was intended to correspond to the “world standing of the Reich” claimed by propaganda. Its circulation increased enormously with the success of the Nazis; in 1931 it reached over 120,000, exceeded the million mark in 1941 and is said to have amounted to 1.7 million copies in 1944. A few days before the German capitulation , the Völkischer Beobachter ceased publication; its last issue of April 30, 1945 was no longer delivered.

 

Brownshirts distributing flyers on the corner of Schellingstraße and Barer Straße circa 1930, now an Edeka supermarket. Directly across the street is:

Schelling Salon

Having lunch at the Schelling Salon where I'm apparently sitting at Lenin's former table. I'm going to quote from my copy of the 'Past Finder Zik Zak' of Munich, which is based on Maik Kopelek's series of books, although the fold-out map hasn't any author mentioned:
"Family-owned since 1872... Hitler is said to have often left without paying; Lenin never did! Worth seeing: the stone urinals in the cellar."

The site has been mentioned several times in literary works; its guests included Bertolt Brecht, Wassili Kandinsky, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ödön von Horváth. Hitler and Lenin also frequented here; after several years, Hitler moved to the neighbouring Osteria Italiana because of unpaid bills. Franz Josef Strauß, later Bavarian Prime Minister, who grew up on Schelling Street, fetched beer for his father from the Schelling Salon in his youth. In the 1960s, the later RAF terrorist Andreas Baader and the later Bild columnist Franz Josef Wagner met in the Schelling Salon.

 

Claimed to have been used by Lenin, Hitler and Franz Josef Strauss and now by me.

When banned from entering for refusal to pay his bills, Hitler then moved down the road to the Osteria Bavaria.

Now the Osteria Italiana, this was apparently Hitler's favourite restaurant where he would have his "Stammtisch" and where he wooed Eva Braun who worked, one block down the street, as a clerk and bookkeeper, at Heinrich Hoffmann's photography studio. Clearly little has changed. Hitler and his followers were regular guests in the "Osteria Bavaria" which was also popular with the Schwabinger Boheme. Oskar Maria Graf described in his Gelächter von außen an encounter between Simplicissimus editors and Hitler with “some of his paladins”, in which both sides eyed each other suspiciously. It was here that, according to Irving (100) in Hitler's War, that "Hitler himself had sketched the rough outlines for the House of Art, using the back of an Osteria menu, one day in 1931 – a gallery of stern Grecian lines which even today is mocked as Munich’s 'Athens Station.’"

Irving also quotes Goebbels's diary (in an excessively misleading way that Evans castigates in Lying About Hitler) wherein he records that it was here that he had reported to Hitler about the events of Reichskristallnacht:

[Hitler] is in agreement with everything. His views are quite radical and aggressive. The Aktion itself went off without a hitch. A hundred dead. But no German property damaged.’ Each of these five sentences was untrue, as will be seen. With minor alterations the Führer authorises my decree re: breaking off the Aktionen. I issue it immediately through the press. The Führer wants to proceed to very harsh measures against the Jews. They must repair their shops themselves. The insurance companies will pay them nothing. Then the Führer wants Jewish businesses gradually expropriated and their owners compensated with paper which we can [word illegible: devalue?] at any time. Meanwhile people are starting with their own Aktionen. I issue appropriate secret decrees. We’re waiting to see the repercussions abroad. For the time being there is silence there. But the hullabaloo will come.

Henriette von Schirach described the restaurant as a “cool, small winery with a little courtyard painted in Pompeian red and a ‘temple,’ that is, an alcove with two columns in front of it,” which was kept reserved for Hitler. However, Hitler’s later secretary, Traudl Junge, said that Hitler's usual table was the “least comfortable table all the way in the back, in the corner.” Hitler rarely ate alone; his constant companions from the early 1920s included not only Heinrich Hoffmann but also Ernst Hanfstaengl, Adolf Wagner, Julius Schaub, Hitler’s personal assistant; Christian Weber, a “potbellied former horse trader” in Joachim Fest’s words; and Hermann Esser, a founding member of the Nazi Party whom Goebbels called “the little Hitler.” Later additions included Martin Bormann, Otto Dietrich, ϟϟ  General Joseph “Sepp” Dietrich, Max Amann, and Wilhelm Brückner (an SA‑Obergruppenführer and Hitler’s chief adjutant since 1930).

Hitler with Unity Valkyrie Mitford at the Osteria. Mitford was christened "Unity Mitfahrt" by mockers because she always knew exactly where the Hitler was and followed him relentlessly. Her sister Diane married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist Party, made it her business to meet Hitler here. After stalking Hitler for over a year, on February 9, 1935 he noticed her at the Osteria Bavaria at Schellingstrasse 62 where, according to her sister Jessica, 

she had reserved a nightly table in the Osteria Bavaria restaurant, where they often went. Evening after evening she sat and stared at them, until finally a flunkey was sent over to find out who she was. On learning that she was an admirer of the Nazis, and a member of the British Union of Fascists Hitler invited her to join them at their table. Thereafter she became one of their circle, saw them constantly in Munich, accompanied them to meetings and rallies.

Ward Price wrote how “[n]o one could sit for long in the same room as Miss Unity Mitford without noticing her. Her golden hair, fair skin, and blue eyes attain the highest standards of that Nordic beauty which Germans especially admire.” Eventually Hitler sent his adjutant Brückner to her in the Osteria Bavaria to convey the chancellor’s compliments. This marked the beginning of a friendship, which soon was to be platonically extended to her sister, Diana Guinness. Shortly after the war broke out, Unity Mitford attempted to end her life by shooting herself in the temple in the English Garden. Hitler ordered the best doctors to her side. After her health was restored, Hitler’s personal physician Morell brought her to Switzerland. From there, she returned to England where she died in 1948, as a patient in the Oban Hospital.

At the usual time, around half past two, I went to the Osteria Bavaria, a small artists' restaurant which rose to unexpected fame when it became Hitler's regular restaurant. In a place like this, one could more easily imagine a table of artists gathered around Lenbach or Stuck, with long hair and huge beards, than Hitler with his neatly dressed or uniformed retinue. But he felt at ease in the Osteria; as a "frustrated artist" he obviously liked the atmosphere he had once sought to attain to, and now had finally both lost and surpassed...

 One tacit agreement prevailed: No one must mention politics. The sole exception was Lady Mitford, who even in the later years of international tension persistently spoke up for her country and often actually pleaded with Hitler to make a deal with England. In spite of Hitler's discouraging reserve, she did not abandon her efforts through all those years. Then, in September 1939, on the day of England's declaration of war, she tried to shoot herself with a small pistol in Munich's Englischer Garten. Hitler had the best specialists in Munich care for her, and as soon as she could travel sent her home to England by a special railroad car through Switzerland. 

Speer (39-40) Inside the Third Reich

The non-descript address here at Turkenstraße 94 off Schellingstraße was where, in 1939, Georg Elser rented a room before attempting to blow up Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8 1938, the day of Hitler's annual speech on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Given the demands of the war and forecast of fog preventing him from flying back to Berlin the next morning, Hitler decided to return to Berlin the same night by his private train. With the departure from Munich's main station set for 21:30, the start time of the event was brought forward by half an hour to 20:00 leaving Hitler to cut his speech from the planned two hours to a one-hour duration at 21:07, 13 minutes before Elser's bomb exploded at 21:20. By that time, Hitler and his entourage had left the Bürgerbräukeller. The bomb brought down part of the ceiling and roof and caused the gallery and an external wall to collapse, leaving a mountain of rubble. About 120 people were still in the hall at the time leaving seven killed. Another sixty-three were injured, sixteen seriously, with one dying later. Hitler did not learn of the attempt on his life until later that night on a stop in Nuremberg when told of the bombing by Joseph Goebbels. Hitler would later declare: "Now I am completely at peace! My leaving the Bürgerbräu earlier than usual is proof to me that Providence wants me to reach my goal."

Nearby a square is named in his honour and yet for a long time Elser was unacknowledged; nor was he himself commemorated. Starting in the late 1960s several attempts were made to have a street named after Elser. It was not until January 1997, however, that a small square off Türkenstraße that Elser had passed every day on his way to the Bürgerbräukeller was named Georg-Elser-Platz, chiefly thanks to the unflagging efforts of the Munich Georg Elser Initiative.

To mark the seventieth anniversary of the assassination attempt in 2009, moreover, a permanent art installation mounted on the façade of the school building on Türkenstraße adjacent to the square was also dedicated to Georg Elser. The neon lettering reading “8 November 1939” by Silke Wagner was the winning entry in a competition held by the city’s Department of Art and Culture. “Georg Elser,” says Silke Wagner, “earned himself a place in the history of resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. The object of the memorial can only be to remind people of this. The work directs the viewer’s gaze to the most important thing – the assassination attempt.” Each day at exactly 21.20, the time of the explosion, the red neon tubes light up one after another, writing the historic date of November 8, 1939 in lights. Exactly a minute later the lights go out again and the work “disappears” from public view. The abstract monument thus confines itself to the central message and through this deliberate reduction interrupts our habitual view of the square, alerting us to that single moment when the history of the twentieth century might have taken a different course. An earlier memorial to Georg Elser was installed in the pavement in front of the building housing the GEMA – the fascist music performing rights and copyright authority that prevents any form of music from being enjoyed in Germany unless being paid for the privilege first– in 1989.

Just across the street is Alter Simpl:

Formerly the café Simplicissimus, at Türkenstraße 57 the name and bulldog logo of which provides a link to the Private Eye-type satirical magazine Simplissimus, banned in 1944 by the Nazis for being critical of them.

The landlady Kathi Kobus opened this artists' in 1903; besides the legendary Café Stefanie at what is now Amalienstraße 25 but since destroyed by the war, it was a scene of the so-called Schwabinger Boheme. Kobus named her pub after the magazine Simplicissimus and was allowed to use the publication's slightly modified symbol, the champagne-chewing bulldog. The artists sometimes paid for their dinners with their own works, so that a collection worth seeing adorned the pub walls. The house poet Joachim Ringelnatz described the attraction of the pub by describing how he was "drawn to the Simplicissimus with ghostly hands [...] after the decorated walls."Regular guests included Frank Wedekind, Ludwig Thoma, Erich Mühsam, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Marc and Franziska zu Reventlow. Many of them also designed cabaret programmes. Even Lenin is said to have been seen in the Simpl during his residence in Munich. Today's Alte Simpl is one of the few pubs that harks back to the legendary heyday of Schwabing's bohemian lifestyle and reflects something of the words of the poet Joachim Ringelnatz (who was allowed to drink as much as he wanted) in his Simplicissimus-Lied:  

Und mich zieht's mit Geisterhänden, 

Ob ich will, ob nicht, ich muss, 

Nach den bildgeschmückten Wänden, in den Simplicissimus

(And I'm drawn by ghostly hands/ Whether I want to or not, I have to/ After the picture-decorated walls, into the Simplicissimus)

On the left is the wife and baby Drake Winston and as it appeared in 1908.  On the day German troops invaded Austria on March 12, 1938, the cabaret performer and art collector Fritz Gruenbaum performed at café Simplicissimus. As he groped his way onto a darkened stage, he complained that he could “see nothing, absolutely nothing. I must have wandered into National Socialist culture.” He was then immediately banned from performing and soon after was sent to Dachau where he organised cultural activities and conducted stand-up routines to bolster the spirits of his fellow inmates, declaring that  “absolute deprivation and systematic starvation are the best defences against diabetes.” His last performance took place in the Dachau infirmary on New Year’s Eve in 1940. A fortnight later, already ill with tuberculosis, he died. 

Before the war, on the right during Fasching. The flair of the former bohemian atmosphere can still be seen today in what is probably my favourite place in Munich for Guinness and Kilkenny on tap.

 

Nazis battling with police on the corner of Schellingstrasse and Amalienstrasse in 1931 on the left whilst nearby a Nazi relief remains on the façade of this building on the corner of Schellingstrasse and Türkenstraße