Showing posts with label Justizpalast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justizpalast. Show all posts

Remaining Nazi Sites around Munich (3)

Munich's opera house during the Day of German Art of July 18, 1937.  The next year saw Lohengrin performed here as the showcase event for the Tag der Deutschen Kunst, specifically chosen by Hitler. as popular for Nazi representational events. The “God-sent leader” Lohengrin was now made to declare that "Because of the Grail I was chosen to fight", a parallel to the "leader sent by God to the German people" of Adolf Hitler. The opera house's programme notes included the following Lohengrin quote under an almost full-length portrait of Hitler: "I rightly recognise the power / That brought you to this country / So you come from God." In addition, the historical Heinrich I appeared in the encore, providing comparisons between the "Third Reich" in relation to the "First Reich ” with the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation' portrayed in pseudo-historical terms. The cult carried out around Heinrich I went so far that Heinrich Himmler had the bones of the king excavated in order to bury them again in 1936 in Quedlinburg in a pompous ceremony. 
 
Two supposed Hitler paintings of the Munich Opera House at Max-Joseph Platz. That on the right is a 25" by 19-3/4" painting of the same building by Hitler just after a rainstorm. It was painted in München in the first half of 1914, when Hitler lived at the Josef Popp residence at 34/III Schleissheimerstraße. Popp in an interview several years later recalled:
He began his painting straight away and stuck to his work for hours. In a couple of days I saw two lovely pictures finished and lying on the table, one of the cathedral and the other of the Theatinerkirche. After that my lodger [Hitler] used to go out early of a morning with his portfolio under his arm in search of customers.
Unity Mitford cycling in front of the opera house with my bike sporting th ered ensign today. Described by the British Secret Services as “more Nazi than the Nazis,” Mitford was praised by Hitler as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood.” Moving to Munich in 1934 where she set about stalking Hitler by 
going to the Osteria Bavaria restaurant and sit waiting for Hitler. She'd sit there all day long with her book and read. She'd say, I don't want to make a fool of myself being alone there, and so she'd ask me to go along to keep her company, to have lunch or a coffee. Often Hitler was there. People came and went. She would place herself so that he invariably had to walk by her, she was drawing attention to herself, not obnoxiously but enough to make one slightly embarrassed. But the whole point was to attract his attention. She'd talk more loudly or drop a book. And it paid off.
She eventually met him at the Osteria Bavaria on Schellingstrasse 62 on February 9, 1935. From then on she is estimated to have met with Hitler 140 times, with him  gifting her a box at the Olympic Games in 1936, attending the Nuremberg rallies and haiving her chauffeured to the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. When he announced the annexation of his homeland to the German Reich, she was allowed to stand next to him. When England declared war on Germany she shot herself in the head in the English Garden, eventually dying in England by her mother and sister in 1948.
After the bombing of the night of October 3, 1943 and standing in front today. 
Looking at what was left of Palais Toerring from Max-Joseph Platz and the Residenz Königsbau towards the opposite way in 1946 and with Drake Winston today from the steps of the opera house. 
  
Max-Joseph-Platz then and now; during the Beer Hall Putsch the putschists had marched through Marienplatz, continued down Weinstraße through Perusastraße into this square and from it down Residenzstraße, shown both from the time of the putsch and immediately after the war from the corner of the Residenz, with Odeonsplatz at the very end. 
 
Bavarian State Tax Office (Oberfinanzpräsidium)
Oberfinanzpräsidium
Nazi EagleGIF: Oberfinanzpräsidium 
Victims of Hitlerism still have to endure this symbol when entering a government building. Even with the swastika removed from the oak leaf wreath, the Nazi eagle is still unmistakable. That this building served a key role in the unrestrained plundering of the Jews during the Nazi period, its continued existence is all the more striking. This building at Sophienstraße 6 was constructed with its three inner courtyards between 1938 to 1942 by Franz Stadtler. The financial administration within was instrumental in destroying the Jewish population and expropriating its assets. During the Nazi era this building administered the expropriation of assets of political opponents and racial undesirables through public auctions of furnishings. Regarding the “Arisierung” of Jewish property, the fiscal authority located here played a key role. After 1945 it was found that 1,589 Munich properties had been confiscated by this office.
Nazi eagle with Bavarian arms
This less-offensive Eagle in the courtyard represents the Bavarian Free State. In a relief above the triple entrance door in the forecourt, his more politically neutral 'colleague' (without a swastika) takes two very tame Bavarian lions and coats of arms under his overpowering wing on behalf of the then politically insignificant state.   
After the war this building served the American Military Authorities before hosting the America Haus (until it moved to the former Führerbau in 1948). This is also where the Bavarian State Parliament met from May 1947 until January 1949 until it was finally able to move into its final seat in the Maximilianeum. Today the headquarters of the Munich Finance Directorate and the authorities assigned to it are located here (Federal Office for Real Estate, Main Customs Office Munich, Bavarian State Office for Taxes, State Building Directorate).
ReichsadlerPoster displaying the history of the eagle as used on the coats of arms of German cities and governments from the earliest times through 1939. When confronting Germans with this offensive symbol, most respond to me that without the swastika, it is simply a typical eagle that has always been the symbol of Germany. But as this chart shows, the Nazi eagle was entirely different from its previous (and current) incarnations. During the Third Reich, a stylised eagle combined with the Nazi swastika was made the national emblem (Hoheitszeichen) by order of Adolf Hitler in 1935 based on his own personal design. Despite its mediæval origin, the term "Reichsadler" in common English understanding is mostly associated with this specific Nazi era version. The Nazi Party had used a very similar symbol for itself, called the Parteiadler. These two insignia can be distinguished as the Reichsadler looks to its right shoulder whereas the Parteiadler looks to its left shoulder.
Hitler himself
spent hours poring over old art publications and books on heraldry to find a model for the eagle. Eventually he discovered what he wanted in an anti-Semitic lexicon where the fowl was characterised as the Aryan of the animal kingdom. He then asked a jeweller to design a model, but when this proved too feeble, he invented his own- a menacing eagle which appeared about to take flight.
Munich Main Station
The main railway station during the so-called Day Of German Art held on the weekend of July 14-16, 1939; given the intensive bombing of the site, it is unrecognisable today. Hitler had been assigned to guard the site upon his return from the Great War in 1919.
Probably in late January, as Schmidt hinted, Hitler returned to Munich. Then, for just over two weeks, beginning on 20 February, he was assigned to guard duty at the Hauptbahnhof, where a unit of his company was responsible for maintaining order, particularly among the many soldiers travelling to and from Munich. 
Kershaw (69) Hitler
Bavarian International SchoolHitler and Mussolini at the Munich railway station, September 1938 for the Munich conference and with my Bavarian International School students students at the start of my annual trip to Berlin. The post building in front looks unchanged apart from the loss of one floor and is today an hotel. Between June 1942 and February 1945 the hauptbahnhof was the starting point of the deportations of Munich Jews, Roma and Sinti to the extermination camps in the east of the reich. In 1938 Hermann Giesler set the station at a 45-degree angle to the road, planning a huge dome with a height of 136 metres and a diameter of 265 metres. In May 1942 the German Reichsbahn began on Hitler's orders with the plans of a broad-gauge railway to be built near the Friedenheimer Bridge under a 141-metre-high, aluminium-covered dome which was to link all of Europe; the broad-gauge tracks of Berlin-Munich and Paris-Vienna would have been linked. In the summer timetable of 1939, the station had 112 arrivals and departures of regularly operated trains per day. It was thus the eleventh most significant node in the long-distance network of the German Reichsbahn. A sketch by Hitler dated March 22, 1939 served as the basis for the competition for the Munich Central Station which was to be higher than the Frauenkirche, 285 metres in diametre. 
 
Technical draftsmen of the largest German steel and reinforced concrete companies made various designs under the file number "Mü-Hbf-Neu" and set aside the largest buildings of the world at that time for comparison shown here- the Arc de Triomphe and St. Peter's Basilica appear tiny in relation.A flat dome would rest on a ring of supporting buildings with a columnar portico emphasising the projecting entrance. A circular ribbon window and a lantern was to illuminate the giant cupola. Hitler very specifically wanted a distinction between the Munich Central Station as a “monument of our century’s technology” in contrast to the Halle des Volkes in Berlin, designed by Albert Speer as a massive dome. Two towers were supposed to flank the colossus: one for a "power-by-pleasure-hotel", the other for the Nazi Party publishing house. Bavarian International SchoolA so-called "Great Road" was supposed to embrace him on both sides. In the West, the eight kilometre-long and 120 metre-wide promenade from Stachus would have been completed by a "Forum der SA" and a "Burgundy Gate".  From September 1938 at Hitler's command 150 people worked from their offices at Prinzregentenstraße 2 to 4 on the most significant project in Munich's architectural history since the time of Ludwig I. It was to have gone into operation no later than January 1, 1949. Not only the long-distance traffic but also suburban trains and subways would have been serviced as indicated via red and blue lines on the plans. These plans included other major plans, such as the relocation of the nearby slaughterhouse and cattle farm to Oberwiesenfeld. 
Drake Winston at the site where chief architect Albert Speer had designed a "monument to the movement" in which a 212 metre-high obelisk was to be clad with so-called V-2-A steel and crowned with the Nazi eagle; within the pedestal Hitler wanted to intern the "blood flag" of the November Putsch. Within the station's wing halls, the German "Gaue" were to have presented themselves. Again at the personal request of Hitler, four tracks were to run in the centre of the normal mainline track. Up to 1,200 metre-long trains with 41 metre-long cars would roll after final victory between Spain, St. Petersburg and Donetsk, later extending possibly to Afghanistan and India. Within the double-decker wagons were to have had bath tubs, hairdresser, and cinema. 
The relocation of the main station four kilometres away would have yielded 800,000 square metres of building land within which, between Landsbergerstrasse and Arnulfstrasse, the Große Straße was to be built in neoclassical style. This would have been the largest boulevard of Hitler's Reich, intended to develop into a business and entertainment centre including numerous first-class hotels, a town hall, two premier cinemas, the largest opera in the world with its own hotel, an operetta theatre, a large concert hall with many smaller carnival balls, exhibitions and artist studios for twenty metre-high productions. In addition, there were also plans to include an ice skating palace, a beer palace, two exhibition halls for the auto industry, a central swimming pool and even spas. A north-south axis was to cross over the Opernplatz, with the Theresienwiese becoming the largest mustering square in Germany and the largest exhibition hall in the world. A monstrous assembly hall would have been built on Lindwurmstraße, behind the new Südbahnhof the "KdF city".
 Model of the main railway station and the former section of the Grosse Straße, 1939-40. Instead of the Friedenheimer bridge, the gigantic new main railway station was to be built according to the ideas of the Nazis. The dismantled track body was designed to be a boulevard with countless buildings in the monumental Nazi style, and the dome of the main railway station was supposed to be the highlight of this new axis. While some demolitions were made along the railway, there was no implementation of the new plans in the war. Planning conceived of the redesign of the station through architect Paul Bonatz with a 136 metre high domed structure with a width of 300 metres and the establishment of a “monument of the movement” at its old site. It was to have served as the central nodal point for the planned Adolf-Hitlerstraße and would accommodate wide-gauge double-decker trains that would travel at speeds of 250 km/h across the Gross Deutsches Reich from Brest to Baku.
Advertising banner for the opening of the anti-Semitic exhibition Der ewige Jude being held at the Deutschen Museum at the entrance in November, 1937 and the site today.  
 All of the Nazi plans for its development were discarded by the war. During the air raids on Munich the station was heavily hit, but it was not until February 25, 1945 that train traffic had to be redirected after 112 bomb attacks destroyed nearly two million cubic metres of enclosed space containing 15,000 inhabitants. Apart from service to Pasing, all long-haul trains had to either bypass the city or move to the Nordring in Munich. In total, the damage amounted to 7.1 million reichsmarks, as well as numerous deaths and injuries. On April 30, 1945 American troops entered Munich, and at first troops of the Wehrmacht continued to defend the station but, given that a counter-attack would have been pointless, it quickly ended. Already by May 6, 1945 reconstruction of the station was begun despite the lack of building materials and complicated approval procedures, so that after July 24, 1945, another 128 trains could be dispatched. From December 16 there were 235 trains daily. At the moment a new façade for the railway station and service hall are to be built according to a design by Auer+Weber+Assoziierte but, because of difficulties in financing, it is questionable when the project will actually be started.
 
Nearby at Arnulfstrasse 52 across from the station is the Augustiner-Keller where Hitler spoke seven times between 1921 and 1931. On September 2, 1928 he spoke after 21.00 in a NSDAP-Führertagung led by Gregor Straßer, followed by Alfred Rosenberg speaking about the goals of National Socialist cultural work and Franz von Pfeffer gave a speech entitled “Political Movement and SA”. Hitler began his speech, its title shortened to The Flame, with how
It is necessary that the individual party comrade be strengthened in his confidence in the victory of the entire movement. I cannot end this conference today without trying to strengthen your confidence and the success of this movement. This can be done by raising hopes or making promises. But there is another way, that of a sober, logical examination of a movement.
Another time was on July 18, 1931 in a meeting that began at 20.00. No text of the speech has been recorded and all that is known is that is that the flag consecration of the SA Sturm 53 was the occasion for Hitler's speech.
The Nazis took over this building at Arcisstraße 19 on the corner of Gabelsbergerstraße in 1938 from the architecture office of Josef Heldmann. Heldmann had worked for the party since 1930 as chief of party construction and supervisor of the Treasury under Reich treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz for all construction matters of the Nazi Party. This included direct responsibility in the construction management for the Führerbau and Verwaltungsbau from mid-1933. 
Schwarz incidentally was one of only four people to have held the rank of ϟϟ-Oberst-Gruppenführer and on June 5, 1944, he received the War Merit Cross, 1st class with Swords (Kriegsverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse mit Schwertern) by Hitler for his work during the Munich air raids of April 24-5 of that year. Approaching seventy, he even led a Volkssturm battalion in Grünwald at the end of the war before being arrested by the Americans.
The building itself served as the headquarters of the NSDAP-Bauleitung. Today there are various facilities of the Technical University in this building.

Site of High Command of the SA (Oberste SA-Führung)
The site of the Supreme Storm Troopers' Leadership (Oberste SA-Führung) in München, Barerstraße 7-11. In 1932, the "Oberste SA leadership" left its offices in the Brown House and moved into its own building at Brienner Strasse 43, whilst the hotels Union and Marienbad at Barer Strasse 7-11 moved into their new accommodations in 1934. Today the location has reverted to its original function as the Hotel Marienbad
Next to the SA headquarters at Barer Straße 13 was the Office for Telecommunications of the Reich Treasurer; on the ground floor was the book binding and printing plant of the "national leadership".
The Sturmabteilung ("Storm detachment" or "Assault detachment" or "Assault section", usually translated as "stormtroop(er)s") was the paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party and played a key role in Hitler's rise to power. SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms which distinguished them from the Schutzstaffel (ϟϟ), who wore black and brown uniforms (in comparison to Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them was cheaply available after the Great War, having originally been ordered for German troops serving in Africa. The SA was also the first Nazi paramilitary group to develop pseudo-military titles for bestowal upon its members later to be adopted by several other Nazi Party groups, chief among them the ϟϟ. The SA became largely irrelevant after he took control of Germany in 1933; it was effectively superseded by the ϟϟ after the Night of the Long Knives. 
Next door to the Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP at Karlstraße 20-22 is this building built in 1828 by the architect Rudolf Röschenauer for master locksmith Johann Schmitz. The Nazis acquired the property in 1934 to serve as the Reichsstudentenführung der NSDAP. The Reichsstudentenführer was created by Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, on November 5, 1936, in order to end the ongoing power struggles between the National Socialist German Students' Union NSDStB as party affiliation on the one hand and the Deutsche Studentenschaft DSt as the umbrella organisation of the local student institutions on the other. With this measure, "the management of German students at all colleges and technical colleges, the leadership of the national socialist academics, the social care of the new students and the care for selection, professional guidance and professional training in the academic professions" were amalgamated at once. Here the Reichsstudenten leadership had its headquarters. The first and only Reichstudentenführer was from 1936 to 1945 the former Heidelberger NSDStB leader Gustav Adolf Scheel. With the Control Council Act No. 2 of October 10, 1945, the Reichsstudentenführung was banned by the Allied Control Council and its property confiscated. Today the property remains vacant. Beside the property at no. 22 was the Schiedsabteilung des Reichsschatzmeisters and, on the right, the  Reich Press Office (Reichspressestelle and Reichspropagandaleiter)." Gradually from 1933 the addresses at Karlstraße 6-20 and 22-29 held the offices of the Oberste SA-Führung, Reichsführung ϟϟ, NS-Dozentenverband, Reichsjugendführung and the NS-Studentenverbund.
This was the former office of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Head of the International Press Office, at Karlstraße 18. In 1931 Hitler appointed Hanfstaengl, owner of the renowned Munich art publisher Franz Hanfstaengl, as head of the Nazis' foreign press. "Putzi" Hanfstaengl had been friends with Hitler for a long time, hiding him from the police at his home after the failed coup in November 1923. Hanfstaengl had studied in the United States before serving the Nazis in various functions before losing favour and emigrating to London in 1937. He became acquainted with Hitler on the occasion of a Nazi meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller. As its largest civil promoter he became part of Hitler's close circle of friends. From 1931-1937 he served as foreign press chief for the Nazi Party. After the elimination of the SA and Ernst Röhm on June 30, 1934 he dissociated himself increasingly from the party, which made him suspicious in the eyes of the Gestapo. He fled in 1937 and eventually arrived in the USA, where in 1942 he became German advisor to Roosevelt, the only man to have worked directly under Hitler and FDR.
Widenmayerstr 18 bears the name in golden letters of Hanfstaengl through Munich photographer and founder of the eponymous publishing house Franz Hanfstaengl Verlag, which specialised in art publications, named after Ernst's grandfather. A farmer's son and artist himself, he had founded the publishing house which combined art prints and portrait photography as early as the 19th century with a growing reputation and lucrative business. The painter, lithographer and later photographer Franz Hanfstaengl had founded a lithographic company in Munich in 1833, reproducing not only portraits, but also dedicated himself to the reproduction of art. From the middle of the century, he used photography as a new reproduction medium. His customers included emperors and kings, Wagner and Liszt. Wilhelm Busch, Richard Strauss and Mark Twain were guests in his son's villa. Ernst's brother Edgar was joint owner Munich of this publishing house, which since 1933 printed postcards and propaganda for the Nazis and became the party's art advisor. 

His son Edgar introduced the term “Kunstverlag Franz Hanfstaengl” as still proclaimed across the building's facade when he took over his father's company in 1868 and further professionalised the reproduction of art. In 1907 Edgar II took over the management. In 1919 he was one of the co-founders of the German Democratic Party (DDP) in Munich and ran in 1932 against the Nazis. His brother Ernst was however, as found throughout this site's pages, a supporter of Hitler and had headed the Nazis' foreign press office since 1931. After the war Edgar II continued the art publishing with a more modern publishing programme. The increasing competition for cheaper offset printing led to the dissolution in 1980.
Across the street is Bernhard Bleeker's Christophorus shown in a Nazi-era photo and today on the right.

  
Further down at Widenmayerstraße 31 Hanfstaengl is shown in the foreground with Hitler, Hess, Röhm and Himmler on July 3, 1932; the building remains unchanged. Also on Widenmayerstraße at number 27 was the location of the Office of Aryanisation (Arisierungsstelle)
ArisierungsstelleThe verb ‘to Aryanise’ (Arisierung) means to make something Aryan by eliminating the influence of allegedly inferior races. Also used as an adjective when speaking of or pertaining to the so-called Aryan race (e.g. Aryan art or art produced by pure Aryans).
By January 1, 1938, German Jews were prohibited from operating businesses and trades, and from offering goods and services. In the Autumn of 1938, only 40,000 of the formerly 100,000 Jewish businesses were still in the hands of their original owners. Through its office here on Widenmayer Str. 27, Aryanisation was completed with the enactment of a regulation, the Verordnung zur Ausschaltung der Juden aus dem deutschen Wirtschaftsleben of November 12, 1938, through which the remaining businesses were transferred to non-Jewish owners and the proceeds taken by the state. Jewellery, stocks, real property and other valuables had to be sold below market value. Jewish employees were fired, and self-employed people were prohibited from working in their respective professions. By the end of 1939, almost all Munich companies in Jewish possession had been expropriated, followed by the “Arisierung” of houses, apartments and fortunes of the entire Jewish population. This was completed by June 1943.
Two accounts related to this address are presented at Memory Loops (both in German):
http://www.memoryloops.net/de/384
http://www.memoryloops.net/de/306

Park Cafe
Park Cafe
Park Cafe and the entrance to the Botanical gardens. Described in Robert Harris's Munich as "an ugly modern building that looked like the entrance to a railway station but advertised itself as the Park Café," the rear of the building has the same fascist busts that can be found on the façade of the nearby Zentrale which " housed some of the main Nazi administration offices for the Party" and was built the same time in 1934.
In 1936-37 the Nazis separated the General Conservatory of the Academy of Sciences, including the Museum of Ethnology, the State Zoological Collection, and the Botanical Garden, from the Academy proper. The site was redeveloped from 1935-37, on the basis of a sketch by Paul Ludwig Troost (the architect of the Nazi buildings in Arcisstrasse), the architect Oswald E. Bieber which redesigned Old Botanical Garden as a park. The conservatories were replaced by Park Café with a beer garden. The Neptune Fountain in Elisenstrasse, allegedly in the "tradition of Baroque monumental fountains", but clearly far too large and ungainly, was executed by the sculptor Joseph Wackerle, as were the decorative figures on the newly created Art Pavilion. The broad paving stones around the Neptune Fountain and leading to the Art Pavilion in the Old Botanic Garden are bordered by tuffstone masonry, in front of which are seats consisting of boards on a base of bricks.
 
The site in 1932 when it held the skating rink at the Glaspalastes and the 1937 redevelopment plan put forward by Professors Oswald Bieber and Josef Wackerle. Soil and trees that had to give way to the Nazi parade ground on Königsplatz were reused here. Park Cafe, was then subsequently built on the axis of Arcisstraße at the northern end of the park. Facing the street, it adapts to the architectural style of the party district with four huge pillars. On the south side of the park, in the axis of the Palace of Justice, a forum with the Neptune Fountain and an exhibition building were built.
GIF: Wackerle's Neptune fountain
Within one can still find the Neptune fountain sculpted in 1937 by Nazi sculptor Josef Wackerle.
In 1938 Alexander Heilmeyer waxed eloquently purple over Josef Wackerle's sculptures as Gesamthunstwerke, the "synthesis of the arts" that Wagner saw as humanity's cultural salvation. Wackerle's sculptures were praised as "an organic structure in which the architectonically conceived action serves as a rhythmical counterpoint to the melody of the sculpted figures." Organic wholeness, it was alleged, could be conveyed in the nude more than in any other genre. Whether defending integrated sculpture as an embodiment of the community (Gemeinschaft) or arguing that art was only art when it created symbols for a people, the art critics of the Third Reich carefully disparaged those who set themselves apart from society or engaged in the decadent principle of art for art's sake. These passages echoed Wagner's exhortations to build a new art that the people would understand and that would elevate both the people and society as a whole. Only symbols with meaning for the entire people were worthy of creation. Here again we see the fascist desire to assign one specific meaning to images and to forbid any other interpretations.
Pursell (132) Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 17, No. 1, Masculinity and Homosexuality in Germany and the German Colonies, 1880-1945
Opening of the Botanical Garden by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner in 1937 and the same site today, accompanied by Tim Gillespie and his wife Jan. Mr. Gillespie had visited my school where he presented to Grade 10 students an astonishing account of his father's time when stationed at our schloss after the war before being in charge of American forces in the Dachau camp, guarding ϟϟ prisoners before the war crimes trials. He brought with him a priceless collection of sources ranging from wartime and pre-wartime original photos of the schloss- which he selflessly donated to his father's love letters to his mother- a truly unique perspective of the end of the war and start of the occupation.  In Mr. Gillespie's own words:   
In going through some long stored-away boxes of my parents after they passed away, I recently found some photographs of Schloss Heimhausen.  My father, Claud Schmidt Gillespie (whose mother's family were Schmidts
From behind, looking towards the Palace of Justice
who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the late 1800s), was in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war was over, he was in charge of a company of U.S. soldiers that was stationed there. In the box of photographs I found this note, hand-written by my father: "Schloss Heimhausen [sic] is in Germany--not too far from Munich--where I lived for awhile (with my rifle company) in 1945 after the war was over. Our mission was to protect hundreds of books stored in the schloss by the Germans to protect them, most from libraries in Munich. (We also kept an eye on the German civilians, especially the teenagers.)"  I should also tell you that during that time my father was also put in charge of the American army's command of the Dachau concentration camp. After its survivors were liberated and taken away by the Red Cross, the Dachau camp was used as a temporary prison for ϟϟ officers--many thousands of them--being tried in the postwar trials. My father was in charge of running the camp and guarding the ϟϟ prisoners. He came home in 1946. Needless to say, he had very powerful memories of his time in Germany during the war and after the war. 
Ausstellungspavillon
In addition to the coffee house and the Neptunbrunnen, this Ausstellungspavillon was built as an exhibition hall in 1936. It was originally intended as the state studio for Joseph Thorak to provide a space for his monumental sculpture which earned him a series of state contracts from the Nazis 1933; after their take over of power he divorced his Jewish wife Hilda who emigrated with her son Peter. Instead, Thorak received his massive studio in Baldham near Munich in which 17 metre high sculptures could be made in one piece. The following year he designed two groups of figures in front of the German Pavilion at the Paris World Fair, which Hitler proclaimed a "masterpiece" before appointing Thorak to head a masterclass at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The Munich Academy of Fine Arts had been the ‘Capital of German Art’ during the Nazi era and had been the domain of Hitler’s favourite artist Adolf Ziegler, the organiser of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. It was Josef Wackerle who was again responsible for the simple neoclassical building's reliefs representing music, architecture, sculpture and painting. After the war Wackerle was able to become an honorary member of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. Students at the Academy would eventually mount protests in the 1960s against Hermann Kaspar who had designed the interior of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery and had taught there unhindered since 1938 save for a short interruption in 1946. The pavilion itself  was badly damaged during the war and later rebuilt by self-help Munich artists. Today it's used for exhibitions of contemporary visual art.
Ironically, inside are the only examples of stolperstein allowed in Munich, in a building commissioned by Hitler and which is closed more often than not (as when I gave a tour for members of the Israeli consulate). The laying of these small brass plates in front of the homes of those deported and/or killed during the Nazi era- Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically handicapped as well as those for political and religious reasons- had been banned in June 2004 by the Munich City Council. Since then 96 German cities have removed these symbols of collective memory. Today the only stolperstein still exhibited in Munich are the three in a building designed by Hitler himself. Munich removed the only two stumbling blocks laid on public land from the pavement on Mauerkircherstraße. The two removed stumbling blocks were brought here to the  Munich Music Academy as part of an artistic installation. Claiming to be acting in the interests of fire protection, the installation was removed in 2011. In Munich there are only stumbling blocks on private land. More than 200 stumbling blocks for Munich victims have already been made and cannot be relocated and have been stored in a cellar ever since. Terry Swartzberg and the Stumbling Blocks Initiative for Munich collected more than 80,000 signatures for their project by June 2015 but nevertheless on July 29 the Munich City Council spoke out against the stumbling blocks on public streets and squares.
Palace of Justice (Justizpalast)
The Palace of Justice (Justizpalast)  during the Nazi era flying the Nazi flag and today. This was the site of the Nazis' "People's Court." Members of the White Rose were tried here on February 22, 1943. The Justizpalast in Munich, a monumental structure embodying the ideals of justice and law, ironically became a symbol of legal perversion under the Nazi regime. The building served as the backdrop for the "People's Court," a special tribunal notorious for its role in delivering swift and often fatal judgements against those accused of crimes against the state. The court, presided over by Roland Freisler, was instrumental in consolidating Nazi power through legal means. Freisler's court was a mockery of justice, often denying defendants the right to legal representation and delivering verdicts that were predetermined. Evans argues that the People's Court was not an institution of justice but rather a tool of terror, designed to instil fear and suppress dissent. The court's decisions were not based on legal principles but were driven by ideological considerations, a point that Evans elaborates upon in his critique of the Nazi judicial system.
GIF: Justizpalast einst und jetzt
The building after the war and today. The interior (which requires airport-type security to enter) has been tastefully rebuilt with something of the original style
Courtroom 216
Courtroom 216 (now 253) which today serves as a permanent exhibition with portraits of Willi Graf, Prof. Kurt Huber, Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst.  It was in this courtroom on February 22, 1943 at 10.00 that the trial of Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst began. At 13.00 Roland Freisler announced the death sentences. Four hours later, Sophie and Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were beheaded in Munich-Stadelheim Prison. The second trial began on April 19 at 9:00 against the fourteen other defendants of the White Rose. This trial, again chaired by Roland Freisler, lasted fourteen hours. At about 11.30 pm late in the evening Freisler announced the death sentences against Professor Kurt Huber, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf. Ten accused, Eugen Grimminger, Dr. Heinrich Bollinger, Helmut Bauer, Hans Hirzel, Franz J. Muller, Heinrich Guter, Susanne Hirzel, Gisela Schertling, Katharina Schueddekopf and Traute Lafrenz received imprisonment for either distributing the leaflets or failing to warn the authorities. Dr. Falk Harnack was surprisingly acquitted. Pardon requests for Schmorell and Graf were rejected by Hitler on June 25, 1943. Schmorell and Huber were executed on July 13, 1943. When this room was converted into an exhibition room, during the opening ceremony Munich’s former Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel said the most important thing about it was not that it provided yet another memorial to the White Rose – ten years after the opening of the DenkStätte Weiße Rose at Munich University – but rather “that it is being staged in this room”. The documentation of the trial also signals an increasing willingness on the part of the German judiciary to critically examine its own past, including the fact that many members of the Nazi judiciary remained in their posts even after 1945.
American troops passing the building at the end of the war
GIF:  neues Justizgebaeude einst und jetzt
The neues Justizgebaeude seen from behind the Justizpalast during the Nazi era and today. In 1933, five judges were removed from service because of their Jewish origin due to the Law on the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service at the Higher Regional Court itself. Denny Joseph Reuß was murdered in 1944 in the concentration camp Theresienstadt , Emil Ulmann, Ernst Herrmann, Joseph Stein and August Frank went into exile. None of the survivors returned to office after 1945. Numerous judicial employees were also victims of the persecution measures at the lower courts. Court President Gerber, who in 1933 did not implement the so-called equalisation of the judiciary by the new Bavarian Minister of Justice Hans Frank with the desired emphasis, was replaced in the same year by Alfred Dürr. Judges Johann David Sauerländer and Hans Koeniger resisted such behaviour. In 1934 Sauerländer prepared in vain a plenary resolution by the Bavarian Supreme Regional Court against the Nazi law for the legalisation of the Röhm murders, which would have branded Nazi law-making a degradation of judicial activity. After the war the denazification proceedings against two of the three past 1933 OLG presidents were suspended, only the last had to suffer as a so-called "incriminated" the reduction of the pension by one level to that of a district court president. Sauerland was not reinstated. The historical reappraisal of the court was first under President Karl Huber. A headscarf ban issued to a female Muslim law clerk was found unlawful by the Augsburg Administrative Court in 2016 and repealed although Minister of Justice Winfried Bausback announced however revision.
GIF: NornenbrunnenGIF: Nornenbrunnen
Located east of Maximiliansplatz from where it was moved in 1966 from its original site at the Stachus, the Nornenbrunnen was completed in 1907 after a design by Hubert Netzer in the art nouveau style. Using Kirchheimer shell limestone, it shows the Nornen, the three Germanic fates: Urd (focussing on the past), Verdandi (present) and Skuld (future), who leans towards the large water bowl. Between the figures are three muzzles, from which the water pours in three flat basin at the ground.
In 1920 Arno Breker, who would become Hitler's official sculptor, moved into an artists’ dormitory and matriculated at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he spent five years studying sculpture with Netzer.
Nazis in front of Wittelsbacher-Brunnen at Lenbachplatz   GIF: Wittelsbacher-Brunnen einst und jetzt
Meanwhile, Adolf von Hildebrand's Wittelsbacher-Brunnen at Lenbachplatz can be seen in the photo on the left behind a marching band of SA and from a 1930s postcard. It was unveiled on June 12, 1895. Its main basin is flanked by two monumental sculptures made of marble; the left shows a young man riding a fish-tailed water horse rising from the water. He holds a boulder with both hands and prepares to throw it to symbolise the destructive power of water, an allusion to the unbridled natural force of the mountain streams in the headwaters of the Munich aqueduct, where they still carry debris with them. The right figure shows an Amazon warrior sitting on a fish-tailed water bull rising from the water. With her left hand she holds out a bowl of water towards the viewer representing the fruitful and healing creative power that water has for people after it has been tamed and channeled. 
The whole complex was badly damaged in the air raids on Munich during the war and was restored after the end of the war by the sculptor and Hildebrand student Theodor Georgii. The fountain was put back into operation on October 3, 1952.
 
Looking the other direction atop the fountain. Like that of Hitler at Odeonsplatz at the start of the Great War, this is another photograph that purports to show Hitler at the end on February 8, 1920, among the crowd listening to Dr. Alois Dallmayr holding a speech atop the Lenbachplatz fountain speaking out against the delivery of German officers to the Allies as war criminals. Dallmayr had written the anti-Semitic Die Geldherrschaft und das Haus Rothschild and had spoken at one of the first Deutschen Arbeiterpartei meetings on November 26, 1919 at the Eberlbräukeller.
Hitler, Lenbachplatz
The Mercedes-Benz showroom at Lenbachplatz, April 1935 as shown in Kershaw's Hitler, and now replaced by BMW.
GIF: Bernheimer haus
Also at Lenbachplatz 9 was the Bernheimer home furnishings and art store, seen here on November 10, 1938 after being targeted during Reichskristallnacht and today. The building itself was built in 1888 by architect Friedrich von Thiersch with a neo-baroque style façade designed by his apprentice Martin Dülfer, making the building one of the first of its kind and later the most influential for all other buildings of its type in Munich and as such is protected as an example of cultural heritage. Starting in 1900, Lehmann Bernheimer sold antiques, tapestry, and valuable carpets and as his business grew, he found that the existing premises were insufficient and so Bernheimer-Haus was completed with the construction of a rearward building. In 1918 Lehmann Bernheimer's son Otto took over the business. During the Nazi dictatorship, the company was initially protected because Otto Bernheimer was a Honorary Consul of Mexico.
In 1938 and 1939 after destruction and threats, the company was aryanised and the Bernheimer family was initially detained in Dachau before being forced into exile.  During the w
ar the building was damaged, including the roof with the spire caving in. After the war, Otto Bernheimer, who had returned from Venezuela in 1946, received Bernheimer-Haus again as Wiedergutmachung- reparations Germany had to give to Jewish victims. He restored the roof by building it in a simplified form.

One of the first addresses for the Munich art market. Goering was a frequent client, despite the ban on aryans frequenting Jewish businesses. After its 'aryanisation', the Bernheimer Gallery became the Münchener Kunsthandelsgesellschaft. According to Irving, during the Reichskristallnacht
Hitler had spent the night in Munich issuing orders to stop the outrages and sending out his adjutants to protect Jewish businesses like Bernheimer’s, the antique dealers. 
(341) Goering: A Biography
Bernheimer Haus after the war during which time it was damaged through the bombing, in particular the roof truss with the top of the tower having collapsed. After the war Otto Bernheimer, who had returned from Venezuela for the first time in 1946, received the building back as part of the restitution agreement. He had the roof restored in a simplified form and rented out large parts of the building whilst rebuilding his business from October 1948. A cinema ended up being installed on the ground floor, which later became a dance hall. Bernheimer increasingly developed an antiques and art trade from the furniture store until 1987 when he sold the site to 
building contractor Jürgen Schneider in order to be able to pay off his co-heirs and supplement his art trade. When the latter's real estate empire collapsed in 1993 due to massive fraud, Deutsche Bank took over the Bernheimer Palais as the main creditor and had it refurbished at a cost estimated to have been well over 100 million Deutschmarks, the most expensive part being the true-to-original reconstruction of the roof with the tower dome.
GIF: Künstlerhaus showing synagogue and today
Seen from across the Justizpalast the Künstlerhaus remains little changed but the main synagogue to its left is conspicuously missing. Built in 1883-87 within sight of Munich’s Frauenkirche, the main synagogue for four decades symbolised the importance and esteem enjoyed by the Jewish community as part of Munich’s social and political life. The spacious Neo-Romanesque building contained more than 1,800 prayer stools and was one of the largest Jewish places of worship in Europe. The demolition of the synagogue ordered by Hitler personally “for traffic reasons” was a portent of the events to come. Degraded to a car park under the Nazi dictatorship, the site was returned to the Jewish Community in 1945. The synagogue was destroyed in June 1938, months before the Kristallnacht, and was the first synagogue to be destroyed in Germany during the Nazi period. According to this site, "Hitler actually hated having the Jewish house of worship so close to his favourite night club, which was located in the adjacent Kunstlerhaus."  
Standing in front looking towards the entrance to the Botanical Garden.
In the wake of the pogrom about 30,000 Jewish men were interned in concentration camps with their release made conditional on proof of arrangements to emigrate. Emboldened by their successes in foreign policy and by Germany’s growing military and economic strength, Nazi leaders apparently no longer felt they needed to take world opinion or foreign reactions into account (although foreign Jews were excluded from harassment by Heydrich’s directive). Hitler’s commitment to eastern expansion increased the likelihood of war in the near future and gave added urgency to the expulsion of the Jews, whose influence could be expected to weaken popular support for the war effort. While the official goal of the regime remained to force Jews to leave Germany, the turn to open, officially-sponsored violence in 1938 marked an important stage in the evolution of anti-Jewish policy toward systematic genocide in 1941.
Stackelberg & Winkle (222) The Nazi Germany Sourcebook
 On its site where even its memorial has suffered anti-Semitic attacks in our time. The Memorial Stone for the Destroyed Main Synagogue located on Herzog-Max-Straße near Karlsplatz was inaugurated in 1969, the first put up by the city to commemorate in public the violent destruction of Jewish life. The Community then sold the property to the City of Munich on condition that part of the site would be redeveloped as a memorial. The city duly invited sculptors from Israel and Germany to submit designs and in late 1967 the first prize was awarded to the Munich sculptor Herbert Peters. The solid form of the memorial is reminiscent of a cornerstone of the demolished synagogue and thus serves as a visual symbol of the building that once stood there. On the back of the memorial there are niches affording protection to certain key symbols of Judaism such as the seven-branched candelabra signifying eternal light and life. The Hebrew inscriptions include quotations from Psalm 74, from the lament over the desecration of the shrine, and from the Ten Commandments. 
 Since 1998 the memorial has been the scene of an impressive commemorative event that takes place every year on November 9, the anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht. Under the motto “everyone has a name”, young people, prominent cultural and social figures and ordinary citizens spend several hours reading out the names of Munich’s deported and murdered Jews together with their age, the date they died or were deported and their place of death. The memory of the thousands of women, men and children murdered by the Nazis is thus kept alive. Of the eleven thousand Jews who lived in Munich more than 4,500 did not survive the Nazis. To mark the seventieth anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht in 2008, the readings were for the first time held at several different locations all over the city.
GIF: Hitler's House in Munich
At the site of Hitler's first residence in Germany when he arrived in Munich on May 25, 1913, a bright Spring Sunday, when
Hitler followed up an advertisement for a small room rented by the family of the tailor Joseph Popp on the third floor of 34 Schleissheimerstr. in a poorish district to the north of the city, on the edge of Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich's artistic and bohemian life, and not far from the big barracks area.
Kershaw (48)  Hitler
Hitler shared the room until mid-February 1914 with Rudolf Häusler, 
a pal who had accompanied him from Vienna, [who was of] similar background and shared Hitler’s political views. Hitler offered to pay and Häusler readily agreed to accompany him, but first Hitler had to wait for his share of an inheritance from his father’s will. After a frustrating month in limbo, they finally left Vienna by overnight train. Years later Hitler told confidants that he came to Munich intending to study ‘for another three years . . . as a designer. I’d enter for the first competition, and I told myself that then I’d show what I could do!’ Nothing came of this, but Hitler seems hardly to have been disappointed. It was enough for him to be in the German city of his dreams, which seemed ‘as familiar . . . as if I had lived there for years within its walls’. Munich was a ‘German city. What a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I thought back on this Babylon of races.’ 
  Eventually Häusler found 
Hitler an exhausting room-mate. Hitler often left the ‘lamp burning until three or four in the morning’, or kept him awake with ‘agitated monologues all night’. Worn out by nocturnal diatribes, Häusler moved to another room. With no ill feeling it seems, since they remained in contact and Häusler later became a Nazi functionary in Vienna. 
Williams (21)
The plaque shown in the period photo on the right declared that 
Adolf Hitler lived in this house from spring 1913 to the day he volunteered for the German army in August 1914. 
Hitler's room was the third from the left on the top floor according to Williams (20):
Shortly after their arrival, he and Häusler found a third-floor room in the house of master-tailor Popp, the main occupant of a terrace at 34 Schleissheimerstrasse. Popp’s wife immediately made this ‘Austrian charmer’ welcome. Her husband, who had worked in Paris and regarded himself as a man of the world, quickly saw in Hitler ‘a personality whose abilities entitled him to the highest hopes’. Hitler was not the first twentieth-century dictator to live in Schleissheimerstrasse. A few years earlier Lenin had lodged about a block away. Today the area appears much as it did in Hitler’s (or Lenin’s) time. A small playground, which Hitler sketched from his window, still lies opposite. While its 1930s’ Nazi-era plaque was pulled down in 1945 along with its ornate stucco façade, 34 Schleissheimerstrasse is still identifiable as Hitler’s first Munich home.

 Hitler would then live there alone until the war broke out the following August. 

The room, which he rented from a tailor, Josef Popp, cost him only 20 marks a month. It was pleasant, well furnished, and had a private entrance from the street. Hitler could easily have entertained, since the Popps had no objections. Yet as they both recalled with some sur­prise, Hitler never once invited either a male or female guest to his room. Popp had been trained in Paris and prided himself on being a master tailor of modish fashions. Since he was also a kindly man, he saw to it that his tenants’ clothes did not cast adverse reflections on his business. Hitler was supplied with well-cut suits and an overcoat. The Popp children, Josef Jr. and Elisabeth, liked the nice man who lived upstairs. But he always remained a little aloof and never wanted to talk about his family background. “We never knew,” they said in an interview in 1967, “what he was really like.” The younger Popp later recalled especially that their tenant “spent a lot of time in keeping his body clean.” 

Hitler paid the rent by painting and selling architectural watercolours door-to-door and in the local beer halls. His landlady recalled that he had no visitors at all for the year and a half that he rented there. And yet, whilst she would claim that she had ‘never met a young man with such good manners,’  

the Popps’ account of Hitler in Munich is filled with inconsistencies. While ‘a whole week’ might pass ‘without a sign of Hitler’, he was still and miraculously able to join them in ‘political discussions every evening’. When not painting in his room, the lodger, who was rarely present, spent ‘most of the time’ with his ‘nose buried in heavy books’. Circumstances and survival probably demanded that Hitler put his energy not into reading books, but into painting. From the moment he arrived in Munich, according to Anna Popp (in yet another contradiction): "Hitler began to paint immediately and remained working for hours. After a few days, I saw two beautiful pictures that he’d finished on his table, one of the cathedral and the other of the Theatiner church. Then early in the morning my lodger went out, a briefcase under his arm, looking for buyers."  
Remarkably, just down the same street at 106 lived Lenin a dozen years earlier:
Lenin's house in Munich     
"Lenin had lived at 106 Schleissheimer Strasse, and at number 34 on the same street, only a few blocks away, Adolf Hitler now took a room as a tenant in the apartment of a tailor named Popp." (Fest, 20, Hitler
It could be argued that the 20th century began in Schwabing. In the years just preceding the World War I, Kandinsky painted Western art’s first abstract painting there, Hitler was hanging out in coffeehouses on the Schellingstrasse, and Lenin, midway through his long exile, was writing his most influential political pamphlets in an apartment off the Leopoldstrasse. 
J. S. Marcus, The Bohemian Side of Munich
 It was in Munich that Lenin formulated the concept that a vanguard party of “professional revolutionaries” from the intelligentsia was necessary to effect political change as articulated in his 1902 manifesto “What Is To Be Done?”, considered the cornerstone of Bolshevism.
Nearby at 142 Schleißheimer Straße is the Nordbad swimming pool:
The topping out ceremony on October 16, 1937 in the presence of Mayor Karl Fiehler and various councilors, representatives of state and municipal authorities, the Armed Forces, the Police Headquarters, the Munich swimming clubs and the German Labour Front. The Nordbad was the first large municipal building and Fiehler had swastika flags raised when the foundation stone was laid, inviting so many local Nazi groups to take part so that after the speeches, cries of "Sieg Heil" followed by the Horst Wessel song ended the ceremony.
According to historian Mathias Irlinger, the swimming pool was particularly valuable for the Nazis as people at the time still had no bathroom at home for basic everyday hygiene; a representative indoor pool with a sports pool was something relatively new with Munich only having the Müller'sche Volksbad. The first application to build the pool came in 1924 from future mayor Karl Scharnagl which failed due to funding, explaining why the Nordbad provided the opportunity for the Nazis to present themselves as particularly efficient. Although compared to the number and size of construction works implemented was weak compared to the 1920s, the Nazis were able to stage their energy with central buildings such as the Nordbad allowing them to boast: We are now building what others have never achieved. In fact, this would be Fiehler's project, not Hitler's who would even explicitly
oppose it. Fiehler had brought a model of the Nordbad to Obersalzberg on August 2, 1935, as with some other construction projects, to collect Hitler's blessing. It was at this meeting in which Hitler officially confirmed that Munich would call itself the "capital of the movement". A few days later, all of Munich was flagged to celebrate this event. Hitler nevertheless was angry, accusing the city of wishing to spend four million Reichsmarks for a small communal town in the north of the city which he found scandalous, particularly as he felt swimming pools enjoyed no international standing. Hitler instead wanted a mega bath at a very central point on the east-west axis he planned, extending across Munich. In the end, the building took place during the war, because it took seven years to complete. As with the laying of the foundation stone and the topping-out ceremony, there was talk of physical exercise, encouraging people to become stronger through sport. Sports competitions, for which a grandstand for 1,400 visitors was built, were also central to this. The statutes for the Nordbad, inaugurated in 1941, regulated that Jews, people with infectious diseases - and drunks - had no access. Nevertheless, some avoided such prohibitions by covering up their Judenstern; the bath staff was unable to recognise the supposedly clear racial characteristics of Jews.  Later, forced labourers were also no longer allowed to go to Nordbad when, in 1942, someone complained that he had to wait a long time because prisoners of war had occupied the whole changing room.
Scwabing krankenhuaus
Nazi propaganda at Schwabing hospital in 1936. Of all the professions requiring higher qualifications, the medical one had the highest proportion (45%) of Nazi Party members, and after the 'forced coordination' of the health system in 1933, these people proceeded to radically attack the 11% of their colleagues who were Jewish. The so-called 'Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service' provided for the dismissal of non-aryan doctors from the public health system, and in July 1938 they had lost their approbation.
There is hardly any profession more significant for the greatness and future of a nation than the medical one, and none is as Jewified as the medical profession. Jewish professors dominate university chairs in medicine. They have dehumanised the art of healing and have saturated generation upon generation of young doctors with their mechanical spirit. For that reason, we call upon the entire German medical profession to make the leadership and spirit of our guild once again German.
National Socialist League of German Physicians, 1933
Hitler's Residence from May 1 1920- October 5 1929
GIF: Hitler's Munich House
Gathering his meagre belongings which consisted of a cap, coat, jacket, trousers, underwear, shirt, socks, shoes and demobilisation pay of fifty marks, Hitler moved to a small room at Thierschstrasse 41 on March 31, 1920; "a poorish street near the river Isar." (Bullock, 83) which would be his home for the next nine years. He arrived at this room—sublet from a Jew—as an unknown person and left it as a national political figure. Ernst Hanfstaengl described the room in his 1957 work Unheard Witness:
Drab and dreary beyond belief, akin to a back bedroom of a decaying New York tenement. The room . . . was tiny. I doubt it was nine feet wide. The bed was too wide for its corner, and the head projected over a single narrow window. The floor was covered with cheap, worn linoleum with a couple of threadbare rugs, and on the wall opposite the bed there was a make- shift bookshelf, apart from the chair and rough table, the only other piece of furniture in the entire room.
It was also the house’s coldest room. Hitler’s landlady later said that he either paid the rent on time or in advance, and he kept his German shepherd dog, Wolf, as company. Today, the building still stands with a statue of the Virgin Mary staring down from an alcove on the second floor outer wall. The room itself, however, was known to make later tenants ill, and since no one would rent it anymore, today it is used as a storeroom.
From July 1936 a plaque was placed outside by the city council that read "Adolf Hitler lived in this house from 1 May 1920 to 5 October 1929." Nearby on Thierschstrasse 15 was the Nazis' third headquarters. His landlord is recorded in Germany's Hitler by Heinz A. Heinz as saying
I hadn't much to do with him myself, since ... his room was a sub-let. And since I am a Jew, I concerned myself as little as possible with the activities of my lodger.... I admit I liked Hitler well enough. I often encountered him on the stairway and at the door - he was generally scribbling something in a notebook.- when he would pass the time of day with me pleasantly enough. Often he
GIF: Hitler haus Muenchen
Showing the plaque from 1935-1945
had his dog with him, a lovely Wolfshund. He never made me feel he regarded me differently from other people.... He lodged in my house from ....1919 to 1929. First he took a little back room, and then an equally small one in the front to serve as a sort of office and study. The back room, in which he slept is only 8 by 15 feet. It is the coldest room in the house .... Some lodgers who've rented it since got ill. Now we only use it as a lumber room....The only 'comfort' Hitler treated himself to when he was here, was a hand basin with cold water laid on. The room to the front was a bit bigger, but the small high-set window left much to be desired. It was very scantily furnished. (pp. 276-277)
Hitler himself had described the scene when he had returned from his term at Landsberg:
I found them gathered at my door, in the Thierschstrasse, in Munich, men like Fuess, Gahr and the other old faithfuls. My apartment was decorated with flowers and laurel wreaths (I've kept one of them). In his exuberant joy, my dog almost knocked me down the stairs.
Former close associate (and only man to have worked directly under Hitler and FDR) Ernst Hanfstaengl revisited the flat after the war and wrote:
When by chance I found myself walking along Thierschstrasse, I couldn't resist the temptation to pay a visit to Hitler's former house at number 41. Nothing had changed; the façade was the same... and the bombs falling on Munich had failed to shake the porcelain Madonna from her alcove.

Eva Braun's House
Hitler had Heinrich Hoffman buy this ordinary-looking villa for Eva Braun for the then fabulous sum of $30,000 to recompense her for the millions of marks Hoffman made from her photographs of Hitler on the Obersalzberg. The house had an air raid shelter that could be supplied with fresh air in case Braun was buried in a bomb attack as well as a one-man bunker with loopholes on the fence. The photo on the left dates from 1938 and is shown shortly before its demolition in 2015 when it still appeared completely unchanged. Today the address is 12 Delpstrasse, formerly Wasserburgstrasse,  near Hitler's own residence on Prinzregentenplatz. It had been renamed a decade after the war in memory of Father Alfred Delp, a resistance fighter during the Nazi era.
 In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated. Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.” Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transfered to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.” Hoffmann made contradictory statements in this regard as well. In his defence document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son‑in‑law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”
Heike B. Görtemaker, Eva Braun Eva Braun haus
The photo on the right shows Eva Braun cycling from her house and the site today. At the time when Hitler and Braun were about to kill themselves, an American raiding party occupied the house. The next day the property was completely emptied and all the items were probably taken to the United States as souvenirs. In 1947 a couple moved in from Washington. Back then, the doorbell still read “Braun” and, as neighbours reported, the house became a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. An older woman recently lived in the house and the property was overgrown. After the woman died, the villa stood empty and fell into disrepair. Local politicians from the Bogenhausen district asked the monument protection authority to check whether it was possible to be included in the monument list but a detailed report came to the conclusion that the house was completely dilapidated and not a monument resulting in the house and property changing hands. The current owner, a publisher of two Munich daily newspapers, bought it from the son of the last resident. Renovation was never considered and in 2015 the villa was completely demolished and a new two-story building with a double garage was built on the site.
Eva Braun haus, Muenchen
Footage from Eva Braun's home movies; a number of scenes show her at home here. The photo on the right shows her birthplace on Isabellastrasse 45 (behind the tree).

GärtnerPlatztheater
GIF: Theater am Gärtnerplatz einst und jetzt
When the Nazis took power the works of Jewish composers and librettists continued to be given because of their popularity although Jewish writers, librettists, and composers were not hired. Since the operetta had a priority position within Nazi cultural policy, it was decided to put it in the foreground in the programme until a new operetta theatre was built in place of the Gärtnerplatztheater. The theatre would focus "exclusively on operetta performances, because operetta is a very essential means of bringing the people to the theatre." The closure for this reason in 1936 only lasted a short time, however, as the demolition plans were abandoned at Hitler's instigation and the theatre was merely renovated. Original plans for the demolition and subsequent new building of a theatre were not implemented; instead, a major renovation took place. The theatre was reopened on November 20, 1937 with a performance of Die Fledermaus, making it the first and only state operetta stage.  In the evening of November 20 1937 Hitler attended the reopening of the rebuilt Theater am Gärtnerplatz where he saw a performance of the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus. This marked the theatre being passed to the Free State of Bavaria and was reopened as the "Bavarian State Operetta", the first state operetta stage.
Hitler at Theater am Gärtnerplatz 
  Among the guests was Hitler. It had been after watching the Zigeunerbaron here in 1926 that Hitler went to the Café Viktoria to eat, renamed Café Roma until its closure in 2008.
Former Café Viktoria
Former Café Viktoria
In 1938, Fritz Fischer, who was one of the most dazzling figures in Munich's theatre life during the Nazi era, was brought in by Gauleiter and Interior Minister Adolf Wagner as director of the reopened Gärtnerplatztheater with Peter Kreuder serving as a music director. With his appointment, a new theatrical aesthetic came to the fore based on Berlin revues and the film operetta which was characterised by splendid furnishings, mass casts and a rapid pace of play. Fischer had been inspired by the Berlin revue role models and film operettas. Through With Fischer's appointment, a new theatrical aesthetic came to the fore, a new style that - based on Berlin revues and the film operetta - was characterised by splendid furnishings, mass casts and a rapid pace of play.
"This style was particularly encouraged by the ruling cultural leaders, although it was actually derived from sources that would have been unsympathetic to the rulers. But they stressed the importance of the operetta of this kind, for the recovery and increase of the vitality and joy of life, of the creative man, and even more of the wounded or on holiday in the home of the soldiers."
On January 7, 1938 at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz, Hitler once again saw the ballet Tanz um die Welt, a guest performance of the German Opera House of Berlin- Charlottenburg.
 When director Fischer was drafted during the war in 1940, opera director Rudolf Hartmann took over the management of the stage on an interim basis until Fischer returned to his post in 1941. The ensemble's visit to the Dachau concentration camp on May 21, 1941 also fell under his term of office. When Fischer was drafted during the war in 1940, opera director Rudolf Hartmann took over the management of the stage on an interim basis until Fischer returned to office in 1941. His visit to the ensemble in the Dachau concentration camp on May 21, 1941 also fell under his term of office. It is disputed whether in 1941 the ensemble (including Johannes Heesters) of the Gärtnerplatztheater had merely visited the camp or had appeared before ϟϟ guards. On April 21, 1945 the theatre was bombed during the last air attack on Munich with the portal torn down and the stage set on fire. The house remained unplayable for a long time with performances relocated to Schornstraße until 1948 when theatre operations in the main building on Gärtnerplatz could be resumed. Due to economic and political considerations, the theatre was directed by Rudolf Hartmann from 1952 to 1955. Today with only minor changes, the auditorium of 1937 remains as it was.

Nürnberger Bratwurst Glöckl
Located at Frauenplatz 9, this was a restaurant frequented by top Nazis, including Hitler and SA chief Ernst Röhm. The owner, Karl Zehnte, was an homosexual associate of Röhm and Heines and was killed during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The Zehnter family had originally come from Nuremberg, hence its name today.
At the door of the Bratwurstgloeckl, a tavern frequented by homosexual roughnecks and bully-boys, Roehm turned in and joined the handful of sexual deviants and occultists who were celebrating the success of a new campaign of terror. Their organisation, once known as the German Worker's Party, was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, The National Socialist German Worker's Party -- the Nazis.  
Yes, the Nazis met in a 'gay' bar.

Zehnter kept a stammtische, a standing table for regulars, which belonged to a associates of Zehnte known as Stammtisch 175 after the notorious paragraph 175 of the German criminal code which outlawed homosexuality. Among its regulars were Edmund Heines Ernst Röhm. Both were numbers one and two respectively in the SA. 

According to Konrad Heiden, author of the 1944 book Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise To Power, in May 1927 Adolf Hitler called together the Munich S.A. and shouted, "The clique from the Bratwurstglöckl are all fairies: Heinz, Röhm, Zentner, and the rest. Am I supposed to take accusations from such people?" 
Heiden (294) 

Zehnter was murdered apparently not because of his homosexuality but because he overheard conversations at Stammtisch 175 concerning one in which Goebbels had assured Röhm and Heines of his loyalty.

According to Otto Strasser, never the most reliable of sources, Goebbels had a private tryst with Röhm in his ‘local’, the Munich Bratwurstglöckl tavern; Strasser’s only evidence was the liquidation of Karl Zehnter, the bar’s owner, in the coming purge.
Irving (333) Goebbels
Haus Neumayr
Now Berni's Pizzeria Nudelbrett, the Café Neumayr at Petersplatz 8, just south of St. Peter’s Church in Munich, was where Hitler went every Monday night to sound out his associates on various new political ideas in the early 1920s. The building itself is still called Haus Neumayr. Kershaw writes that
Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt. His regular accompaniment formed a motley crew – mostly lower-middle class, some unsavoury characters among them. Christian Weber, a former horse-dealer, who, like Hitler, invariably carried a dog-whip and relished the brawls with Communists, was one. Another was Hermann Esser, formerly Mayr’s press agent, himself an excellent agitator, and an even better gutter-journalist. Max Amann, another roughneck, Hitler’s former sergeant who became overlord of the Nazi press empire, was also usually there, as were Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and, frequently, the ‘philosophers’ of the party, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. In the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the snacks they had brought with them and drinking their litres of beer or cups of coffee. At the end of the evening, Weber, Amann, Graf, and Lieutenant Klintzsch, a paramilitary veteran of the Kapp Putsch, would act as a bodyguard, escorting Hitler – wearing the long black overcoat and trilby that ‘gave him the appearance of a conspirator’ – back to his apartment in Thierschstraße. 
Hitler (98)
Gasthaus Deutsche Eiche
GIF: Gasthaus Deutsche Eiche
In 1926 Hitler gave six speeches here, and another in 1929. One such 1926 speech took place during a closed general assembly of the NSDAP Section Neuhausen, started here at 20.30 in which, according to the police report, 56 people participated, and was headed by Helmut Walter. Hitler "spoke for about 20 minutes, Anton Allwein spoke and Karl Ostberg on the question of race or the Jews.
Ironically, the Gasthaus Deutsche Eiche is now one of the Munich gay scene's most popular meeting places with its bathhouse that takes over four floors and almost 4,600 square feet complete with a Finnish sauna, a salt sauna, a whirlpool, a large steambath, shower area, massage rooms, a solarium, a rooftop garden, a Bistro & Bar, TV rooms, relaxation rooms, individual and exclusive booths etc... which explains the gay flags that flank the international ones in the centre. In fact, the area around Gärtnerplatz is largely shaped by the gay scene including the Deutsche Eiche at Reichenbachstrasse 13, with the 1921-23 Nazi Party headquarters at Corneliusstrasse 12 located nearby. Probably because of its proximity to the Gärtnerplatz Theatre and its dancers, the Deutsche Eiche became a meeting point for artists and homosexuals early on. Until his death in 1982, its restaurant was also the "second living room" of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who lived opposite from 1974 to 1978. In some of his films, the guesthouse served as the location. Freddy Mercury apparently also felt at home here
Ernst Röhm's address on Hohenzollernstraße 110. In proceedings conducted by  the Public prosecutor's office at LG Munich I on October 21, 1931 against Peter Granninger, an accountant from Freising who was best known as the personal pimp or supplier of Röhm, who brought boys and young men to him for homosexual contacts from 1931 to 1934, and as a defendant in a trial for these events that took place after Röhm's murder in autumn 1934 before the district court of Munich. Along with others charged with homosexual acts, this address was the location of many of the acts that took place. 
In 1931 when the accused Granninger read in the newspaper that Röhm had returned from South America, he went to his apartment in Hohenzollernstrasse 110 shortly before Easter 1931. Röhm served the accused Granninger with coffee and liqueur. Röhm brought himself to the accused Granninger, hugged him, kissed him and gripped his thighs. He opened Granninger's pants, took out his member and sucked on it until ejaculation occurred. After this traffic, Granninger took Röhm's penis in his mouth after rubbing it with his hand and sucked on it until ejaculation occurred. Röhm then gave the defendant 50 RM and promised to get him a job.