Showing posts with label Nordfriedhof. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nordfriedhof. Show all posts

Sites around Munich (4)

Löwenbraukeller
The Lowenbraukeller beer hall was located at Nymphenburgerstrasse #4 on Stiglmaier Plaza in Munich, and it was where Hitler commanded the SA to break up a meeting of the rival Bavarian League on September 14, 1921, also ordering its main speaker—Otto Ballerstedt— to be assaulted, too.  
On November 8–9, 1923, at Munich’s Burgerbraukeller beer hall, Hitler attempted to seize first that city, then Bavaria, and finally the Reich by force, just as Benito Mussolini had done in Italy almost exactly a year before; however, Hitler failed miserably. On the night of 8 November. Ernst Röhm and some 2,000 SA, Bund Oberland, and Reichskriegflagge men assembled at the Lowenbräukeller where they received the code word from the Burgerbräu to march in support of the coup. Following that abysmal debacle, Hitler decided that, in the future, he would gain office only through legal means—and did a decade later, replacing the old state with a new, Nazi model that was built up during the intervening ten years by himself and the Party.
In 1939, the Führer cut short his Putsch commemorative speech in the same hall and left it just before an explosion that killed or wounded several Party members— an event still not entirely explained. Following the destruction of the Burgerbraukeller by Georg Elser’s bomb blast on November 8, 1939, the Führer and others honoured the anniversary of the 1923 Burgerbraukeller Putsch at the Lowenbraukeller throughout the rest of the war.
On November 9, 1943, the Führer celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Burgerbraukeller Putsch with a speech before the Nazi Party Old Fighters at the Lowenbraukeller. In addition to the dead of 1923, Hitler added the commemoration of the casualties of the war from 1939–43, hoping to shore up support for himself, the Party, the regime, and the war in Munich—the vaunted “Capital of the Movement.”

In a footnote on page 830 of Shirer writes:
I learn from Hitler’s captured daily calendar book that the celebration had been moved from the old Buergerbraukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a more elegant beer hall in Munich, the Loewenbraukeller. The Buergerbraukeller, it will be remembered, had been wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing the Fuehrer on the night of November 8, 1939.
This was also the site of Hitler's last major public speech to party faithful on 8 November 1942 to commemorate the nineteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. This happened to be the same day as the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and less than a week after the defeat of General Erwin Rommel’s Africa Corps by the British at El Alamein. The opening lines of this speech were used at the beginning of the film Downfall when Hitler is made to dictate them for Traudl to type out for the qualification test:
My German Volksgenossen! Party Comrades! I believe it is quite rare when a man can appear before his supporters after almost 20 years and, in these 20 years, did not need to make any changes whatsoever in his programme.
 Hitler speaking at the site.
Adolf Hitler - Speech from 08.11.1942
Hitler and other Nazi officials celebrate Christmas at a party for ϟϟ officer cadets at the Lowenbraukeller on December 18, 1941.

Nazi Party Headquarters, November 1921 to July 1925
The site of another party headquarters at Corneliusstraße 12
The dismal back room at the Sterneckerbrau which had served as a committee-room was abandoned for new and larger offices at 12 Corneliusstrasse. Bit by bit they accumulated office furniture, files, a typewriter, and a telephone.
Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf:
After eighteen months our business quarters had become too small, so we moved to a new place in the Cornelius Strasse. Again our office was in a restaurant, but instead of one room we now had three smaller rooms and one large room with great windows. At that time this appeared a wonderful thing to us. We remained there until the end of November 1923.

Memorial to Freikorps
The German army’s impotence after the Great War was apparent on Christmas Eve when its troops, ordered to remove radicals from the Royal Stables, dispersed and went home. It was thus that a proposal was made to supplement the Reichsheer through a broad creation of Freikorps units made up of volunteers which existed in some fashion from late 1918 until 1923 who would defend the new Republic. The best known of the volunteers were the Freikorps, or regular volunteers
consisting of officers and soldiers, as well as students and civilians, driven by counterrevolutionary zeal, eager for adventure, or simply seeking the ‘‘companionship of the trenches’’ and regular meals. Numbering 200,000 to 400,000 men by the spring of 1919, the 103 major Freikorps units received little direct attention from the Reichsheer and were militarily and politically unreliable. During the first half of 1919 they were used to crush both real and imagined threats throughout Germany.
Vincent (137) An Historical Dictionary of Germany’s Weimar Republic
The remains of a 1942 Nazi memorial to the Freikorps victory over the communists in Munich in May 1919 remains on Ichostrasse, apparently as a memorial to victims of Nazism, although the various symbols appear intentionally vague:
By May 2, 1919, the Freikorps and a coalition of Prussian and Bavarian troops, collectively known as the known as the Weisse Garde, had taken the City of Munich. It was not officially announced secure until May 6 after roughly 1,200 Communists had been killed.
The White force had in it hardened desperadoes and they shot down without cause some twenty medical orderlies and eight surrendered Red soldiers. Most infamously, the Reds executed ten people by firing squad, including the Countess Westarp. This killing was the direct result of the White atrocities at Dachau which had caused Red soldiers to ask superiors if they could take revenge. Permission was granted and the victims were rounded up and brought to courtyard of the Luitpold gymnasium. In pairs, they were placed against a wall and shot. The news of this horrific event spread quickly and, by midday of 1 May, the killings had become public knowledge. There were protest meetings all over the city, and firefights erupted.
The Whites had decided to move on 2 May. They now advanced the attack to May Day. It was held to be just and proper that they were moving into the capital on the traditional workers’ holiday. As the Whites took Munich, atrocities appeared seemingly everywhere. All White killings were said to be justified by the Luitpold executions. The Luitpold killings had also had a demoralizing impact on Red troops not involved but who had heard of them. They began throwing down their arms, as the Whites entered the city to encounter scant opposition.
The Munich political scene, immediately after the demise of the Red Republics, was profoundly altered. The disappearance of the two republics resulted in an atmosphere changed lastingly... This was the heritage which carried over into the scene after the war.

Hofbräukeller
This is where Hitler publicly spoke for the first time on October 16,1919.
A hundred and eleven people turned up, and Hitler rose to address his first public meeting as the second speaker of the evening. In a bitter stream of words the dammed-up emotions, the lonely man’s suffocated feelings of hatred and impotence, burst out; like an explosion after the restriction and apathy of the past years, hallucinatory images and accusations came pouring out; abandoning restraint, he talked till he was sweating and exhausted. ‘I spoke for thirty minutes,’ he writes, ‘and what I had always felt deep down in my heart, without being able to put it to the test, proved to be true.’ Jubilantly he made the overwhelming, liberating discovery. ‘I could make a good speech!
On the wall outside is a plaque dedicated to the victims of the Freikorps during the smashng of the Räterepublik:
Translated into English, it reads:

IN MEMORY OF THE CITIZENS from Perlach: 
JOSEPH LUDWIG     ARTUR KOCH JOHANN KEIL     SEBASTIAN HUFNAGEL ALBERT DENGLER     ALBERT CANCER GEORG JAKOB     JOSEPH JAKOB GEORG EICHNER     KONRAD ZELLER AUGUST STÖBER     JOHANN SPRUCE  
Following the military defeat of the Munich Soviet Republic, these workers and craftsmen were denounced and without legal judicial proceedings were taken by the Freikorps Lützow on 5 May 1919 to the garden of the Hofbräuhaus Keller and murdered.

Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
The Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on Maximilianstraße where the Thule Society was founded in the early 1920s and had its headquarters.
Members of the Thule Society, a right-wing, völkisch, anti-Semitic organization, had got hold of the stamp of the Communist military chief of Munich, the twenty-one-year-old deserter from the navy Rudolf Eglhofer, and used it to forge orders and requisitions. Ten of the members of the Thule Society were taken as hostages from a meeting at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and then, as the government forces converged on Munich, they were executed in the courtyard of the Luitpold gymnasium as a reprisal for the deaths of eight members of the Red Guard who had been killed at Dachau.

The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazis, Eugene Davidson (128)
The ceremonial foundation of the Thule Society took place on 17 August 1918. The society met at the fashionable Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Munich, in rooms decorated with the Thule emblem: a long dagger, its blade surrounded by oak leaves, superimposed on a shining, curved- armed swastika.
Richard Evans destroys David Irving's credibility when the latter referred to the hotel in Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich during the events of Reichskristallnacht in his attempts to absolve Hitler from all blame of the violence:
WHAT of Himmler and Hitler? Both were totally unaware of what Goebbels had done until the synagogue next to Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel was set on fire around one a.m. Heydrich, Himmler’s national chief of police, was relaxing down in the hotel bar; he hurried up to Himmler’s room, then telexed instructions to all police authorities to restore law and order, protect Jews and Jewish property, and halt any on- going incidents. The hotel management telephoned Hitler’s apartment at Prinz- Regenten-Platz, and thus he too learned that something was going on. He sent for the local police chief, Friedrich von Eberstein. Eberstein found him livid with rage.
In fact, Evans points out
The only historical truth in this account was the assertion that Heydrich sent a telex to the German police authorities. Everything else was a blatant manipulation of the historical record. Even a cursory glance at the telex showed that it ordered the opposite of what Irving claimed it did. What Heydrich was telling the police was not to prevent the destruction of Jewish property or get in the way of violent acts against German Jews.
This was also where Daladier and his entourage stayed September 29, 1938 during the Munich conference whilst Chamberlain and the Czech representatives went to the Regina Palast Hotel on Maximiliansplatz 5:

The hotel also plays a significant role in the Fleming novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service after James Bond arrives in Munich from Zurich where he is met at the airport by his fiancée Tracy, who drives him to her “favourite hotel in the world.” Bond drinks at the hotel bar and makes plans to dine at Walterspiel’s which had once been located inside the hotel.

Editorial Offices of Munchner Neueste Nachrichten
Memorial plaque to Dr. Fritz Gerlich, editor-in-chief and subject of film "Hitler: The Rise of Evil." After the Nazis seized power in Germany, they quickly decided to remove Gerlich as shown in this scene from the film where he is arrested on March 9, 1933 and brought to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered on July 1, 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives according to David Irving, through the orders of Hermann Göring:
Who, other than Göring, would have ordered the pickax murder of seventy-one- year-old ex-dictator Gustav von Kahr and Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich? Kahr had betrayed the 1923 beer hall putsch. Gerlich had claimed that Göring broke his word of honour to escape; Göring had sued him for libel and lost. Now both those old scores were settled, permanently.
Göring (209)
After his death his wife received confirmation of her husband's death when his blood-spattered glasses were delivered to her home. You can see a website dedicated to his memory at http://www.gerlich.com/
video
At Gerlich's former residence this plaque was placed: "The journalist Dr. Fritz Gerlich lived in this house up to his arrest on 9.3.1933. As an opponent of the Third Reich he was murdered on 30.6.1934 in the KZ Dachau." The video on the right is from Hitler: Rise of Evil

Maximilianeum and the Maximilianbrücke

Apparently Hitler's own painting on the left beside a turn-of-the-century postcard


Looking out towards the town centre from inside during MUNOM 2010
Ruhmeshalle (Bavarian Hall of Fame)

After the war and today
The Ruhmeshalle (Bavarian Hall of Fame) in front of which stands the 19 metre high Bavaria from whose head one can have a remarkable view. The area it's in, Versammlungsplatz, was one of the main preferential rendezvous points of the left political spectrum since 1818. On November 7, 1918 it was the scene of the demonstration for the end of the Great War, leading to the collapse of the monarchy and to the proclamation of the Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919 the place was the starting point of the protest march against the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. From 1922 the socialist trade unions met here and its demonstrations on May 1 1923 were threatened by armed National Socialists and banned in 1924, 1925 and 1932. From 1933 May 1 was taken over by the Nazis as the 'Day of German Work' on the Theresienwiese.
The Hall today houses the marble busts of noteworthy Bavarians including a recent one of von Stauffenberg. The bust itself appears to have been mutilated; a probable example of the debate whether his actions in launching the July Plot were those of an hero or villain.

German Research institute for Psychiatry (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie) Kraepelinstr. 2
Opened in 1917, it served during the NS time in the intellectual preparation and “justification” of the murder of “lebensunwert”. In 1934 it sponsored the “Law for Preventing Hereditary Illness into the Next Generation” ("Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses") and approved of patient killings.
Research on eugenics was done primarily at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem (directed by Eugen Fischer from 1927, its founding, to 1942, and by Otmar von Verschuer from 1942 to 1945) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt (directed by Ernst Riidin) in Munich.
Kristie Macrakis (125) Surviving the Swastika : Scientific Research in Nazi Germany

Sites Hitler painted- Asamkirche and Alte Residenz
The Asamkirche on Sendlinger Straße in the centre of the City, built between 1733-1746, was the subject of an Hitler drawing.
The other painting above is the Alte Residenz, the Alter Hof, which was home to Bavarian dukes, electors and kings. The painting on the right is of its inner courtyard (bombed in 1944) by Hitler himself in 1914.

Nornenbrunnen
The Nornenbrunnen was completed in 1907 after a design by Hubert Netzer in the art nouveau style. Using Kirchheimer shelly limestone, it shows the Nornen, the three Germanic fates: Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, 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.
Meanwhile, Adolf von Hildebrand's Wittelsbacher-Brunnen at Lenbachplatz can be seen in the photo on the left behind a marching band of SA.

Nordfriedhof
 Nordfriedhof - where many from Hitler's inner circle are buried.

After being bombed in 1944

The grave of Hitler's favourite architect, shown on the left with Hitler paying his respects during the ceremonies "marking the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in July 1937" again from Third Reich Ruins. "In Munich Hitler spent many hours in the studio of Professor Troost, his favourite architect" (Bullock, 387) who had designed the Haus Deutschen Kunst. According to Albert Speer,
The Führer found in the irreplaceable artist Paul Ludwig Troost, his architect. Troost understood how to utilise Hitler's intentions and how to provide the correct architectural form. The Führer during his great speech at the cultural meeting of the Reich Party in 1935, delivered a memorial to Professor Troost which could not have been a more beautiful tribute to an architect of our times, Hitler said: We should be filled with happy pride that through a strange fate Germany possessed the greatest architect since Schinkel, in the new Reich and for the movement. He erected his first and unfortunately his only tremendous works in stone as monuments of true Germanic and Teutonic purity.
Hitler attended Troost’s burial on January 24 at the Munich Nordfriedhof. Contrary to his customary habit, he not only appeared at the funeral ceremony itself, but accompanied the casket to the grave. Doramus (413) The Complete Hitler. Every January 21 Hitler had a wreath placed at the grave.

Andreas Bauriedl was an early member of the Nazi Party who participated in the Beer Hall Putsch on 9 November 1923. When the Munich Police opened fire on the on the marchers, Bauriedl was hit in the abdomen, killing him and causing him to fall on the Nazi flag, which had fallen to the ground when its flagbearer, Heinrich Trambauer, was severely wounded. Bauriedl's blood soaked the flag. The flag later became known as the Blutfahne, a sacred relic to the Nazis, and Andreas Bauriedl and the other killed participants of the putsch were regarded as the first martyrs to the Nazi Party. His body was interred in a crypt in the an Ehrentempel as part of a memorial to the putsch. The memorial was demolished by the Allied occupation forces at the end of the Second World War.

Andreas Bauriedl, relocated after the war from his sarcophagus in an ehrentempel on Königsplatz. Note the date of death- apparently it was his blood that had 'consecrated' the blut fahne.
The Nazis invested the concept of the "blood flag" with a decidedly emotional colouration. "Blood flag" was their name for the swastika flag that had allegedly been drenched with the blood of Andreas Bauriedl who had carried it on 9 November 1923 dur­ing the legendary march to the Feldherrnhalle, at the time of the Hitler Putsch. At the second Nazi Party congress in Weimar on 4 July 1926, Hitler "bestowed" the flag of this "blood witness" on the then Reichsführer of the ϟϟ, Berchtold.

The grave of Hitler's official photographer. The stone refers to him as "Professor", a title given him by Hitler in 1938. It was Hoffmann and his second wife Erna who introduced Hitler to Eva Braun, his studio assistant at the time.
Also buried here is his daughter Henriette who had married Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach. Irving in Hitler's War records the following exchange between her and Hitler at the Berghof:
A few days after Himmler’s visit, Baldur von Schirach and his pretty wife Henriette were in Hitler’s house party. They joined the fireside circle, slumped in the deep armchairs in the semi-darkness. While Hitler sipped his special tea and the others their wine or cognac, Henriette exclaimed that she had just witnessed at Amsterdam the loading of Jews into open trucks for deportation.
‘Do you know about it?’ she asked. ‘Do you permit it?’
Hitler retorted, ‘They are being driven off to work, so you needn’t pity them. Meantime our soldiers are fighting and dying on the battlefields!’ Later he added, ‘Let me tell you something. This is a set of scales’ – and he put up a hand on each side like the pans. – ‘Germany has lost half a million of her finest manhood on the battlefield. Am I to preserve and minister to these others? I want something of our race to survive a thousand years from now.’ He reproached her: ‘You must learn how to hate!’
The Schirachs were still there the next evening, June 24, when Goebbels wickedly brought the fireside conversation around to Vienna. Until after four a.m. Hitler drew savage comparisons between Schirach’s Viennese and Goebbels’s Berliners until tears welled up in Henriette’s eyes: the Berliners, he said, were hard-working, intelligent, and politically shrewd. Goebbels wrote, ‘Frau von Schirach in particular acted like a silly cow . . . and later summed up her unhappiness by saying that she wanted to go back to Munich with her husband and would the Führer send [Gauleiter] Giesler to Vienna instead.’‘Tell me,’ Hitler challenged her,‘is your husband our Reich representative in Vienna – or is he Vienna’s man in the Reich?’ The Schirachs departed in a huff the same night, and never saw Hitler again.
Fest in The Face Of The Third Reich writes that it was
[f]rom this point on he found himself isolated, and if his subsequent statement that he had expected to be arrested and charged before the People’s Court was probably simply self-dramatization, it is nevertheless true, as he claimed, that after the controversy at the Berghof he was ‘politically a dead man’. He retired into the background, partly out of personal fear and also no doubt out of the embarrassment of a man who saw his romantic ideals and fantasies of self-sacrifice, heroism and marble monuments contradicted by the reality of the war, even if he refrained from putting it into words, ‘in order to maintain a foolish dream a little while longer’
The grave of ϟϟ-Obersturmbannführer Max Wünsche, the legendary German Waffen-ϟϟ Obersturmbannführer who was awarded the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves. He held the position of ϟϟ Standartenführer and served as Hitler’s adjutant. Irving acknowledged the importance of his diary entries to his research from June 16 to Nov 20, 1938 listing the Hitler’s appointments and decisions.
Wünsche is the subject of a figure produced in China.

After the Serbian uprising of July 1941, Gen. Hermann Bohme was given emergency powers to govern the country. He commanded 370th Infantry Division when he was captured by the Soviets in 1944 near Sevastopol.

After the bloody end of the Räterepublik Munich became a centre of opposition to the young democratic state. An important figure for the extreme Right was Gustav von Kahr, who was elected Bavarian prime minister as the candidate of the Bavarian People’s Party in 1920. His aim was to make Bavaria an authoritarian “cell of order” and an antithesis to Berlin. This provided an ideal operating environment for a broad spectrum of nationalist, anti-democratic and reactionary forces.

Kahr met Hitler just before relinquishing office. With like-minded contemporaries, he deemed Hitler the drummer for Germany’s national revival and hoped that Bavaria’s many Wehrverbaende might unite behind the Nazi leader. On 26 September 1923, with Berlin enmeshed in crisis, Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling appointed Kahr to the semi-dictatorial post of General State Commissioner. In succeeding weeks Kahr, who desired an authoritarian state, toyed with the idea of a march on Berlin. But by the evening of 8 November, the occasion of Hitler’s putsch, he had abandoned his plan as unworkable (he may have intended proposing a Wittelsbach restoration). Hitler’s unexpected action split Bavaria’s nationalists and doomed Kahr’s political future. His ambivalence to the putsch led friend and foe alike to use him as a scapegoat.
Gustav von Kahr, long in retirement, had moved far from the political arena in his native state. He lived in Munich, maintaining a low political profile, and was no longer in any position to do any damage to Hitler or his movement. But over a decade earlier he had caused, with help, the failure of the Hitler putsch. Although the Hitlerian coup of 1923 might well have fallen short without Kahr’s intervention, he was dragged from his home under arrest by the ϟϟ. His body was found later, hacked to pieces, in the hills near Dachau.

The grave of Emil Maurice, Hitler's chauffeur and first Supreme SA Leader before becoming ϟϟ Oberführer.
Maurice with Hitler in Landsberg in 1924. Bullock (121) describes Emil Maurice "partly as Hitler's batman, partly as his secretary, a job which he later relinquished to Rudolf Hess, who had voluntarily returned from Austria to share his leader's imprisonment." According to Shirer in, "[b]efore the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and the first commander of the Nazi ”strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation."
According to Bullock (393) Hitler "was beside himself with fury when he discovered that she had allowed Emil Maurice, his chauffeur, to make love to her, and forbade her to have anything to do with any" other man." Goebbels’s diary for Oct 19, 1928 records: ‘Kaufmann . . . tells me crazy things about the Chief, his niece Geli, and Maurice . . . I understand everything, true and untrue.’ Heiden claims that the murder gang that killed Father Bernhard Stempfle of the Hieronymite Order who, "helped edit Mein Kampf and later talked too much, perhaps, about his knowledge of why Hitler’s love, Geli Raubal, committed suicide" and was found in the forest of Harlaching near Munich with his neck broken and three shots to the hear was led by Maurice during the Night of the Long Knives.
Incredibly given his supposed affair with Hitler's niece Hitler stood by and protected him even after his Jewish ancestry had been discovered by Himmler. All ϟϟ officers had to prove racial purity back to 1750, and it turned out that Maurice had Jewish ancestory. Himmler, who had always been jealous of Hitler's close friends from the early days of the Party, and especially of the lack of control he had over Hitler's inner bodyguards, was delighted and recommended that Maurice be expelled from the ϟϟ, along with other members of his family. To Himmler's annoyance however, the Führer stood by his old friend. In a secret letter written on the August 31, 1935, Hitler compelled Himmler to make an exception for Maurice and his brothers, who were allowed to stay in the ϟϟ.

Hitler's youngest personal private secretary (December 1942 to April 1945) and subject of the film Der Untergang, Traudl Junge. It was she who had She typed Hitler's last private and political will and testament in the Führerbunker a day and a half before his suicide. Junge later wrote that while she was playing with the Goebbels children on 30 April that
Suddenly... there is the sound of a shot, so loud, so close, that we all fall silent. It echoes on through all the rooms. 'That was a direct hit,' cried Helmut [Goebbels] with no idea how right he is. The Führer is dead now.
video
Her interview (with English subtitles) for the 2002 documentary film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary which drew much attention and how she appeared in Der Untergang as portrayed by Alexandra Maria Lara. According to Antony Beevor,
Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian disguised themselves as men. But the striking Tyrolean Constanze Manzialy became separated from them almost immediately. One account claims that she was seized by a huge Russian infantryman and assaulted by him and his comrades. Nobody knows whether she resorted to the cyanide ampoule which Hitler had presented in a brass container to each of his staff as going-away presents. In any case, she was never seen again. Both Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, despite alarming adventures, managed to reach the other side of the Elbe. (388) The Fall of Berlin 1945
The grave of Oswald Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936), best known for his book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), published in 1918 and 1922, where he proposed a new theory, according to which the lifespan of civilisations is limited and ultimately they decay. Some National Socialists such as Goebbels held Spengler as an intellectual precursor, whose Der Untergang des Abendlandes and Preussentum und Sozialismus were considered useful stepping stones for Hitler’s climb to power. but he was ostracised after 1933 for his pessimism about Germany's and Europe's future, his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority, and his critical work Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision) when he dared to articulate his skepticism about the future of National Socialism. He fell out of Hitler’s favour and the second part this work was not allowed to be published. In spite of this, Alfred Rosenberg wrote a lengthy obituary in the Volkiscber Beobachter at Spengler’s death in 1936.

Just outside Freising in Dürneck where I cycle past everyday to get to work, is where Ferdinand Marian died in a road accident in 1946. Described by David Stewart Hull as "a rather oily matinee idol with a marked resemblance to the late American comic Ernie Kovacs. Marian had a small following, but was no major star, although he was later to prove his genuine talents in several remarkable performances," he had been the star of history’s most incendiary film, Jud Süß despite having had an half-Jewish daughter from his first marriage and whose second wife had been married to a Jew, whom Marian hid in his house.
"I can't play that kind of role, I'm a bon vivant." Goebbels: "Who gives you your parts-the public or me? I know you want to go to Hollywood, but here you get more money than scientists, and yet you refuse to play the part the Fuhrer wants you to play. Don't tell me you won't play it, tell my aide." With this, Goebbels stomped out of the room. Marian, cowed, then cried after the departing Goebbels, "I'll do it!" (This scene was recorded for posterity by a secretary, according to Harlan, who said that it was revealed after the war. I have not been able to locate the document.) Marian, said Harlan, was so miserable that he went home, got drunk, and wrecked his apartment with an axe.

Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema 1933-1945 (165-166)
His losing fight to not appear in the film was the subject of the German-Austrian movie Jud Süss - Film ohne Gewissen of 2010.

Apparently he had been driving to Munich drunk with a borrowed car to collect denazification papers that with the permission by US film officer Eric Pleskow that would have allowed him to work again, having celebrated this news just beforehand. Other sources suggest that the accident was suicide:
Ferdinand Marian, who had taken the title role in Iud Suss, committed suicide in a car crash due to feelings of guilt . Hull (269)
The Hochbunker on the corner of Domagkstrasse across from the cemetery is now being redeveloped as shown in these two photos taken a year apart.


Stadelheim Gaol

Even before the failure of the Burgerbraukeller Putsch, Hitler had already served time in gaol for a five-month sentence beginning on June 4, 1922, for inciting a riot. He served this sentence here at Munich’s Stadelheim prison, a little known fact which he himself spoke of in his Table Talk (263) of January 30, 1942:
My first long term of imprisonment was at Stadelheim. As he led me into my cell, the warder amiably pointed out to me that a number of celebrated men had lived there before: Ludwig Thoma, for example—and likewise Kurt Eisner.
perhaps the most (in)famous name in Nazi cinema resides at: 
Leni Riefenstahl's grave in the Waldfriedhof; her grave is located at 509-W-4
Objectively, Leni Riefenstahl's films helped the Nazi cause. This does not mean that she was a personal monster, nor that every "moral" aspect of her films is deplorable. For her achievements on this level. she has been widely and no doubt justly condemned-if not always for the reasons stated by her critics-and it seems unlikely that history will reverse the verdict. But it is also necessary to assess her as an artist, accountable only to another kind of history, and it seems possible that on this level, film history will preserve the honours which have been given her.   
Hull (139-140)
NSDAP Publishing House
Thierschstraße 11-17, the former headquarters of the Reich Chief for the Press and President of the Reich Chamber of the Press. This was where Mein Kampf and other Nazi publications were produced, including the party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter,
an anti-Semitic gossip sheet which appeared twice a week. Exactly where the sixty thousand marks for its purchase came from was a secret which Hitler kept well, but it is known that Eckart and Roehm persuaded Major General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s commanding officer in the Reichswehr and himself a member of the party, to raise the sum. Most likely it came from Army secret funds. At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels.
1933 edition of Mein Kampf lent me by a student's mother. Her own grandfather had actually read the first book and I'd love to know what the exclamation marks and underlined passages refer to. He had been denied a promotion in a letter I saw due to his un-national socialist beliefs.

Reichsfinanzhof
Currently serving as the Bundesfinanzhof, the highest tax court, from 1933 the judgements here provided the legal justification for the expropriation of political opponents and Jews, the latter through the "Reichsfluchtsteuer". From the 1939 directory:
Reich Finance Court in Munich (Reichsfinanzhof zu München) Ismaningerstrasse 109; Telephone: 480255/6 The Reich Finance Court is the supreme court in Reich tax matters. In final appeal proceedings it hands down decisions in cases especially referred to it by law. The Senate of the Reich Finance Court, composed of five members, including the chairman, decides in legal complaint cases. At the final vote the case is decided by the votes of at least three members, including the chairman. The Reich Finance Court is the supreme authority in respect to real property taxes, in so far as the taxes are administered by state offices and Oberfinanzpräsidenten (Chief Finance Presidents). In addition, upon application of a Land (state) government, the Reich Finance Minister can designate the Reich Finance Court as the supreme court for the taxes of the states (Länder), communes, communal associations and religious societies.

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