Munich's Adolf-Hitler-Straße: The Corridor of Nazi Authority

Brienner Straße (formerly Adolf-Hitler-Straße)

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

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

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

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

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

The café shown during the 1930s and the same vantage point today. On February 12, 1933, a documented meeting of writers, including Erich Mühsam, took place at the café, where anti-Nazi sentiments were discreetly expressed, as noted in Mühsam’s diary which wasn't published until 1984. Such gatherings were cautious, given the increasing surveillance by the Gestapo, which had established a presence in Munich by March 1933. In fact, the café would become a meeting point for the SA and ϟϟ, which was particularly tragic for Mann, who loved going to his Luitpold. It would be frequented too by high-ranking Nazi officials, such as Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, who visited on April 15, 1934. The Nuremberg Laws, enacted on September 15, 1935, restricted Jewish access to public spaces, impacting Café Luitpold’s operations. The café’s Jewish manager, Heinrich Rosenberg, who had overseen operations since 1928, was forced to resign on October 10, 1935, and was replaced by Karl Fischer, a non-Jewish appointee. Jewish patronage, estimated at 200 visitors annually in 1932, dropped to fewer than 20 by 1937. The café’s staff, numbering sixty in 1932, was reduced to 45 by 1936 due to economic pressures and the exclusion of Jewish employees. Despite these changes, the café’s 20 halls, including a billiard room with 16 tables, continued to operate whilst its physical spaces were altered to comply with Nazi regulations. By December 1936, a portrait of Hitler was displayed in the main hall, a requirement imposed on public venues across Munich. The café’s menu, once renowned for its patisserie, faced challenges due to rationing, introduced on August 28, 1939, which cut coffee supplies to 10% of prewar levels by September 1941. Sugar shortages reduced confection production from 2,000 items daily in 1932 to 800 by 1942, with alcohol sales accounting for 35% of revenue by 1943. Likewise attendance decreased, with 1,500 visitors recorded in 1942 compared to 3,000 in 1932. On November 12, 1943, a private meeting of the White Rose group, including Sophie Scholl, took place in a secluded room, with fewer than eight participants discussing anti-Nazi strategies. These gatherings were rare, given the café’s visibility and Gestapo monitoring, which intensified after 1941. The café’s proximity to the Brown House heightened scrutiny, but its reputation as a cultural rather than political space allowed limited covert activity. By 1944, wartime pressures further reduced operations, with the café serving only 100 customers daily by January 1944, as staff shortages and conscription took effect. The café’s billiard room, once a lively hub, saw minimal use, with only four tables operational by 1943 due to maintenance challenges.
The war brought significant destruction to the café. On July 13, 1944, an Allied bombing raid demolished 80% of the building, leaving only the colonnaded passage partially intact. The attack, part of a campaign that damaged 70% of Munich’s city centre, destroyed 1,500 square metres of the café’s 2,000-square-metre structure. Then on the night of December 18, 1944, after a 45-minute bombardment, the lights in Café Luitpold went out although it continued operating in the basement; fortunately for the site the bombs only hit the entrance area leaving the auditorium relatively unscathed. It eventually reopened in 1962. Reconstruction began in 1946 but was delayed by material shortages, with costs estimated at 1.2 million Deutsche Marks. By October 1948, the café reopened as the Palmengarten, a simplified version of its prewar form, using 200 tonnes of salvaged marble for restoration. The postwar café served 150 customers daily, a modest recovery from its prewar peak, but its cultural significance endured, with events resuming by 1949.

Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus

Square for the Victims of National Socialism

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

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

 

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

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

Munich Gestapo Headquarters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other lion shown on the right has stood in front of the Catholic Academy on Mandlstraße since 1970. The plaque in front of the lion, installed in 1970, reads:

"DIE FREIHEIT VERTEIDIGEN" 

Dieser Löwe- 1848- befand sich einst vor dem Wittelsbacher Palais der späteren Gestapo-Zentrale. Seit 1970 steht der Löwe „Swaps“ vor der Katholischen Akademie in Bayern. Er soll erinnern an den Kath. Publizisten Fritz Gerlich der am 1. Juli 1934 in Dachau von den Nazis ermordet wurde.

   (“DEFEND FREEDOM” This lion – 1848 – once stood in front of the Wittelsbach Palace, which later became Gestapo headquarters. Since 1970 the lion “Swaps” has stood in front of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria. It is intended to commemorate the Catholic journalist Fritz Gerlich, who was murdered by the Nazis in Dachau on 1 July 1934.)  

The relocation to the academy in 1970 was deliberately chosen because the academy, founded in 1957 as a forum for free Catholic intellectual life, wished to place a visible anti-totalitarian symbol in its courtyard. The explicit reference to Gerlich, the Catholic journalist murdered in Dachau, underscores the academy’s commitment to remembering resistance against National Socialism. Gerlich had repeatedly warned against Hitler in his newspaper Der Gerade Weg and was one of the first prominent Catholic opponents arrested after the Machtergreifung in March 1933. As for the nickname 'Swaps', it comes from an humorous incident in the 1960s when the two lions were temporarily exchanged (geswappt) between the Katholische Akademie and the Bayerischer Landtag; the name stuck to this particular lion.

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

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

Irving (178)

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

House of German Doctors (Haus der Deutschen Ärzte)

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

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

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

Chad Ross (78-9) Naked Germany

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

Inside the inner courtyard in front of Bernhard Bleeker's Windsiele-brunnen created in 1935 and inaugurated on July 11, 1936, and as it appears in a Nazi-era postcard from the "Deutsche Plastik Underer Zeit" series from the Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein company. Bleeker probably received the order for the fountain from the medical centre association, which also commissioned him to paint a portrait of Hitler. On the edge of the pool stand three closely watched bronze greyhounds on their slender hind legs which seem to be picking up a scent: their heads are pointing upwards, their finely modelled ears laid back. Tendons and muscles clearly stand out. The athletic, filigree animals are contrastingly set against the massive, overhanging fountain column. According to Otto Josef Bistritzki, the dogs serve as a reminder of Hitler's demand that young men had to be “tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel and quick as greyhounds”.  It's not clear however why a connection to German youth, embodied by a dog fountain, should be made on the site of a medical centre. A reference to ancient healing arts would be more plausible: the dog was already an attribute of the healing god Aesculapius) in Greek and Roman antiquity. The animal was said to have healing effects with its saliva considered medicinal. This interpretation would also correspond to Bleeker's preference for using ancient iconographic models for his works. Bleeker also made two fish-shaped door handles on the main portal and two snakes with a chalice on topas well as a swastika band on the front of the building.
The fountain is again shown on the left during the inauguration of the House of German Doctors on November 3, 1935 after a large military parade and in Hitler’s presence. To mark the centennial of the “Munich Medical Association,” a commemorative booklet written by Dr. Hermann Kerschensteiner, director of Schwabing Hospital  at Kölner Platz 1 declared:

Now, in the Third Reich, social medicine expands to meet the scale of the times. The task is being undertaken not merely to think for the individual or the masses, but for the entire national community—for those who are, and for those who will be. Social medicine becomes racial biology, becomes eugenics. Nietzsche’s principle: ‘Not forward shall you propagate, but upward!’ shall be put into action; an immense goal is being vigorously pursued. In this field too, Munich has been a leader in recent decades.

Already on April 22, 1933, all “non-Aryan” panel doctors had their accreditation revoked. Henceforth, they were permitted to treat only private patients. Furthermore, the NSDAP announced its intent to “liberate” Germany from female medical students and doctors. By early 1934, married female doctors whose husbands earned “sufficiently” also lost their panel accreditation. On September 8, 1934, Hitler himself linked antisemitism and misogyny, stating: “The term ‘women’s emancipation’ is merely a word invented by Jewish intellect, and its content bears the stamp of that same spirit.”

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

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

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

Kraft durch Freude - München-Oberbayern

The site of the former headquarters of the Upper Bavarian branch of the German Labour Front (DAF) on the left, whose goal was to bring together in a single organisation all 'working Germans', regardless of their training, social status or actual profession, and indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology. The prestigious house at what was then Brienner Strasse 47 was built by Gustav von Cube in 1910 for the Jewish court antiquarian Jacques (Jakob) Rosenthal, born near Memmingen, as his company's headquarters. In 1935, Rosenthal had to sell his property to the German Labour Front, which housed the administration of the “Kraft durch Joy” organisation. Jacques Rosenthal died on October 5, 1937 in Munich; his wife Emma was able to emigrate to Zurich in December 1939. The DAF was made particularly attractive by the leisure activities and holidays offered by its Strength through Joy organisation (Kraft durch Freude- KdF). They were located here at Brienner Straße 26-28 when, 1935 the KdF took over the business premises and house of the Jewish antiquarian bookseller Jacques Rosenthal who was forced to sell the building to the Reich Leadership of the Nazi Party for well below its value. Rosenthal died on October 5, 1937 in Munich; his wife Emma emigrating to
Zurich in December 1939. The Deutsche Arbeitsfront functioned as an instrument of social control and the headquarters at Brienner Strasse 47 was a site where labour conflicts were suppressed and workers were compelled to participate in ideological indoctrination.  The building sustained damage during the Allied bombing raids that targeted the Maxvorstadt district in 1944 and 1945. Following the occupation of Munich by the US Army on April 30, 1945 the building was requisitioned by the military government. The Deutsche Arbeitsfront was dissolved as a criminal organisation and its assets were confiscated. The building was repurposed for use by the American occupation authorities or by the emerging Bavarian state administration. The current structure at this address does not retain visible features from the Nazi period. The lack of preserved architectural elements or commemorative markers at the site means that the history of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront headquarters has been largely erased from the physical landscape.

Next door shown on the right is the former site of the German Labour Front and the offices of the Gau for Munich-Upper Bavaria, formerly the Palais Matuschka. The DAF used the premises for the regional leadership of the NS-Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude and for the offices responsible for worker education programmes in Upper Bavaria. The façade of the Palais Matuschka received no large external eagle sculpture but featured internal modifications including the installation of a ceremonial hall with National Socialist banners and a portrait gallery of party leaders. The building served as the administrative centre for DAF membership records and contribution collection in the Munich area until 1945. During the air raids of 1944 the palace suffered roof damage but the main structure survived.
After the war the Palais Matuschka was one of the few Brienner Straße palaces to remain largely intact. It was returned to private ownership in 1950 and has since housed various commercial tenants. Today the building contains law firms, tax advisory offices, and the Honorary Consulate of the Principality of Monaco. The original Seidl interior decoration, including the grand staircase and stucco ceilings, was preserved during post-war repairs and remains visible in the entrance hall and principal rooms. The building is listed as a protected monument under the Bayerisches Denkmalschutzgesetz.

Karolinenplatz under snow with the Nazi eagle towering over the Braunes Haus (now replaced by the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München) from one of the temples of temple and today. During the Third Reich the square's significance derived entirely from its position along the processional route connecting the key sites of party mythology and power in central Munich. The annual commemorative march on November 9, retracing the route of the 1923 putsch from the Bürgerbräukeller across the Isar through the old town to the Feldherrnhalle and onward to the Ehrentempel at Königsplatz, passed directly through Karolinenplatz. Every motorcade, ceremonial procession, delegation arriving at the Führerbau by road from the city centre passed through or alongside it. The square was therefore dressed with party banners and lined with spectators and formations during these events, its 19th-century Bavarian military memorial temporarily absorbed into a landscape reorganised around Nazi symbolism and ritual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fest (316) The Face Of The Third Reich

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

Next door at Karolinenplatz 4 was the Untersuchung- und Schlichtungsausschuss (Investigation and Arbitration Committee), or USchlA. It was an internal Nazi Party tribunal that was established by Hitler in 1925 to settle intra-party problems and disputes. After the Nazi seizure of power, the Uschla was renamed the Supreme Party Court (Oberstes Parteigericht) in January 1934, under which title it functioned throughout the remainder of the Nazi regime until May 1945. It was the highest authority of the National Socialist party courts for conducting disciplinary proceedings. As historian Stuart B.T. Emmett, author of  Strafvollzugslager der SS und Polizei: Himmler's Wartime Institutions for the Detention of Waffen-SS and Polizei Criminals informed me,

The Nazi government published the Gesetz zur Sicherung der Einheit von Partei und Staat (Law to Safeguard the Unity of Party and State) on 1 December 1933. This law allowed the transformation of the NSDAP Parteigericht (Party Courts) into official legal institutions of the Nazi State.A hearing considered necessary to judge a complaint, the USchlA - typically consisting of a chairperson and two Laienrichter (lay judges without required legal training), recruited from local and district membership and not necessarily equipped with law degrees - met in a closed session with the opposing parties (absent legal counsel) and their witnesses. During the session, the judge and Laienrichter questioned the plaintiff, defendant, and the witnesses. After deliberation, the committee rendered its verdict. The ultimate punishment was permanent expulsion. SS leaders who sat in judgement as Laienrichter at the Oberstes Parteigericht wore an armband on their left arm that bore the title ‘Oberstes Parteigericht.’ 

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

On the left, the ruins of Palais Asbeck-Lotzbeck, located at Karolinenplatz 3, which had served as the Nazi accounting office (Reichrevisionsamt/ Rechnungsamt) until suffering damaged in 1944 and 1945 with its ruins torn down and made the site in 1955 of the Amerika-Haus when the ruins were finally removed. The Reichsrevisionsamt was the central auditing authority of the Nazi state responsible for overseeing the financial operations of government ministries party organisations and affiliated entities. The office was tasked with ensuring fiscal discipline and preventing corruption within the party apparatus although this function was subordinated to the political priorities of the regime. The Rechnungsamt or accounting office administered by the Reichsrevisionsamt at Karolinenplatz 3 processed the financial records of the regional party offices in Munich and Upper Bavaria. The staff within the building reviewed budgets expenditures and contracts for construction projects propaganda activities and the administration of party-controlled enterprises. The office also audited the finances of organisations such as the Deutsche Arbeitsfront the Hitler Youth and the NS-Volkswohlfahrt or Nazi People's Welfare Organisation. The control of financial flows was integral to the functioning of the totalitarian state and the offices at Karolinenplatz 3 represented a key node in this bureaucratic network.

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

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

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

The Amerika Haus flying the Canadian flag upside-down. Despite my antipathy towards this flag which replaced the red ensign under which so many Canadians died for Crown and Empire, it does represent a country instrumental in liberating Germany and Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. When informed of it, they replied that it was given to them by the Canadian consulate, could only be flown upside-down and that one shouldn't be "overly critical" about Germans choosing to fly the current flag of a country that lost 43, 600 men helping rid the world of fascism. Now openly partisan politically, its flags have been replaced by meaningless multicoloured flags and its CEO openly equates anti-Semitism in Germany with Roe v. Wade.
After the Americans took (the politically-correct lingo is "liberated") Munich, the American Reading Room was opened as part of the reeducation in October 1945 as the world's first American library of its kind in the Medical Reading Hall on Munich's Beethovenplatz. From January 1946, the institution was opened to the general public by its director, Stefan P. Munsing with the stated aim of bringing democracy closer to the people of Munich (using the United States as its example). On July 12, 1948, the America House opened in the former Führerbau. By January 26, 1950, Die Zeit wrote of how “in Munich it is the children who have every reason to love the Americans: in the 'America House' they have a library, film screenings, storytelling hours and singing and playing groups set up for the children that no one would want to be without." In 1957, the current building, built according to plans by the architects Karl Fischer and Franz Simm, was moved into the site of the Lotzbeck Palace on Karolinenplatz, which was destroyed in the war. After the Soviet dictatorships across Eastern Europe the United States Information Agency, the sponsor of the house, was dissolved. The American government then closed many of its 'America Houses' throughout Germany, including this one in 1997. On the initiative of the former program director Christoph Peters and with the support of the Bavarian state government, the newly founded Bavarian-American Centre (BAZ) took over management as a supporting association, financed by grants from the Bavaria state , donations from private individuals, associations, companies and the state capital of Munich, as well as grants from the American government. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler's Table Talk (359)

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

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

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

Irving (100) Hitler's War

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

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

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

 Zumbini (83) The Parthenon on the Danube

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

The obelisk shown during the Nazi era looking down Hitler-straße where it continued to stand unchanged in the centre of Karolinenplatz, retaining its bronze inscription honouring thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers fallen in the Russian campaign of 1812, with no additions or modifications to its structure or text despite the surrounding party's administrative expansions that incorporated over fifty buildings by 1938. During the annual commemorations of the November 9, 1923, putsch, starting from November 9, 1933, processions of up to twenty thousand participants, including party formations and youth groups, commenced at the Brown House on Brienner Strasse and proceeded westward past the obelisk towards the honour temples at Königsplatz, where Hitler inspected ranks and laid wreaths at the sarcophagi containing sixteen reinterred putsch participants. On November 9, 1935, during the inaugural transfer of remains from various cemeteries to the temples, the march route featured the obelisk encircled by one hundred twenty swastika flags arranged in a radial pattern, with torchbearers stationed at its base as Hitler passed, delivering remarks en route about the eternal watch of the fallen, stating that their blood cemented the movement's foundation. Similar decorations occurred on November 9, 1936, with wreaths of oak leaves draped over the obelisk's pedestal and illuminated by searchlights during evening ceremonies attended by forty thousand spectators, where Joseph Goebbels broadcast a speech emphasising the monument's alignment with the regime's martial heritage. For the Day of German Art on July 18, 1937, the obelisk received garlands of laurel and red banners bearing the party's eagle emblem, serving as a waypoint in a parade of two thousand floats and performers traversing from Haus der Deutschen Kunst along Brienner Strasse, with Hitler observing from a reviewing stand nearby and declaring in his address that such symbols bridged ancient valour to the new order. On July 16, 1938, during the subsequent art festival, the obelisk bore black and gold drapery with inscribed slogans like "Art is a mission demanding fanaticism," as quoted from Hitler's opening speech, amid a procession of fifteen hundred historical costumes passing it. In the putsch trial's closing arguments on April 1, 1924, Hitler invoked the vicinity's historical monuments, including the obelisk as emblematic of sacrificial struggles against foreign domination, asserting that the putsch mirrored the 1812 campaign's spirit in resisting the republic, proclaiming that future generations would erect memorials to the movement's martyrs akin to those on the square. By September 1943, protective measures included encasing the obelisk's lower section in two-metre-high wooden barriers filled with sand to mitigate blast damage from aerial bombings, which affected adjacent structures on October 19, 1944, but left the monument intact. During the March 15, 1939, celebration of the Anschluss anniversary, the obelisk featured illuminated iron crosses at its apex and base, with a military band positioned around it playing "Deutschland über Alles" as columns of five thousand troops marched past en route to a rally at Königsplatz. 

The view down Adolf Hitler strasse during Mussolini's visit on Spetember 25, 1937 and today. The entire side of the road has since been obliterated- Palais Degenfeld which served as the Vatican's consulate and one of the two 'temples of honour' now gone, leaving only the obelisk as a frame of reference. The event, starting around 14.00, lasted approximately one hour and focused on a military parade to showcase Nazi Germany’s strength and impress Mussolini, reinforcing the Rome-Berlin Axis. Mussolini and Hitler arrived in an open-topped Mercedes-Benz, escorted by 36,000 guards lining the route. The streets were adorned with red, white, and black swastika flags alongside Italian red, white, and green banners, complemented by Roman eagles and scarlet-gold festoons. The parade here, which began around noon, was a focal point of the visit, lasting approximately two hours. An estimated 100,000 spectators, including Nazi Party members, Hitler Youth, ϟϟ units, and local citizens, gathered to witness the event. The site was chosen deliberately to evoke the Nazi movement’s revolutionary origins as Mussolini and Hitler stood side by side on a small reviewing stand in front of the Temples of Honour. Mussolini, visibly impressed, remarked to Hitler, “It was wonderful! It couldn’t have been better in Italy.” The parade featured disciplined formations of ϟϟ and SA troops, whose synchronised marching and military displays underscored Germany’s martial prowess. Approximately 10,000 troops participated, including 3,000 ϟϟ members under Himmler’s command and 5,000 SA members led by Lutze. The parade’s logistical complexity involved 1,000 municipal workers over two weeks, erecting 300 temporary stands for spectators. The event’s 2,000-meter route through Königsplatz was lined with 50,000 swastika and Italian flags, creating a visual unity of the two regimes. Mussolini’s 10-minute speech, delivered at 13.30, was translated into German by Attolico, reaching 80,000 listeners directly and 2 million via radio. Hitler’s response, lasting five minutes, was similarly broadcast, with both leaders emphasising anti-communist themes. The parade’s 10,000 troops included 1,500 ϟϟ Leibstandarte members, whose elite status impressed Mussolini, as noted by Ciano in a September 25, 1937, dispatch. The event’s cost, including 500,000 Reichsmarks for decorations, was justified by Goebbels as “a small price for eternal friendship.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Adolf Hitler- The Life Of The Leader

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

 H. Nicolai, Mein Kampf ums Recht.

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

During its period as the Nazi Party headquarters, the building was closely guarded. Because authorities sometimes brought arrested individuals to the Brown House for questioning, the structure also earned the nickname "Denuntiature," a pun combining the "act of denunciation" and the papal nunciature across the street.
In April 1945 and today. The Brown House was greatly damaged by Royal Air Force bombs on March 9–10, 1943, and in October later that year and by the time of its fall to the American Army in 1945, it was a mere shell of its former self. The rubble was cleared away in 1947, leaving an empty lot. It was eventually razed to the ground in 1947 and the plot remained empty for nearly 75 years.  It had proved a controversial choice as to what the final name of the new documentation centre would be. At the decisive city council meeting in March 2011, the city's cultural department and the SPD criticised the abbreviation 'NS' because it stood for 'National Socialism' and thus was a term of choice of the Nazis. The President of the Orthodox Jewish Community, Charlotte Knobloch, agreed, stating that that the term 'NS' in this context was "absolutely inappropriate," since it was derived from the culprits' language. She's the one, mind, who somehow has the power not to allow any stolpersteine in Munich regardless of whether the person commemorated was an orthodox Jew, homosexual, T4 victim, politician, etc. Moreover, 'NS' apparently would not have been a recognisable term abroad. Cultural adviser Hans-Georg-Küppers (SPD) went so far as to suggest some might think it would have been seen not as a Documentation Centre but actually a "National Socialist Centre."  However, the Political Advisory Council and the Initiative Committee had unanimously voted in favour of the name "NS Documentation Centre" with the scientific advisory board stating that it could not be imagined that anyone would assume that Munich would build a centre for the glorification of the Nazi era with Siegfried Benker of the Green Party declaring that "[e]ven the dumbest neo-Nazi understands that this is about the analysis of terror."

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

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

In 2022 the new director of the centre, its mission to simply document the evils of the Nazi regime now judged not sexy enough, went full-out Woke and decided to expand its scope by imposing someone's artistic and ideological pretensions over horrific images of people being hanged and shot whilst visitors were forced to listen to a woman with a North American accent constantly repeating the words "light touch". Interspersed amidst displays of hangings, massacres and bestiality were modern erotic cartoons, poems and images. Here on the right it seems to imply that Ernst Rohm's homosexuality led to his death during the Night of the Long Knives. Given that the idea of 'Queer' is still evolving (it's never been explained to me what it now is supposed to mean or why it deserves respect and special attention), to have this take over every space pretensiously demanding "to be seen" amidst obscene cartoons over documentation of the Holocaust whilst visitors made their way calls into question the focus of a museum ostensibly dedicated to documenting the crimes of the Nazi regime. As an aside, as one of my students told me when I took my class to the monument to persecuted homosexuals, there's more to homosexuality than just sex which this latest victim of virtue signalling fails to recognise. For a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality in the Third Reich, check out a student's research paper on the subject which received an 'A' from the International Baccalauerate. Meanwhile the current director continues to reject the stated purpose of the site to clear out the entire first floor of anything to do with the history of Nazism in Munich to promote pretentious contemporary art exhibitions in the service of promoting her own ideology.

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

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

Continuing through Konigsplatz through the Propylaeon to Brienner Straße 40 was the NSKK Führungshauptamt, located then at Adolf-Hitler-Straße 41 which served as the administrative hub of the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, established April 1, 1931, under Adolf Hühnlein, a Beer Hall Putsch veteran. By 1939, the NSKK grew to 350,000 members, 80% trained as drivers or mechanics, managing motorised transport and propaganda. This neoclassical building, repurposed in 1933, housed offices, a communications centre with ten teleprinters by 1941, and a map room. Near Königsplatz, it supported propaganda events like the July 10, 1938, Tag der Deutschen Kunst, displaying 500 vehicles for 50,000 spectators. The headquarters issued a March 15, 1938, directive for a 6-month training programme (200 hours driving, 100 hours ideology), deploying 2,500 vehicles during the Anschluss. By 1937, it employed 120 staff, including 30 officers, and managed 20,000 vehicles by 1940. It supported Operation Barbarossa with 15,000 drivers, moving 3 million tonnes of supplies, though 12% of vehicles were lost. A 1935 racial policy rejected 5,000 non-Aryan applicants by 1939. The NSKK facilitated deportations, using 600 vehicles in Munich from 1941–1943 to transport 4,000 Jews to camps like Dachau, under officers like Wilhelm Brückner. The headquarters collaborated with BMW and Opel, securing 2,000 vehicles via contracts signed March 1, 1936. It issued 100,000 driver permits by 1940, with 95% trained at NSKK facilities. The NSKK allocated 500,000 Reichsmarks yearly for motorsport propaganda, including the July 25, 1937, German Grand Prix, won by Rudolf Caracciola before 300,000 spectators. The building, damaged in a 1944 bombing, operated until American forces seized it on April 30, 1945. 

Munich's Adolf-Hitler-Straße history Schellingstraße Nazi events then and now current state of Adolf-Hitler-Straße site virtual tours 2025 can I visit today what happened during WWII preservation efforts Munich street names map drone footage 2025 Holocaust education at Schellingstraße ethical debates on touring Nazi sites augmented reality experiences of Munich history contemporary significance of Adolf-Hitler-Straße guided tours of Nazi-era locations digital archives of Schellingstraße events underground structures near Munich sites memorial sites in Munich interactive timelines of Nazi rallies 1930s to now virtual reality reconstructions of speeches current excavations and restorations drone footage of Adolf-Hitler-Straße 2025 historical photos then and now augmented reality apps for Nazi sites educational resources on Munich's streets post-war renaming modern exhibits at Nazi-related locations