Remaining Nazi Sites around Munich (3)

Hitler's painting of the Hofbräuhaus and standing in front today. The Hofbräuhaus in Munich holds a significant place in the history of the Nazi Party. Established in 1589, this beer hall became a focal point for political gatherings, particularly for Hitler and his Nazi Party. It was here on April 13, 1919 (Palm Sunday) that the soldiers' councils proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic in the festsaal. The Hofbräuhaus was one of the beer halls used by the Nazi Party for functions and holds a particular significance in its mythology. The DAP—the future Nazi Party—held its first mass meeting there on October 16, 1919—less than a year after the war’s end—with an audience of seventy people. On February 24, 1920, in its Festival Hall, Hitler presented the Twenty-five Points that formed the political base of the Nazis—this time with two thousand in attendance. During this event, Hitler introduced the party's 25-point programme, a foundational document that outlined the party's ideological stance and political objectives. The choice of the Hofbräuhaus for such a seminal event was strategic; its central location and popularity made it an ideal venue for attracting a large audience and disseminating propaganda.

Adolf Reich's Hofbräuhaus- Schwemme of 1939 on the right, showing a Wehrmacht soldier sitting alone and seemingly lost in his thoughts as the rest throw themselves into merriment upon the outbreak of the war in the Aufgabeort (Place of Consignment) which is immediately at the entrance on the left when one walks in. The painting itself is in the possession of the owner of the German Art Gallery (like 90% of the works found on the site) and is for sale for € 9.000. A number of Reich's paintings are strewn throughout this site, perhaps most famously being Das größere Opfer. He had moved from Vienna to Munich in 1935, and from 1938 his paintings were exhibited at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst.

During a school tour in 2013.

On Friday, August 13 1920, Hitler publicly denounced the Jews for the first time in his Why We Are Antisemites speech, demanding their removal from Germany altogether. On November 4, 1921, there was a massive fight between the Nazis and their opponents in the Hofbrauhaus, the so-called "Feuertaufe der SA," but Hitler managed to complete his address, despite the chaos of smashed tables and chairs and hurled beer mugs all about him. On February 25, 1939, Martin Bormann wrote to Bavarian Prime Minister Ludwig Siebert, that Hitler ordered that the Hofbräuhaus should no longer bear the "royal" designation but its official name should in the future be "Das Hofbräuhaus zu München". The Hofbräuhaus was actually renamed, but instead became "Staatliches Hofbräuhaus".

As it appeared after the war on the left. Hitler referred in his address to the first assembly that was held at the Hofbräuhaus:

It was the first major rally our Movement had ever held in which we can say that the Volk participated. For the first time the internal organisation was tested in a large hall, and it worked. For the first time people came to us who wanted to listen. We certainly had not lacked the courage to summon the masses, but for a long time the masses lacked the courage to hear our call.
At that first rally we announced our twenty-five points—which our opponents ridiculed—for the first time, to implement them item for item in the years thereafter. And finally, I myself spoke to a large crowd of people for the first time in this hall, although someone had told me I had any number of talents, but speaking was not one of them. I had to assert myself at that large rally, which was not as well-mannered as it is today.
Later my opponents conceived of the idea of calling me “the drummer” for years afterwards. In any case, that first rally was significant in that it was the first mass rally of our Party, it announced our programme and produced a new speaker.

This plaque (shown here during and after the war) commemorated Hitler's speech of February 24, 1920 in which he laid out the goals of the new Nazi Party in his 25 point programme, an event later declared to have been the founding session of the Nazi Party.

The principles were incorporated in the party programme that Hitler together with Anton Drexler and Gottfried Feder wrote out in twenty-five points and that Hitler presented to a meeting of February 24, 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus. They had appealed greatly to the party constituency even though they had no prospect whatever of being realised in any foreseeable future. The party's programme enunciated among other things the right to self-determination for Germany, with equal treatment and land and colonies to feed the German people. The Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain were to be abrogated. Only racial Germans could be citizens, and racial Germans were men and women of German blood regardless of religion, so no Jew could be a Volks comrade. Battle would be waged against the corruption of the parliamentary system based on party considerations, which took no account of character and ability. Every citizen had the same rights and duties; the general need came before the individual need; only a man who worked was entitled to an income; war profits were to be confiscated, the serfdom of interest broken. Profiteers, common criminals, and black marketers were to be executed. Trusts already nationalised were to remain so. In the interest of a healthy middle class, the party platform declared that big department stores would be communalised. It demanded land reform and the abolition of speculation in land. Poor children were to be educated by the state, child labour was to be prohibited, and health services were to be provided for mothers and children and young people. A people's army was to replace mercenary troops, and a strong central authority was to be established with complete authority over the Reich and its organisations.

The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism , Eugene Davidson (130-1)

The plaque can be seen behind the 'blood flag' behind Hitler on left, speaking in the Hofbrauhaus on February 24, 1940 on the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Nazi Party, and Adolph Wagner shown speaking in the centre. Hitler's speech can be read here. I'm standing at the location today with the plaque being replaced with a fire escape sign. Kershaw argues that the Hofbräuhaus served as a "propaganda machine" for the Nazis. The beer hall's large gathering space allowed for the mobilisation of supporters and the dissemination of Nazi ideology. Hitler's oratorical skills were particularly effective in such a setting, where he could engage directly with the public and sway opinions. The Hofbräuhaus thus became a platform for Hitler to gain political traction and build a following in the early years of the Nazi Party's existence. A fight that broke out on November 4 1921 made the site a Nazi shrine as it was claimed that the SA had met its baptism of fire. As Hitler wrote at the beginning of Chapter VI, The First Period of our Struggle in Mein Kampf,

 During that period the hall of the Hofbrau Haus in Munich acquired for us, National Socialists, a sort of mystic significance. Every week there was a meeting, almost always in that hall, and each time the hall was better filled than on the former occasion, and our public more attentive.

The Festsaal on the third floor where, in 1920, the Nazi Party held its first meeting. The following year on November 4 Hitler spoke to a crowd of two thousand, a number of whom belonged to the Social Democrats, concerning an assassination attempt on one of the SPD's spokesmen, Erhard Auer. The ensuing clash is recounted by Hitler in Chapter VII: The Struggle with the Red Front in the Second Volume of Mein Kampf:

In the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus I always stood on one of the long sides of the hall and my platform was a beer table. And so I was actually in the midst of the people. Perhaps this circumstance contributed to creating in this hall a mood such as I have never found anywhere else. In front of me, especially to the left of me, only enemies were sitting and standing. They were all robust men and young fellows in large part from the Maffei factory, from Kustermann's, from the Isaria Meter Works, etc. Along the left wall they had pushed ahead close to my table and were beginning to collect beer mugs; that is, they kept ordering beer and putting the empty mugs under the table. In this way, whole batteries grew up and it would have surprised me if all had ended well this time...

The presence of the SA at the Hofbräuhaus underscored the venue's importance as a hub for both the ideological and operational aspects of the Nazi movement. Fest contends that the Hofbräuhaus was instrumental in creating a sense of community and belonging among Nazi Party members. The beer hall culture, characterised by camaraderie and social interaction, facilitated networking among party members and sympathisers. This sense of community was vital for the Nazi Party's grassroots organising and recruitment efforts. The Hofbräuhaus thus served as more than just a physical space; it was a symbol of the party's identity and a catalyst for its growth.

Until a few years ago, above each lamp the Bavarian flag was seen in the form of a swastika, painted by Hitler's supporters after he took power. After the war the owners found they couldn't paint over them as the swastikas were still visible after several coats of paint, and so decided to 'decorate' them as oddly shaped Bavarian flags. Recently the shape itself was altered as seen in the before-and-after photos above. The ceiling paintings were the work of Hermann Kaspar, a well-known Nazi artist whose work was featured in the monumental mosaic frieze on the gallery walls in the congress hall of Munich's Deutsches Museum in 1935 as well as the remaining swastika-decked ceiling mosaic over the colonnades of the Haus der Kunst. With sculptor Richard Knecht he'd been responsible for the overall design of the marches and parades for the “Day of German Art ” in Munich in 1937 and 1938. At the parade of his kitschy floats, Kaspar was allowed to sit right next to Hitler. Works by Kaspar were also shown in the 1944 art exhibition Deutsche Künstler und die ϟϟ in Breslau organised by Himmler and the main office of the ϟϟ. Kaspar was on the God-gifted list in 1944. In the late 1960s, he was seen as an example of failure to denazify because, despite his initial dismissal from the Americans, he remained an academy professor and received numerous government contracts. The ceiling of the Hofbrauhaus had suffered war damage in 1945 and was not painted until 1965. Since then Kaspar's painting became a victim of tobacco smoke and its restoration took place after the smoking ban from 2007.
According to Wikipedia, the Hofbrauhaus "also held a 1889 baby photo of Hitler as recent [sic] as 2006" and furthermore, according to a post at http://worldwartwozone.com: "On the left hand side of the main hall is small room with sort of a racks where locals can keep their beer steins. They wash them in a copper sink, then put into mailbox size padlocked lockers. When I visited Hofbrauhaus one of the locals told us that Hitler's stein is still there. No one knows which one it is, but is worshipped. Indeed one of the racks was decorated with green applications. Apparently faithful locals decorate it every year before Adi's birthday - 20th April." Given that Hitler was supposedly a teetotaller, it's hard to credit that... 

Although Hitler indeed consumed little alcohol and did not smoke, his image as a vegetarian teetotaler was carefully crafted propaganda used, in the words of Ian Kershaw, to evoke the image of of a “Führer without sin.” Such a cultivated reputation was one element in an effort to portray Hitler as the sober, well-intentioned, moderate leader of a Nazi state that took extreme actions. it helps to explain why Hitler's personal popularity remained elevated when Germans' opinion of the Nazi Party began to decline. although Hitler did not allow himself to be seen drinking, he never avoided association with the trappings of alcohol that make up everyday German life, and which devout Mormons avoided by the early twentieth century. Faithful Latterday Saints would not be seen in a tavern, but Hitler gave one of his most famous speeches at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich in 1923.

Nelson (139) Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany

   The day Hitler committed suicide and now showing the entrance when the site served as the Command Post for the American 45th Division, most associated with the Oklahoma Army National Guard. It was reactivated and deployed in late June 1943 to North Africa and subsequently took part in various campaigns in Europe under the command of Major General Robert T. Frederick when the division was involved in taking several cities and faced intense resistance from enemy forces. After crossing the Rhine, its troops had advanced along the Main towards Franconia and fought fierce battles for Aschaffenburg from late March to mid-April. During the Battle of Nuremberg which took place from April 16-20, the city was taken. On April 29, 1945, the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division liberated the Dachau concentration camp. During the war the Hofbräuhaus was almost completely destroyed by air raids starting on the night of April 25, 1944 followed by three more air raids. Only a part of the Schwemme, the ground floor, remained intact although several hundred mugs in the cellars of the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl remained intact from where they were recovered and stacked up. Nevertheless, the rest of the beer hall, and most of the buildings on the Platzi, lay in ruins. For example, the Talbruck gate tower near the Hofbräuhaus had been completely destroyed by 1945, and less than 3% of Munich's buildings remained unscathed from Allied carpet bombing, which had targeted the city centre. Only months earlier on February 24 the Nazi Old Guard had gathered in the partially wrecked Hofbrauhaus for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the party programme. Although not present, Hitler sent the following message: “Twenty-five years ago | prophesied the victory of the movement; today I prophesy the victory of the German Reich!” That same month Mayor Fiehler admitted that “Munich was especially hard hit by terror attacks on December 17, 1944 and January 7, 1945, and must now be regarded as one of the most devastated cities in the Reich. Many unique sites much loved by Münchners and visitors have been destroyed... [however] you can be sure that after our victory Munich will be rebuilt according to the great plans of the Führer, whilst retaining historical features and idiosyncrasies.” It wasn't until 1958 on the occasion of Munich's 800th anniversary that the building's reconstruction was completed with the reopening of the ballroom. This came at a time when the subject of Munich's reconstruction was fought over between the traditionalists who demanded that the city be rebuilt as close as possible to what it had been before the war and the modernisers who in turn demanded that the old, bombed out buildings be replaced with the same dreary, soulless modern structures found throughout postwar Europe in order to permanently mark the destruction Hitler had brought to the city.

In June 1945 the occupation authorities banned the brewing of beer to conserve grain and took over most of the major beer halls and breweries in the city. The Bavarian authorities tried to convince the military authorities that beer was not a luxury item but a major staple of the Bavarian diet which provided much nutrition, but they had little success. “Dunnbier” and “Hefe-sud” a poor, non-alcoholic substitute, made their debut, at least until the military authorities got the breweries running again and the food situation stabilised.” Ironically, perhaps, American troops, often accompanied by attractive Munich women, drank so much beer in their off hours, in some cases paying with American dollars, that they inadvertently resurrected the Munich food and beer industry in spite of military government prohibitions. They also clearly ignored the “non-fraternisation” orders by finding German girlfriends so quickly. The Bürgerbraukeller, for example, now became a popular American canteen.”

 Jeffrey S. Gaab (86) Hofbrauhaus & History— Beer, Culture, & Politics

Nearby is the Pfeffermühle, founded by Erika and Klaus Mann in January 1933 which satirised the Nazis before the two emigrated to New York after Hitler's seizure of power. Erika defined clearly the aims of his political-satirical cabaret: “Wir wollten die Nazis bekämpfen." Only a few weeks after its highly successful première, the troupe had to flee from the Nazis to resume as an exile cabaret on September 30, 1933 in Zurich at the Hotel Hirschen. The second exile programme was launched on January 1, 1934, with clearer references to the Nazis followed by the third and most biting programme on October 3, 1934 in Basel. One performance ended up triggering riots by Swiss Nazis, so that the performances could only be continued under police protection. The performances had attracted criticism from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1934, and various cantons even banned its performances. When Nazi pressure became too strong, Erika tried to reëstablish The Peppermill in New York at the start of 1937 without much success.

Hitler's 1914 Alten Residenz painting, the Alter Hof, which was home to Bavarian dukes, electors and kings. Destroyed during the wartime bombing, how it appears today with some of my Grade 11 and 12 Bavarian International School history students. In 1935 Hitler gave the painting as a fiftieth birthday present to his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Hoffmann came to own at least four of Hitler's watercolours – one was purchased in 1944, which provoked the remark from Hitler that it would have been "insane" to have paid more than 150 or 200 marks for it, at most. The painting itself shows its inner courtyard (bombed in 1944) and has been described as illustrating both Hitler's style and mastery of watercolour to create a strict delineation of the building whilst on the left presenting two soft standing trees to contrast the harsh lines of the house. In many of Hitler's watercolours, Charles Snyder notes the "detailed attention to humble structures surrounded by water and vegetation, [but] the architecture is of the prime importance... Note plant life, especially leaves on trees. Leaves are typically daubed and dappled in with little regard for accuracy or realism, often used to 'frame' the subject". 

On the left is is the entrance into the Alter Hof from Burgstrasse, shown in 1942 amidst the ruins. The complex was partially destroyed during the war and rebuilt after 1950, initially using simple means on the north and east sides (Lorenzistock, Pfisterstock and Brunnenstock). The southern and western wings (Burgstock and Zwingerstock), on the other hand, still have the old roof structures and numerous historical details.

One of Hitler's own favourites was the courtyard of the Old Residenz. He must have done a good many of these as well, and presented one to Heinrich Hoffmann for his fiftieth birthday in 1935. To Hoffmann's daughter, Henriette von Schirach, he once commented that he had often washed out his paintbrushes in the courtyard fountain there.

Frederick Spotts (131) Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

 The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich and a few other paintings by Hitler are archived in the basement of the Army Centre of Military History in Washington, D.C., never shown to the public eye because of their controversial nature for fear of offending the most sensitive souls who might accidentally be in the area.

 Looking down Burgstraße from the other direction towards Marienplatz with the altes rathaus in the background, this time shown from 1904 and today. There are a couple of locations on this street associated with Mozart- next door to the Weinstadl, the oldest surviving town house in Munich, Mozart composed the opera Idomeneo which premièred on January 29, 1781 in the Munich Residenztheater. Commenting on it, Elector Karl Theodor is said to have said to Mozart how “[o]ne should not think that there is something so big in such a small head.” In September 2006, a production of Idomeneo was cancelled at the Deutsche Oper Berlin due to fear of Islamic terrorists after it was felt necessary by the directors to display the severed head of Mohammed next to the bloody heads of Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon, not to stir up interest and insult people who take such characters seriously, but apparently to signal that the subjugation of people through and in religions must be overcome. Another example of an artist's work being desecrated by Woke pretensions. Mozart also lived at number 7 for a short period in 1780 where he completed Idomeneo from November to December of the year. A panel attached to the façade of the house on the corner of Altenhofstraße commemorates this. At number 8 directly opposite the Weinstadel, the architect Francois Cuvilliés lived and died. Again, a memorial plaque on the facade commemorates this. In 1715 Cuvilliés arrived at the court of Elector Max Emanuel in Munich and a decade later was given the office of court architect. Between 1738 and 1756, he published more than fifty books on the interior of rooms and on design elements such as wall panels, ceilings, furnishings and wrought-iron decoration objects. The engravings in these books helped to spread the taste and style of the Rococo throughout Europe.

 Munich's opera house during the Day of German Art of July 18, 1937.  The next year saw Lohengrin performed here as the showcase event for the Tag der Deutschen Kunst, specifically chosen by Hitler. as popular for Nazi representational events. The “God-sent leader” Lohengrin was now made to declare that "Because of the Grail I was chosen to fight", a parallel to the "leader sent by God to the German people" of Hitler. The opera house's programme notes included the following Lohengrin quote under an almost full-length portrait of Hitler: "I rightly recognise the power / That brought you to this country / So you come from God." In addition, the historical Heinrich I appeared in the encore, providing comparisons between the "Third Reich" in relation to the "First Reich ” with the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation' portrayed in pseudo-historical terms. The cult carried out around Heinrich I went so far that Himmler had the bones of the king excavated in order to bury them again in 1936 in Quedlinburg in a pompous ceremony. 

 

Two supposed Hitler paintings of the Munich Opera House at Max-Joseph Platz. That on the right is a 25" by 19-3/4" painting of the same building by Hitler just after a rainstorm. It was painted in München in the first half of 1914, when Hitler lived at the Josef Popp residence at 34/III Schleissheimerstraße. Popp in an interview several years later recalled:

He began his painting straight away and stuck to his work for hours. In a couple of days I saw two lovely pictures finished and lying on the table, one of the cathedral and the other of the Theatinerkirche. After that my lodger [Hitler] used to go out early of a morning with his portfolio under his arm in search of customers.

The statue in both paintings in the middle of the square is the Max Joseph Monument to King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria by Christian Daniel Rauch. It was only erected in 1835, ten years after the king's death because he refused to be immortalised in a seated position.

Unity Mitford cycling in front of the opera house with my bike sporting the red ensign today. Described by the British Secret Services as “more Nazi than the Nazis,” Mitford was praised by Hitler as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood.” Moving to Munich in 1934 where she set about stalking Hitler by 

going to the Osteria Bavaria restaurant and sit waiting for Hitler. She'd sit there all day long with her book and read. She'd say, I don't want to make a fool of myself being alone there, and so she'd ask me to go along to keep her company, to have lunch or a coffee. Often Hitler was there. People came and went. She would place herself so that he invariably had to walk by her, she was drawing attention to herself, not obnoxiously but enough to make one slightly embarrassed. But the whole point was to attract his attention. She'd talk more loudly or drop a book. And it paid off.

She eventually met him at the Osteria Bavaria on Schellingstrasse 62 on February 9, 1935. From then on she is estimated to have met with Hitler 140 times, with him  gifting her a box at the Olympic Games in 1936, attending the Nuremberg rallies and having her chauffeured to the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. When he announced the annexation of his homeland to the German Reich, she was allowed to stand next to him. When England declared war on Germany she shot herself in the head in the English Garden, eventually dying in England by her mother and sister in 1948.

After the bombing of the night of October 3, 1943 and standing in front today. The evening before, Meinhard von Zallinger had conducted a performance of Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland. The destruction dealt a great blow to the city of Munich and its many opera lovers, leaving Richard Strauss shocked, and his grief was the starting point for his Metamorphoses for 23 solo strings. After the war, it was decided to reconstruct the old theatre. Gerhard Moritz Graubner and Karl Fischer led the reconstruction from 1958 to 1963, which cost 62 million Deutschmarks and was partly covered by donations from the public. The stage was changed and has since become one of the largest opera stages in the world, surpassed only by the Opéra Bastille in Paris and the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw. The gable fields of the main façade were originally decorated with paintings by Ludwig Schwanthaler in 1840 and replaced by mosaics in 1894. The upper mosaic "Pegasus and the Hora" has managed to be preserved but the lower mosaic "Apollo and the Muses"  was destroyed in the war and replaced in 1972 by a modern group of figures by Georg Brenninger. On November 21, 1963, the reopening was celebrated with a performance of the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss. Two days later the first public performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg followed, again under the direction of Keilberth in front of guests including Maximilian Schell, Herbert von Karajan and the Shah of Persia.

Looking at what was left of the Palais Toerring-Jettenbach seen from Max-Joseph Platz which was built according to plans by the Bavarian court architect Leo von Klenze between 1835 and 1838 based on the model of the Foundling Hospital in Florence. The classicist building is located opposite the Königsbau of the Munich Residence on the corner of Maximilianstrasse and Residenzstrasse and is also known as the former main or residence post office. As can be seen here, the palace was badly damaged in the war with the baroque parts largely destroyed. The western façade was never restored but rather was rebuilt in a 'modern style' with porthole windows, with the baroque portal being moved inside in front of the ticket hall. Apparently the palace belongs to the Frankfurt company Opera Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG which in turn is owned by a company in the British Virgin Islands through several Luxembourg companies apparently under the ægis of Russian businessman Ruslan Yevgenyevich Goryukhin.

On the right is the Residenz Königsbau looking from the opposite direction in 1946 and with Drake Winston today from the steps of the opera house. From 1508 to 1918 this was the seat of the dukes, electors and kings of Bavaria from the House of Wittelsbach. During the wartime air raids on Munich, the Residence was almost completely destroyed, especially in 1944 when of its 23,500 m² of roof area, only 50 m² remained intact. It was largely reconstructed in the decades that followed, thanks mainly to the fact that almost all of the furniture and a large part of the wall and ceiling panelling could be removed before the first bombing raids, otherwise, reconstruction in its current form would have been unthinkable.

A couple of examples of the extensive reconstruction of the Residenz that has taken place since it was destroyed in the March 18, 1944 bombing- here Drake Winston is in the Antiquarium and as it appeared after the RAF launched 958 tonnes of explosive and incendiary bombs on Munich. The National Theatre was completely destroyed; even the iron stage construction melted in the heat and by the next morning only the perimeter walls  remained.  Richard Strauss, who saw the premiere of his last opera "Capriccio" here, described after looking at the heap of rubble how "it was the biggest disaster that has ever broken into my life; there is no comfort." The Residenz had become the possession of ϟϟ Brigade Commander Christian Weber, described by Otto Strasser as an "ape-like creature" and "the most despicable of Hitler's underlings". He was last heard from in May 1945 and hasn't been fully clarified in the archives to this day.

A city councilman, Weber had been effectively the leader of the city following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, becoming a hated figure in the city, particularly amongst the middle classes, as exemplifying Nazi corruption given that this former hotel bellboy had come to own a number of hotels, villas, petrol stations, a brewery, the city's racecourse (which he kept open during the war against the strenuous objections of Gauleiter Paul Giesler) and bus service as well as a home in the Residenz. In 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, Weber was amongst the ϟϟ men who travelled to Bad Wiessee to purge the SA leadership. Hitler personally rewarded him for his involvement by promoting him to the rank of ϟϟ-Oberführer. From 1936 to 1939, Weber organised the notorious "Night of the Amazons" carnivals at schloß Nymphenburg, which featured parades of topless variety show girls dressed only in skin-coloured panties. On Kristallnacht he took a group of ϟϟ men, including Hitler's future brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein, to Planegg where they ransacked the estate of Jewish nobleman Baron Rudolf Hirsch which Weber then took over for himself. He would eventually die under mysterious circumstances in 1945 after being arrested by the United States army near Starnberg.

  

Max-Joseph-Platz then and now; during the Beer Hall Putsch the putschists had marched through Marienplatz, continued down Weinstraße through Perusastraße into this square and from it down Residenzstraße, shown both from the time of the putsch and immediately after the war from the corner of the Residenz, with Odeonsplatz at the very end. After the war the appearance of this site was affected by the construction of an underground car park under the square. In 1963, the remaining underground remains of the Franciscan monastery and its cemetery were cleared away without any archaeological investigation. The New Residence Theatre with a modern loggia was built between the Royal Building and the National Theatre in place of the Cuvilliés Theatre, whose magnificent Rococo elements were saved from destruction and installed in the pharmacy floor of the Residence but adapted to the architectural style of the National Theatre. At the war-damaged Palais Toerring-Jettenbach, only the classicist north façade was reconstructed by Klenze, but not the rococo west facade by Gunetzrhainer. In the case of the burned-out National Theatre, the lower gable mosaic wasn't restored during the reconstruction, but the gap was later filled with the usual 'modernist' stone figures. In 1964, the underground car park with 500 parking spaces was opened under Max-Joseph-Platz, the access to which makes it very difficult to redesign the square and create a pedestrian zone. 

 
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 organisation, 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.

Alan Baker, Invisible Eagle: The Hidden History of Nazi Occultism

It was here in March 13, 1935 that 

Lieutenant-Colonel Hoßbach, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, was ordered to present himself the next morning in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich. When he arrived, Hitler was still in bed. Only shortly before midday was the military adjutant summoned to be told that the Führer had decided to reintroduce conscription in the immediate future – a move which would in the eyes of the entire world graphically demonstrate Germany’s newly regained autonomy and cast aside the military restrictions of Versailles. 

Kershaw Hitler 

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.

(57) Lying About Hitler

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. Later that year after attending the midnight oath-taking ceremony for SS candidates on Odeonsplatz, Himmler retired here where he followed the news of the events of Kristallnacht.  

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.

She got up briskly. 'I suppose I've got to get used to doing what you say. I'll drive to Munich. To the Vier Jahreszeiten. It's my favourite hotel in the world. I'll wait for you there. They know me. They'll take me in without any luggage. Everything's at Samaden. I'll just have to send out for a toothbrush and stay in bed for two days until I can go out and get some things. You'll telephone me? Talk to me? When can we get married? I must tell Papa. He'll be terribly excited.'

'Let's get married in Munich. At the Consulate. I've got a kind of diplomatic immunity. I can get the papers through quickly. Then we can be married again in an English church, or Scottish rather. That's where I come from. I'll call you up tonight and tomorrow. I'll get to you just as soon as I can. I've got to finish this business first.'

Recently Harry Kane racked up a £1 million tab at his £10,000-a-night hotel suite here....

Editorial Offices of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten

Memorial plaque to Dr. Fritz Gerlich, editor-in-chief and subject of film "Hitler: The Rise of Evil." From 1920 to 1928 he was editor in chief of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (MNN), a predecessor to today's Süddeutsche Zeitung in that its circulation was one of the largest in southern Germany. As editor, Gerlich opposed the Nazis whom he described as and Hitler's Nazi Party as "murderous". In the early 1920s, he had seen proof of Nazi tyranny already in Munich. Once a conservative nationalist, after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch Gerlich decisively turned against Hitler and became one of his fiercest critics. Other critics of the Nazis at the newspaper were later arrested within days of Gerlich, includingFritz Buechner, who followed Gerlich as the editor of the MNN, Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, who was domestic editor at the MNN, and Cossmann, who wrote for the MNN, all of whom had steered the MNN to support a return of the monarchy. 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. 

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

SA men after ransacking the offices of the Münchener Post at Wittelsbacher Platz 2 on March 9, 1933. The social-democratic paper was one of the Nazis' most vocal opponents who the latter referred to as the "Munich plague" and the "poison kitchen."

Ron Rosenbaum writes of 

 'the lost safe-deposit box. A place where allegedly revelatory documents - ones that might provide the missing link, the lost key to the Hitler psyche, the true source of his metamorphosis - seem to disappear beyond recovery." This mythology was inspired by real events in Munich in 1933, when Fritz Gerlich, the last anti- Hitler journalist in that city, made a desperate attempt to alert the world to the true nature of Hitler by means of a report of an unspecified scandal. On 9 March, just as Gerlich's newspaper, Der Gerade Weg, was about to go to press, SA storm troopers entered the premises and ripped it from the presses.

Although no copy of the Gerlich report has ever been found, rumours have been circulating for many years about the ultimate fate of the information with which Gerlich hoped to warn the world of the danger of Hitler, one of which involves a secret copy of the report that was smuggled out of the premises (along with supporting documentary material) by one Count Waldburg-Zeil. Waldburg-Zeil allegedly took the report and its supporting documents to his estate north of Munich, where he buried them somewhere in the grounds. According to Gerlich's biographer Erwin von Aretin, however, Waldburg-Zeil destroyed them during the war, fearful of what might happen should they be discovered by the Nazi authorities.

Rosenbaum informs us of an alternative version of these events, involving documents proving that Geli Raubal was indeed killed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. According to von Aretin's son, the historian Professor Karl-Ottmar Freiherr von Aretin, his father gave the documents to his cousin, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Guttenberg, co-owner of the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, who put them in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland. Guttenberg was killed following his involvement in the attempted coup against Hitler on 20 July 1944. For the sake of security, he had not told anyone the number of the safe- deposit-box account. 

Baker Invisible Eagle

 Site of High Command of the SA (Oberste SA-Führung)

The headquarters of the Supreme Storm Troopers' Leadership (Oberste SA-Führung) was on Barerstraße 7-11; here SA men in 1935 standing in front of the entrance door at Barer Strasse 11, which was decorated with glass mosaics in the shape of the SA emblem. In 1932, the Oberste SA leadership left its offices in the Brown House and moved into its own building at Brienner Strasse 43, whilst the hotels Union and Marienbad at Barer Strasse 7-11 moved into their new accommodations in 1934. Today the location has reverted to its original function as the Hotel Marienbad. 

Nearby at Barer Straße 13 was the Office for Telecommunications of the Reich Treasurer; on the ground floor was the book binding and printing plant of the "national leadership".
The Sturmabteilung ("Storm detachment" or "Assault detachment" or "Assault section", usually translated as "stormtroop(er)s") was the paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party and played a key role in Hitler's rise to power. SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms which distinguished them from the Schutzstaffel (ϟϟ), who wore black and brown uniforms (in comparison to Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them was cheaply available after the Great War, having originally been ordered for German troops serving in Africa. The SA was also the first Nazi paramilitary group to develop pseudo-military titles for bestowal upon its members later to be adopted by several other Nazi Party groups, chief among them the ϟϟ. The SA became largely irrelevant after he took control of Germany in 1933; it was effectively superseded by the ϟϟ after the Night of the Long Knives. 

Next door to the Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP at Karlstraße 20-22 is this building built in 1828 by the architect Rudolf Röschenauer for master locksmith Johann Schmitz. The Nazis acquired the property in 1934 to serve as the Reichsstudentenführung der NSDAP. The Reichsstudentenführer was created by Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, on November 5, 1936, in order to end the ongoing power struggles between the National Socialist German Students' Union NSDStB as party affiliation on the one hand and the Deutsche Studentenschaft DSt as the umbrella organisation of the local student institutions on the other. With this measure, "the management of German students at all colleges and technical colleges, the leadership of the national socialist academics, the social care of the new students and the care for selection, professional guidance and professional training in the academic professions" were amalgamated at once. Here the Reichsstudenten leadership had its headquarters. The first and only Reichstudentenführer was from 1936 to 1945 the former Heidelberger NSDStB leader Gustav Adolf Scheel. With the Control Council Act No. 2 of October 10, 1945, the Reichsstudentenführung was banned by the Allied Control Council and its property confiscated. Today the property remains vacant. Beside the property at no. 22 was the Schiedsabteilung des Reichsschatzmeisters and, on the right, the  Reich Press Office (Reichspressestelle and Reichspropagandaleiter)." Gradually from 1933 the addresses at Karlstraße 6-20 and 22-29 held the offices of the Oberste SA-Führung, Reichsführung ϟϟ, NS-Dozentenverband, Reichsjugendführung and the NS-Studentenverbund.

This was the former office of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Head of the International Press Office, at Karlstraße 18. In 1931 Hitler appointed Hanfstaengl, owner of the renowned Munich art publisher Franz Hanfstaengl, as head of the Nazis' foreign press. "Putzi" Hanfstaengl had been friends with Hitler for a long time, hiding him from the police at his home after the failed coup in November 1923. Hanfstaengl had studied in the United States before serving the Nazis in various functions before losing favour and emigrating to London in 1937. He became acquainted with Hitler on the occasion of a Nazi meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller. As its largest civil promoter he became part of Hitler's close circle of friends. From 1931-1937 he served as foreign press chief for the Nazi Party. After the elimination of the SA and Ernst Röhm on June 30, 1934 he dissociated himself increasingly from the party, which made him suspicious in the eyes of the Gestapo. He fled in 1937 and eventually arrived in the USA, where in 1942 he became German advisor to Roosevelt, the only man to have worked directly under Hitler and FDR.

Widenmayerstr 18 bears the name in golden letters of Hanfstaengl through Munich photographer and founder of the eponymous publishing house Franz Hanfstaengl Verlag, which specialised in art publications, named after Ernst's grandfather. A farmer's son and artist himself, he had founded the publishing house which combined art prints and portrait photography as early as the 19th century with a growing reputation and lucrative business. The painter, lithographer and later photographer Franz Hanfstaengl had founded a lithographic company in Munich in 1833, reproducing not only portraits, but also dedicated himself to the reproduction of art. From the middle of the century, he used photography as a new reproduction medium. His customers included emperors and kings, Wagner and Liszt. Wilhelm Busch, Richard Strauss and Mark Twain were guests in his son's villa. Ernst's brother Edgar was joint owner Munich of this publishing house, which since 1933 printed postcards and propaganda for the Nazis and became the party's art advisor. 

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

  

Further down at Widenmayerstraße 31 Hanfstaengl is shown in the foreground with Hitler, Hess, Röhm and Himmler on July 3, 1932; the building remains unchanged. Also on Widenmayerstraße at number 27 was the location of the Office of Aryanisation (Arisierungsstelle)

The verb ‘to Aryanise’ (Arisierung) means to make something Aryan by eliminating the influence of allegedly inferior races. Also used as an adjective when speaking of or pertaining to the so-called Aryan race (e.g. Aryan art or art produced by pure Aryans).

Thomas J. Laub After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940-1944

By January 1, 1938, German Jews were prohibited from operating businesses and trades, and from offering goods and services. In the Autumn of 1938, only 40,000 of the formerly 100,000 Jewish businesses were still in the hands of their original owners. Through its office here on Widenmayer Str. 27, Aryanisation was completed with the enactment of a regulation, the Verordnung zur Ausschaltung der Juden aus dem deutschen Wirtschaftsleben of November 12, 1938, through which the remaining businesses were transferred to non-Jewish owners and the proceeds taken by the state. Jewellery, stocks, real property and other valuables had to be sold below market value. Jewish employees were fired, and self-employed people were prohibited from working in their respective professions. By the end of 1939, almost all Munich companies in Jewish possession had been expropriated, followed by the “Arisierung” of houses, apartments and fortunes of the entire Jewish population. This was completed by June 1943.

Two accounts related to this address are presented at Memory Loops (both in German):
http://www.memoryloops.net/de/384
http://www.memoryloops.net/de/306

At the site of Hitler's first residence in Germany when he arrived in Munich on May 25, 1913, a bright Spring Sunday, when

Hitler followed up an advertisement for a small room rented by the family of the tailor Joseph Popp on the third floor of 34 Schleissheimerstr. in a poorish district to the north of the city, on the edge of Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich's artistic and bohemian life, and not far from the big barracks area.

Kershaw (48)  Hitler

Hitler shared the room until mid-February 1914 with Rudolf Häusler, 

a pal who had accompanied him from Vienna, [who was of] similar background and shared Hitler’s political views. Hitler offered to pay and Häusler readily agreed to accompany him, but first Hitler had to wait for his share of an inheritance from his father’s will. After a frustrating month in limbo, they finally left Vienna by overnight train. Years later Hitler told confidants that he came to Munich intending to study ‘for another three years . . . as a designer. I’d enter for the first competition, and I told myself that then I’d show what I could do!’ Nothing came of this, but Hitler seems hardly to have been disappointed. It was enough for him to be in the German city of his dreams, which seemed ‘as familiar . . . as if I had lived there for years within its walls’. Munich was a ‘German city. What a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I thought back on this Babylon of races.’ 

John Williams (19), Corporal Hitler and the Great War 1914-1918: The List Regiment

  Eventually Häusler found 

Hitler an exhausting room-mate. Hitler often left the ‘lamp burning until three or four in the morning’, or kept him awake with ‘agitated monologues all night’. Worn out by nocturnal diatribes, Häusler moved to another room. With no ill feeling it seems, since they remained in contact and Häusler later became a Nazi functionary in Vienna. 

Williams (21)

The plaque shown in the period photo on the right declared that 

Adolf Hitler lived in this house from spring 1913 to the day he volunteered for the German army in August 1914. 

Hitler's room was the third from the left on the top floor according to Williams (20):

Shortly after their arrival, he and Häusler found a third-floor room in the house of master-tailor Popp, the main occupant of a terrace at 34 Schleissheimerstrasse. Popp’s wife immediately made this ‘Austrian charmer’ welcome. Her husband, who had worked in Paris and regarded himself as a man of the world, quickly saw in Hitler ‘a personality whose abilities entitled him to the highest hopes’. Hitler was not the first twentieth-century dictator to live in Schleissheimerstrasse. A few years earlier Lenin had lodged about a block away. Today the area appears much as it did in Hitler’s (or Lenin’s) time. A small playground, which Hitler sketched from his window, still lies opposite. While its 1930s’ Nazi-era plaque was pulled down in 1945 along with its ornate stucco façade, 34 Schleissheimerstrasse is still identifiable as Hitler’s first Munich home.

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

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

Waite (199) The Psychopathic God

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

the Popps’ account of Hitler in Munich is filled with inconsistencies. While ‘a whole week’ might pass ‘without a sign of Hitler’, he was still and miraculously able to join them in ‘political discussions every evening’. When not painting in his room, the lodger, who was rarely present, spent ‘most of the time’ with his ‘nose buried in heavy books’. Circumstances and survival probably demanded that Hitler put his energy not into reading books, but into painting. From the moment he arrived in Munich, according to Anna Popp (in yet another contradiction): "Hitler began to paint immediately and remained working for hours. After a few days, I saw two beautiful pictures that he’d finished on his table, one of the cathedral and the other of the Theatiner church. Then early in the morning my lodger went out, a briefcase under his arm, looking for buyers."  

Remarkably, just down the same street at 106 lived Lenin a dozen years earlier:

     

"Lenin had lived at 106 Schleissheimer Strasse, and at number 34 on the same street, only a few blocks away, Adolf Hitler now took a room as a tenant in the apartment of a tailor named Popp." (Fest, 20, Hitler) 

It could be argued that the 20th century began in Schwabing. In the years just preceding the World War I, Kandinsky painted Western art’s first abstract painting there, Hitler was hanging out in coffeehouses on the Schellingstrasse, and Lenin, midway through his long exile, was writing his most influential political pamphlets in an apartment off the Leopoldstrasse. 

J. S. Marcus, The Bohemian Side of Munich

 It was in Munich that Lenin formulated the concept that a vanguard party of “professional revolutionaries” from the intelligentsia was necessary to effect political change as articulated in his 1902 manifesto “What Is To Be Done?”, considered the cornerstone of Bolshevism.
Nearby at 142 Schleißheimer Straße is the Nordbad swimming pool:

The topping out ceremony on October 16, 1937 in the presence of Mayor Karl Fiehler and various councilors, representatives of state and municipal authorities, the Armed Forces, the Police Headquarters, the Munich swimming clubs and the German Labour Front. The Nordbad was the first large municipal building and Fiehler had swastika flags raised when the foundation stone was laid, inviting so many local Nazi groups to take part so that after the speeches, cries of "Sieg Heil" followed by the Horst Wessel song ended the ceremony.
According to historian Mathias Irlinger, the swimming pool was particularly valuable for the Nazis as people at the time still had no bathroom at home for basic everyday hygiene; a representative indoor pool with a sports pool was something relatively new with Munich only having the Müller'sche Volksbad. The first application to build the pool came in 1924 from future mayor Karl Scharnagl which failed due to funding, explaining why the Nordbad provided the opportunity for the Nazis to present themselves as particularly efficient. Although compared to the number and size of construction works implemented was weak compared to the 1920s, the Nazis were able to stage their energy with central buildings such as the Nordbad allowing them to boast: We are now building what others have never achieved. In fact, this would be Fiehler's project, not Hitler's who would even explicitly

oppose it. Fiehler had brought a model of the Nordbad to Obersalzberg on August 2, 1935, as with some other construction projects, to collect Hitler's blessing. It was at this meeting in which Hitler officially confirmed that Munich would call itself the "capital of the movement". A few days later, all of Munich was flagged to celebrate this event. Hitler nevertheless was angry, accusing the city of wishing to spend four million Reichsmarks for a small communal town in the north of the city which he found scandalous, particularly as he felt swimming pools enjoyed no international standing. Hitler instead wanted a mega bath at a very central point on the east-west axis he planned, extending across Munich. In the end, the building took place during the war, because it took seven years to complete. As with the laying of the foundation stone and the topping-out ceremony, there was talk of physical exercise, encouraging people to become stronger through sport. Sports competitions, for which a grandstand for 1,400 visitors was built, were also central to this. The statutes for the Nordbad, inaugurated in 1941, regulated that Jews, people with infectious diseases - and drunks - had no access. Nevertheless, some avoided such prohibitions by covering up their Judenstern; the bath staff was unable to recognise the supposedly clear racial characteristics of Jews. Later, forced labourers were also no longer allowed to go to Nordbad when, in 1942, someone complained that he had to wait a long time because prisoners of war had occupied the whole changing room.

Nazi propaganda at Schwabing hospital in 1936. Of all the professions requiring higher qualifications, the medical one had the highest proportion (45%) of Nazi Party members, and after the 'forced coordination' of the health system in 1933, these people proceeded to radically attack the 11% of their colleagues who were Jewish. The so-called 'Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service' provided for the dismissal of non-aryan doctors from the public health system, and in July 1938 they had lost their approbation.

There is hardly any profession more significant for the greatness and future of a nation than the medical one, and none is as Jewified as the medical profession. Jewish professors dominate university chairs in medicine. They have dehumanised the art of healing and have saturated generation upon generation of young doctors with their mechanical spirit. For that reason, we call upon the entire German medical profession to make the leadership and spirit of our guild once again German.

National Socialist League of German Physicians, 1933

An eloquent and exposed outpost of Dachau in the early years was Schwabing hospital, where a special ward of fourteen beds was set up in the surgical department under the constant guard of two to four SS men. According to its head nurse, this sealed area was ‘almost always fully occupied’, and the medical staff were forbidden to speak to the prisoners. It was from this ward that Erwin Kahn spoke to Evi and his doctors about the April shootings. Hospitals throughout Germany found themselves treating the victims of early concentration camp violence: yet another phenomenon difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of the camps as a secret site of crime. This outpost of Dachau was eventually closed down, and the SS established a much-feared prisoner infirmary of their own. 

Dillon (226) Dachau and the SS A Schooling in Violence

Hitler's Residence from May 1 1920- October 5 1929

Gathering his meagre belongings which consisted of a cap, coat, jacket, trousers, underwear, shirt, socks, shoes and demobilisation pay of fifty marks, Hitler moved to a small room at Thierschstrasse 41 on March 31, 1920; "a poorish street near the river Isar." (Bullock, 83) which would be his home for the next nine years. He arrived at this room—sublet from a Jew—as an unknown person and left it as a national political figure. Ernst Hanfstaengl described the room in his 1957 work Unheard Witness:

Drab and dreary beyond belief, akin to a back bedroom of a decaying New York tenement. The room . . . was tiny. I doubt it was nine feet wide. The bed was too wide for its corner, and the head projected over a single narrow window. The floor was covered with cheap, worn linoleum with a couple of threadbare rugs, and on the wall opposite the bed there was a make- shift bookshelf, apart from the chair and rough table, the only other piece of furniture in the entire room.

It was also the house’s coldest room. Hitler’s landlady later said that he either paid the rent on time or in advance, and he kept his German shepherd dog, Wolf, as company. Today, the building still stands with a statue of the Virgin Mary staring down from an alcove on the second floor outer wall. The room itself, however, was known to make later tenants ill, and since no one would rent it anymore, today it is used as a storeroom.
From July 1936 a plaque was placed outside by the city council that read "Adolf Hitler lived in this house from 1 May 1920 to 5 October 1929." Nearby on Thierschstrasse 15 was the Nazis' third headquarters. His landlord is recorded in Germany's Hitler by Heinz A. Heinz as saying

I hadn't much to do with him myself, since ... his room was a sub-let. And since I am a Jew, I concerned myself as little as possible with the activities of my lodger.... I admit I liked Hitler well enough. I often encountered him on the stairway and at the door - he was generally scribbling something in a notebook.- when he would pass the time of day with me pleasantly enough. Often he

Showing the plaque from 1935-1945

had his dog with him, a lovely Wolfshund. He never made me feel he regarded me differently from other people.... He lodged in my house from ....1919 to 1929. First he took a little back room, and then an equally small one in the front to serve as a sort of office and study. The back room, in which he slept is only 8 by 15 feet. It is the coldest room in the house .... Some lodgers who've rented it since got ill. Now we only use it as a lumber room....The only 'comfort' Hitler treated himself to when he was here, was a hand basin with cold water laid on. The room to the front was a bit bigger, but the small high-set window left much to be desired. It was very scantily furnished. (pp. 276-277)

Hitler himself had described the scene when he had returned from his term at Landsberg:

I found them gathered at my door, in the Thierschstrasse, in Munich, men like Fuess, Gahr and the other old faithfuls. My apartment was decorated with flowers and laurel wreaths (I've kept one of them). In his exuberant joy, my dog almost knocked me down the stairs.

Hitler's Table Talk (286)

Former close associate (and only man to have worked directly under Hitler and FDR) Ernst Hanfstaengl revisited the flat after the war and wrote:

When by chance I found myself walking along Thierschstrasse, I couldn't resist the temptation to pay a visit to Hitler's former house at number 41. Nothing had changed; the façade was the same... and the bombs falling on Munich had failed to shake the porcelain Madonna from her alcove.

Click here for Hitler's Residence- Prinzregentenplatz 16

Hitler had Heinrich Hoffman buy this ordinary-looking villa for Eva Braun for the then fabulous sum of $30,000 to recompense her for the millions of marks Hoffman made from her photographs of Hitler on the Obersalzberg. The house had an air raid shelter that could be supplied with fresh air in case Braun was buried in a bomb attack as well as a one-man bunker with loopholes on the fence. The photo on the left dates from 1938 and is shown shortly before its demolition in 2015 when it still appeared completely unchanged. Today the address is 12 Delpstrasse, formerly Wasserburgstrasse,  near Hitler's own residence on Prinzregentenplatz. It had been renamed a decade after the war in memory of Father Alfred Delp, a resistance fighter during the Nazi era.

 In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated. Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.” Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transferred to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.” Hoffmann made contradictory statements in this regard as well. In his defence document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son‑in‑law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”

Heike B. Görtemaker, Eva Braun

The photo on the right shows Eva Braun cycling from her house and the site today. At the time when Hitler and Braun were about to kill themselves, an American raiding party occupied the house. The next day the property was completely emptied and all the items were probably taken to the United States as souvenirs. In 1947 a couple moved in from Washington. Back then, the doorbell still read “Braun” and, as neighbours reported, the house became a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. An older woman recently lived in the house and the property was overgrown. After the woman died, the villa stood empty and fell into disrepair. Local politicians from the Bogenhausen district asked the monument protection authority to check whether it was possible to be included in the monument list but a detailed report came to the conclusion that the house was completely dilapidated and not a monument resulting in the house and property changing hands. The current owner, a publisher of two Munich daily newspapers, bought it from the son of the last resident. Renovation was never considered and in 2015 the villa was completely demolished and a new two-story building with a double garage was built on the site.

Footage from Eva Braun's home movies; a number of scenes show her at home here. The photo on the right shows her birthplace on Isabellastrasse 45 (behind the tree).

GärtnerPlatztheater

When the Nazis took power the works of Jewish composers and librettists continued to be given because of their popularity although Jewish writers, librettists, and composers were not hired. Since the operetta had a priority position within Nazi cultural policy, it was decided to put it in the foreground in the programme until a new operetta theatre was built in place of the Gärtnerplatztheater. The theatre would focus "exclusively on operetta performances, because operetta is a very essential means of bringing the people to the theatre." The closure for this reason in 1936 only lasted a short time, however, as the demolition plans were abandoned at Hitler's instigation and the theatre was merely renovated. Original plans for the demolition and subsequent new building of a theatre were not implemented; instead, a major renovation took place. The theatre was reopened on November 20, 1937 with a performance of Die Fledermaus, making it the first and only state operetta stage.  In the evening of November 20 1937 Hitler attended the reopening of the rebuilt Theater am Gärtnerplatz where he saw a performance of the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus. This marked the theatre being passed to the Free State of Bavaria and was reopened as the "Bavarian State Operetta", the first state operetta stage.

 

  Among the guests was Hitler. It had been after watching the Zigeunerbaron here in 1926 that Hitler went to the Café Viktoria to eat, renamed Café Roma until its closure in 2008.

Former Café Viktoria

In 1938, Fritz Fischer, who was one of the most dazzling figures in Munich's theatre life during the Nazi era, was brought in by Gauleiter and Interior Minister Adolf Wagner as director of the reopened Gärtnerplatztheater with Peter Kreuder serving as a music director. With his appointment, a new theatrical aesthetic came to the fore based on Berlin revues and the film operetta which was characterised by splendid furnishings, mass casts and a rapid pace of play. Fischer had been inspired by the Berlin revue role models and film operettas. Through With Fischer's appointment, a new theatrical aesthetic came to the fore, a new style that - based on Berlin revues and the film operetta - was characterised by splendid furnishings, mass casts and a rapid pace of play.

"This style was particularly encouraged by the ruling cultural leaders, although it was actually derived from sources that would have been unsympathetic to the rulers. But they stressed the importance of the operetta of this kind, for the recovery and increase of the vitality and joy of life, of the creative man, and even more of the wounded or on holiday in the home of the soldiers."

On January 7, 1938 at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz, Hitler once again saw the ballet Tanz um die Welt, a guest performance of the German Opera House of Berlin- Charlottenburg.

 When director Fischer was drafted during the war in 1940, opera director Rudolf Hartmann took over the management of the stage on an interim basis until Fischer returned to his post in 1941. The ensemble's visit to the Dachau concentration camp on May 21, 1941 also fell under his term of office. When Fischer was drafted during the war in 1940, opera director Rudolf Hartmann took over the management of the stage on an interim basis until Fischer returned to office in 1941. His visit to the ensemble in the Dachau concentration camp on May 21, 1941 also fell under his term of office. It is disputed whether in 1941 the ensemble (including Johannes Heesters) of the Gärtnerplatztheater had merely visited the camp or had appeared before ϟϟ guards. On April 21, 1945 the theatre was bombed during the last air attack on Munich with the portal torn down and the stage set on fire. The house remained unplayable for a long time with performances relocated to Schornstraße until 1948 when theatre operations in the main building on Gärtnerplatz could be resumed. Due to economic and political considerations, the theatre was directed by Rudolf Hartmann from 1952 to 1955. Today with only minor changes, the auditorium of 1937 remains as it was.

 

Gasthaus Deutsche Eiche 

In 1926 Hitler gave six speeches here, and another in 1929. One such 1926 speech took place during a closed general assembly of the NSDAP Section Neuhausen, started here at 20.30 in which, according to the police report, 56 people participated, and was headed by Helmut Walter. Hitler "spoke for about 20 minutes, Anton Allwein spoke and Karl Ostberg on the question of race or the Jews." 
Ironically, the Gasthaus Deutsche Eiche is now one of the Munich gay scene's most popular meeting places with its bathhouse that takes over four floors and almost 4,600 square feet complete with a Finnish sauna, a salt sauna, a whirlpool, a large steambath, shower area, massage rooms, a solarium, a rooftop garden, a Bistro & Bar, TV rooms, relaxation rooms, individual and exclusive booths etc... which explains the gay flags that flank the international ones in the centre. In fact, the area around Gärtnerplatz is largely shaped by the gay scene including the Deutsche Eiche at Reichenbachstrasse 13, with the 1921-23 Nazi Party headquarters at Corneliusstrasse 12 located nearby. Probably because of its proximity to the Gärtnerplatz Theatre and its dancers, the Deutsche Eiche became a meeting point for artists and homosexuals early on. Until his death in 1982, its restaurant was also the "second living room" of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who lived opposite from 1974 to 1978. In some of his films, the guesthouse served as the location. Freddy Mercury apparently also felt at home here. 

Ernst Röhm's address on Hohenzollernstraße 110. In proceedings conducted by  the Public prosecutor's office at LG Munich I on October 21, 1931 against Peter Granninger, an accountant from Freising who was best known as the personal pimp or supplier of Röhm, who brought boys and young men to him for homosexual contacts from 1931 to 1934, and as a defendant in a trial for these events that took place after Röhm's murder in autumn 1934 before the district court of Munich. Along with others charged with homosexual acts, this address was the location of many of the acts that took place. 

In 1931 when the accused Granninger read in the newspaper that Röhm had returned from South America, he went to his apartment in Hohenzollernstrasse 110 shortly before Easter 1931. Röhm served the accused Granninger with coffee and liqueur. Röhm brought himself to the accused Granninger, hugged him, kissed him and gripped his thighs. He opened Granninger's pants, took out his member and sucked on it until ejaculation occurred. After this traffic, Granninger took Röhm's penis in his mouth after rubbing it with his hand and sucked on it until ejaculation occurred. Röhm then gave the defendant 50 RM and promised to get him a job.