GERMANY: HITLER'S MUNICH

 May 25, 2025

Our very last joint activity on our family trip to Germany was a guided tour of Hitler's Munich. But before I get to that, I just have to throw in this photo of a silver lion that we passed in the Old Town square. Munich has several statues of lions, once a symbol of Bavarian strength. Besides the Old Town Square, they can be found flanking the entrance to the Munich Palace, on the top of the triumphal arch, and at the Lowenbrau Brewery. My high school mascot was a lion, and I'm a big fan of the books The Wizard of Oz and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both of which prominently feature a lion, so I am always drawn to statues of lions. This one looks powerful. I like it!

Munich is considered the birthplace of the Nazi Party (aka National Socialism or NSDAP), and a visit to Munich is not complete without seeing a few of the sites involved with the Nazi Party, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.

Our first stop on the tour was the Hofbrauhaus, a historic beer hall that started as a supplier for the Bavarian court. 

Our guide took us up a long stairway . . .

. . . to this dining hall. It was here in February 1920 (so early!) that 30-year-old Hitler, the propaganda chief of the National Socialist Party, announced the party's official program to a gathering of about 2,000 people. Seventeen months later, on July 29, 1921, he was elected to be the head of the Nazi Party here.

Wishing I had taken an opportunity to be a beer-maid. Darn.

Not related to Hitler or the Nazi Party, but here is a fun fountain we walked past: Wolfsbrunnen (Wolf Fountain), created in 1904. 

Four bronze wolf heads are spouting water into the basin, and atop the granite pillar, a young girl is encircled by a wolf--a scene from the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" (popularized in the 19th century by the German Brothers Grimm). Ironically, the statue was funded by Adolph and Apollonia Wolf, generous benefactors of the Munich art scene at the time.

Our next stop was the Haus der Kunst, or House of Art, opened in 1937. It was the first major architectural project commissioned under Hitler, who laid the founding stone himself in 1933. It served as a showcase for the Nazi regime and a public venue for Nazi propaganda. Hitler was intent on eliminating the "degenerate" modernist movement in art and returning to classical forms.

The museum had an interesting historical display that included pictures of Hitler at the museum.

Today, besides some historical perspective, the museum also displays plenty of that degenerate art that Hitler despised.

We walked through a small section of the Englischer Garden, or English Garden, one of the largest urban parks in the world--even larger than New York's Central Park. Its origin goes back to 1789.

Between the English Garden and Old Town, we came across this interesting structure with a black slab covered in what looks like handwritten messages. It is a tribute to the White Rose movement, a non-violent German student resistance movement during World War II that was led by five Munich University students and one professor. From 1942-1943, they and their followers distributed six pamphlets and used graffiti to share their message denouncing the Nazis and calling for passive resistance. If caught, and some of them were, they faced swift execution.

Next, we approached the Bavarian State Chancellery, which still serves as the offices of the government for the state.

Our interest was not in the building itself, largely rebuilt after being bombed during the war, but in the memorial that lies in a square pit in front of it.

This Warrior Memorial was dedicated in 1928 to remember the soldiers from Munich killed in World War I. Stairs on each of the four sides lead down seven feet into the pit, where a statue of a fallen soldier lies in the center.

This is such a tender depiction, don't you think? This soldier could be anyone's son just taking a nap between battles.

A relief of marching soldiers is on one of the walls.

We continued our stroll along the tree-lined paths of the Hofgarten, built in the early 17th century by Maximilian I.

We shared the path with some local equestrians.

Check out this unique fence! The posts look like treble clefs.

The park was the playground for the Bavarian royalty, whose palace, called the Residenz, was next door. It is the largest city palace in all of Germany. It is HUGE--130 rooms and ten courtyards! We didn't go inside, but we walked past this neoclassical wing that housed the 820-foot-long banquet hall, added to the palace between 1832 and 1842 by King Ludwig I. Gee, that need for a huge reception hall sounds strangely familiar . . . .

While Hitler never lived here, he did produce at least one painting of one of the courtyards.

Close by is the Feldherrnhalle, or Field Marshals' Hall, also built by King Ludwig I and modeled after the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy. This building does tie in to Hitler. It is the site of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, his failed attempt to overthrow the government. On the evening of November 8, Hitler and 600 of his paramilitary friends marched into a meeting in a nearby Munich beer hall where the Bavarian Minister-President was delivering a speech. Hitler fired a shot into the ceiling and declared that the Bavarian government had been overthrown (not true), which he hoped would start a national revolution. The next day 2,000 Nazis marched on this building but were stopped by police, who shot and killed 16 of their ranks. 

Hitler fled but was captured two days later and charged with treason. After a widely-publicized trial, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released after only nine months. During that time he wrote Mein Kampf. (By the way, if you are interested in reading all or part of Mein Kampf, it is available free through the Gutenberg Project here.)

After Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933, they turned the Feldherrnhalle into a memorial for the Nazis who had been killed during the failed Beer Hall Putsch ten years prior. Our guide showed us a drawing of the memorial. A list of the names of the so-called martyrs was placed under one of the arches and was under constant, largely ceremonial guard by the SS. New members of the SS would make their oath of loyalty to Hitler in front of the memorial, people walking by the memorial were expected to give it the Nazi salute, and the square in front of the building was often used for Nazi parades and rallies.

This photo shows Hitler and party members during a commemorative march on the street next to the Feldherrnhalle on the 10th anniversasry of the failed Putsch.

That street today:

On May 3, 1945, four days before Germany surrendered, local citizens spontaneously smashed the Feldherrnhalle memorial to pieces.

It was all very intense. We needed a break from the drama. This cute doorknob made us look up and discover that we were at the flagship store for Steiff stuffed animals and toys! Unfortunately, there was no time for shopping.

That door knob looks a lot like my teddy bear, inherited from my mom:

Okay, back to Hitler and the Nazi Party. This is the Memorial for the Victims of National Socialism, erected in 1985 in the square known as "The Place of the Victims of National Socialism." An eternal flame burns inside the cage-like structure at the top. Text on the base reads: "To the victims of the National Socialist tyranny."

No, not another World War memorial, but still a war memorial, this time for the Bavarian soldiers who fell during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. This 95-foot-tall obelisk was commissioned by King Ludwig I (wow, he did a lot of building) in 1833 and is clad with bronze plates made from captured Turkish cannons from the Battle of Navarino. The inscription on the base says, "To the 30,000 Bavarians who died in the Russian war."

The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism confronts the history of the Nazi Party head on. It is located at the site of what was known as the "Brown House" (brown being the color of Nazi uniforms), which was the former Nazi Party headquarters from 1931 to 1945. (Although political power eventually shifted to Berlin, the Nazi Party bureaucracy remained in Munich.) The Brown House was destroyed by bombing raids during World War II. In 2015, the Documentation Center was finally opened in response to engaged groups of Munich's citizens' demands that the city's past must be critically examined and documented. 

I took a picture of the front door, but forgot to get the building itself, so I borrowed the picture below right from Wikipedia.

Onsite information panels provide a lot of good information.

This is a pretty poorly angled photo of the Führerbau (or "Führer's building"), but I wanted to include it because as one of Hitler's offices, it was where the 1938 Munich Agreement was signed by Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. That was the document that allowed the German annexation of the Sudentenland, a part of Czechoslovakia where many ethnic Germans lived. The building survived the war and was used by the occupation forces as a central collection point for the art that had been looted by the Nazis all over Europe. Today its benign role is that of the University of Music and Performing Arts.

The Brown House and the Führerbau were close to a large square known as Königsplatz ("King's Square") where Nazi military rallies were frequently held. On one side of the square is the neoclassical city gate, patterned after the Acropolis and completed in 1862. It commemorated the Greek War of Independence and the ascension of Otto, one of the sons of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, to the Greek throne.

A museum holding antiquities from Greece and Italy is also on the square.

In front of the art museum is an interesting circular design sculpted in marble and resting on top of the concrete.

Here is the backstory of this 2021 work by Arnold Dreyblatt entitled Die Schwarze Liste ("The Black List"). Information below the photo comes from a plaque at the site.

The book burnings in May 1933 were carried out by the anti-Semitic "German Student Union". They took place in many German cities as part of the "Action Against Un-German Spirit" and were the prelude to the systematic removal of all literature not acceptable to the national Socialists from libraries, bookstores, and literary publishing. In Munich there were two book burnings on May 6 and 10 on the Königsplatz. In 2016 the Munich City Council decided to commemorate the National Socialist book burnings in public space. The title of the artwork, "The Black List", designed by Arnold Dreyblatt and realized in 2021, refers to the "black lists" of objectionable literature that were compiled by a National Socialist librarian in the spring of 1933. The organizers of the book burnings were guided by these lists. The book titles found on this spiral monument include the publications of 310 authors who were ostracized and banned by the Nazi regime and its supporters.

Most of the titles are by German authors who are unknown to me, but a few names are familiar: Berthold Brecht (German playwright and poet), John Dos Passos (American novelist), Theodore Dreiser (American novelist), Friedrick Engels (German philosopher), Ernest Hemingway (American novelist), Paul Klee (Swiss-born German artist), Vladimir Lenin (Russian revolutionary), Jack London (American novelist and journalist), Thomas Mann (German novelist), Karl Marx (German philosopher), Erich Maria Remarque (German novelist), Upton Sinclair (American author and journalist), Jossif Stalin (Soviet revolutionary), and Paul Tillich (German-American philosopher and theologian). A specific title is given for each author, and even among the names I know, I am often unfamiliar with the title. Still, if your name was on this list, I'm sure the Germans weren't rushing out to buy copies of your other works for their libraries.

Our tour ended here, and our guide took us to the subway so that we could get back to our hotels. The art on their subway walls is quite different from what we have in our subways! Of course, we were in the art district of Munich.

The next morning we made our way to the Munich Airport where, thankfully, we found some breakfast food.

We were lucky to have a direct flight from Munich to LAX, and even luckier to have empty seats next to us! But the best part of returning home, at least for me, is the sight of the U.S. flag and the words on the ledge below it, barely visible here, "Welcome to the United States." There is no place like home.

STILL.  WHAT A TRIP!

VIDEO

This German-made 52-minute documentary (filmed in 2006 and included free with an Amazon Prime membership) is an excellent companion to both this post and your own trip to Munich. Many of the places our guide took us to are depicted in this video, along with additional information and footage. The rise of the National Socialist Party is documented in a more-or-less linear fashion, which is helpful as my post is based on a walking tour and jumps around a lot. In particular, I found additional information about the Brown House, the art museum, and Hitler's architectural aspirations for Munich very interesting. There is also a segment about Dachau and its subcamps at the end. Although the video is now 20 years old, I highly recommend it!