The Party Quarter of the NSDAP

In a meeting at the Hofbräuhaus beer hall in February 1920, Adolf Hitler announced that the Party would change its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and he outlined its first manifesto. When he became Party chairman in July 1921, he stated that “Munich is the headquarters of the movement and always will be.” With a rapidly growing membership, the Party moved its main offices to the Gasthaus Cornelius inn at Corneliusstraße 12. By the end of 1922, the Party leadership in Munich was able to count 100 local branches throughout Germany, the majority of them in Bavaria.  

After the failed putsch of November 1923, the NSDAP was initially banned. It was newly founded in February 1925 under the same name, but pursuing a line that was allegedly legal. The Party headquarters remained in Munich. Between 1925 and 1930 they were located in a rear building in Schellingstraße, very close to the studio of Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.

In addition, the city where the Party had been founded acquired a mythical status. In 1935 Adolf Hitler officially conferred the title of “Capital of the Movement” on Munich. This title had been proposed by the city government under Mayor Karl Fiehler, who sought to use it as a tourist attraction, to apply for funding, and for urban planning projects.

After coming to power the Party apparatus became much larger and therefore needed more space. Apart from the core Party with its sub-divisions and offices, there were regional, district, and local branches, all the way down to Party cells and Party blocks. There were also organizations like the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the National Socialist Women’s League as well as party-affiliated associations such as the National Socialist Students’ League and the German Labor Front (DAF). This close-knit network of Party organizations was intended to spread Nazi ideology to all levels of society, to exert control, and to bring people into line.

In 1933 Paul Ludwig Troost was commissioned to construct two monumental new buildings in the direct vicinity of the “Brown House”: the “Führerbau” and the “NSDAP Administrative Building” as well as two halls of remembrance for those who had died on November 9, 1923. To make room for these new buildings, several buildings on Arcisstraße were expropriated and demolished, including the Villa Pringsheim.

Troost was actually a specialist in ship interiors, but he was also adept at translating Hitler’s ideas of propaganda and spectacle into architecture. The Nazis’ aggressive ideology and their power ambitions were expressed in a blunt, angular, reduced form of neoclassicism. The buildings were completed in 1937 and served as models for almost all subsequent Nazi showcase buildings.  

As well as the “Brown House” and the two other monumental buildings, more than sixty other buildings in the surrounding area were used by Party offices or Nazi organizations. In the entire quarter as many as 6,000 people were employed full-time by the Nazi Party. They included the Supreme SA leadership, which moved into Barerstraße 7–11 in 1933. The head of the Storm Battalion (SA) Ernst Röhm had already had an office in the “Brown House” since 1931. In the early 1930s the SA had played a major role in “gaining control over the street.” When the SA was deprived of its power in 1934 in the wake of the “Night of the Long Knives,” its general staff moved to Berlin.  

The Wittelsbacher Palais on Brienner Straße, about 200 meters from the “Brown House,” had once been the residence of Ludwig I. The “Bavarian Political Police” under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich moved into the building in July 1933. Heydrich was also head of the Security Service (SD) of the SS. The Political Department had previously been made independent of the Munich Police Department, which had been under the “Reich Leader of the SS” Heinrich Himmler since March 1933. Within a short space of time the Political Police was transformed into the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo), which was outside the control of the state and the judiciary. Heydrich had a Gestapo prison built in the northern section of the site where thousands of political opponents were incarcerated, beaten up, and tortured, including Hans and Sophie Scholl in February 1943.

The NSDAP’s Supreme Court was housed at Karolinenplatz 4. Its tasks included examining applications for membership, settling internal Party disputes, and sanctioning behavior deemed harmful to the Party. Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and later General Governor of Poland, served as a judge here for a time. After the violent pogroms of November 1938, the Party court hearings made sure that the crimes and their perpetrators were covered up. Regular courts were not involved.

Some of the Party buildings were badly damaged by bombing raids in the final year of the war. The Wittelsbacher Palais burned out in 1944, while the “Brown House” was completely destroyed in January 1945. Afraid of the Americans, the employees working in the still intact buildings left their offices in the final days of the war. During the night before the liberation of Munich on April 30, 1945, many Munich citizens looted the unguarded Party buildings. The cellar of the “Führerbau” contained not only stores of food and wine but also 1,500 valuable works of art, a large of which the Nazis had extorted or stolen, many of them from Jewish collectors. Most of the works, which included paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens, were intended for a museum in Linz and were being temporarily stored in Munich. At least 650 artworks were looted during the night of April 30, 1945, in the largest art theft Munich has ever experienced. 400 of these works are still lost today.