New City Hall

The rapid growth of the population of Munich in the 19th century and the expansion of the city administration meant a new city hall was needed. It was built from 1867 to 1908 in three sections by Graz architect Georg von Hauberrisser (1841-1922) in the neo-Gothic style.

After the National Socialists seized power, the SA occupied the building on March 9, 1933, unfurling a huge swastika flag from the tower, while Nazi Party city councilor Max Amann announced to the crowd that they were witnessing a ‘national uprising’. The incumbent Mayor Karl Scharnagl (BVP) resigned under massive pressure from the National Socialists on March 20 and on the same day, former Nazi Party city councilor and leading local politician of his party Karl Fiehler was appointed acting First Mayor of Munich by the acting Bavarian Minister of the Interior Adolf Wagner. In April, Fiehler was confirmed in office by the city council, which had since had its powers reduced and undergone changes in personnel. With the KPD banned, the remaining SPD councilors placed in ‘protective custody’ in Dachau, and the BVP councilors declared ‘undesirable’ from that point onwards, the first meeting of the purely National Socialist Munich city council took place in the New City Hall on July 25, 1933.

Having suffered some damage during the air raids on Munich in 1944, the building was rebuilt after the end of the war. To mark the city’s 800th anniversary in 1958, a memorial room was set up on the second floor facing the inner courtyard: here, two marble plaques commemorate the dead of the two world wars and the victims of political persecution during the Nazi era. Another plaque installed in the stairwell to the second floor in November 2000, commemorates ‘in grief and shame – and horrified at the silence on the part of those who knew’ the 1,000 Jewish men and women who were deported from Munich to Kovno (formerly Kaunas) in Lithuania on November 20, 1941 and murdered there shortly afterwards.