Borsig Palace
The Palais Borsig was as a private residence, then as a bank and finally as a government building occupied building in Berlin's district Mitte ( Friedrichstadt ). The building was located from 1875/1877 until its destruction in World War II in the Voßstraße one on the corner of William Street .
Construction and installation
The Borsig Palace was designed by the director of the Berlin Bauakademie , the architect Richard Lucae (1829–1877), on behalf of the manufacturer Albert Borsig (1829–1878) as the new Berlin residential building for Borsig. The construction took place in the years 1875 to 1877.
Lucae designed the palace as a two-storey building in the style of the neo-Renaissance, which was very popular at the time . On the upper floor, in the niches between the individual windows, sculptures by Archimedes , Leonardo da Vinci , James Watt , George Stephenson and Karl Friedrich Schinkel were placed to symbolize technical progress. Reinhold Begas , Otto Lessing , Erdmann Encke and Emil Hundrieser were involved as sculptors . The facades were clad with sandstone slabs. Architects and artists were among the best that could be found in Berlin at the time.
The self-confidence of the aspiring citizen Borsig is made clear both with the style based on the Italian High Renaissance , which refers to the Italian city republics (such as Venice or Florence ), as well as with the figure program. In the area around Wilhelmstrasse there were previously only palaces of aristocrats who looked back on centuries of tradition. Albert Borsig's father had built a large company out of nothing.
In 1878 the first renovation had to be carried out on the house that had just been completed: the neighbor in Vossstrasse 2 had his horse stable built right under the windows of the ballroom, which occupies a large part of the upper floor - the Prince of Pless , Hans Heinrich XI. von Hochberg , who also competed in Silesia with the Borsigs in the mining industry .
use
In 1878, when the interior of the house was to be completed, the builder Albert Borsig died. The construction work was then stopped, the house remained unused for around a quarter of a century under unspecified circumstances, despite the exposed location and the high property value, until 1904 for 1.3 million marks (purchasing power adjusted in today's currency: around 8.70 million euros) of of the Prussian Pfandbriefbank and expanded for use as a bank building.
From June 1933 to June 30 / July 1, 1934, the Borsig Palace served as the official seat of the “Chancellery of the Deputy Reich Chancellor” in the Hitler government , Franz von Papen . On March 23, 1934, the palace was bought by the Reich . During the almost one year of use of the building as a vice chancellery, it served - referred to as the "Reich complaints office" - as a gathering point for a resistance group against the Nazi dictatorship that was recruited from close employees of von Papens (but did not involve them) (in the literature, among other things, as "Papen- Circle "," Jung Group "," Jung-Bose-Ketteler-Tschirschky Group "). This consisted essentially of Herbert von Bose , Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler , Friedrich-Carl von Savigny , Fritz Günther von Tschirschky , Hans von Kageneck , Kurt Josten and Walter Hummelsheim, seven members of the Vice Chancellor's staff. In addition, there was the extraordinary employee of the law firm Edgar Julius Jung .
On June 30, 1934, in the course of the Röhm affair , the vice chancellery was stormed and occupied by an SS commando. Papen was then interned in his private apartment on Lennéstrasse. Bose was shot on the premises of the chancellery, Tschirschky, Savigny and Hummelsheim were arrested and temporarily held in the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and in concentration camps . Kageneck, Ketteler and Josten were able to leave the office unhindered and flee.
Who gave the instruction for the action against the vice chancellery is still unclear. One of Adolf Hitler's orders at last instance was supported by the fact that a few days earlier he referred Alfred Rosenberg to the building of the vice chancellery during a conversation about disruptive maneuvers against his policy coming from the government apparatus itself and said: “Yes, everything comes from here, I will do the whole thing Have the office excavated ". It is not entirely clear which of Hitler's subordinates organized the action and had it implemented. Tschirschky noted in his memoirs (memories of a high traitor) that there had been disputes among the detectives who stormed the office about who was allowed to arrest him. He identified the leader of the one, smaller group that later arrived at the palace to take him into custody as one of Hermann Göring's employees . He assumed that the leader of the group that arrived first, consisting mainly of SS men, who finally prevailed and arrested him, was an employee of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich . This assumption - apart from the fact that the SS men were primarily subordinate to these two, although Göring would also have had a right of disposal over them if necessary - is supported by the fact that the shot Herbert von Bose was a personal enemy of Heydrich and that he, Tschirschky, was abducted to the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.
On July 1, 1934, Hitler ordered the palace to be vacated as a vice chancellery. Instead, he commissioned the architect Albert Speer to convert the Palais Borsig into the new headquarters for the SA staff , which Hitler had gradually moved from Munich to Berlin in the summer / autumn of 1934.
From November 1934 on, 32 rooms in Palais Borsig could be used by the SA leadership under Viktor Lutze and 12 rooms by the “Presidential Chancellery of the Führer” under the direction of Otto Meissner . When the New Reich Chancellery was built in 1938/1939 , the Palais Borsig was integrated into the new building.
The building was finally destroyed by aerial bombs and subsequent fires in World War II and later demolished. On the former site of the Palais Borsig there are eight to nine-storey apartment blocks and parking spaces.
Villa Borsig
Not to be confused with the "Palais Borsig" are two buildings that are named "Villa Borsig":
- Villa Borsig in Berlin-Moabit (street Alt-Moabit ) 1849–1911
- Borsig Villa Reiherwerder
literature
- Laurenz Demps : Berlin-Wilhelmstrasse. A topography of Prussian-German power . 3rd updated edition. Ch.Links, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86153-228-X .
- Rainer Orth : “The official seat of the opposition” ?: Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor in the years 1933–1934 . Böhlau, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-412-50555-4 .
Web links
- Photo-realistic reconstruction ( memento from October 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at atelier-neubauer.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 38, 1904, No. 24 (from March 23, 1904), p. 148.
- ^ Burghard Freudenfeld: Stations in German History, 1919–1945 . 1962, p. 119.
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 '42 " N , 13 ° 22' 59" E