Prince Albrecht Palace

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The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, around 1837

The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais was a stately city palace in Berlin's Friedrichstadt . It was located at Wilhelmstrasse 102, opposite the western end of Kochstrasse , and was blown up in 1949 after severe war damage.

history

Baron Francis Matthäus von Vernezobre de Laurieux had the building built between 1737 and 1739. The merchant, who came from a Huguenot family and was promoted to the Prussian aristocracy and baron class in 1724, had made a considerable fortune in the silk trade , which he invested in goods on the Barnim, in the Uckermark and in the Niederlausitz. When King Friedrich Wilhelm I ordered him to marry his daughter to Friedrich Wilhelm Quirin von Forcade, who had been rejected by her , Vernezobre could only avert the marriage by offering a city residence in Wilhelmstrasse , which the king had designated for the construction of representative palaces erect. After his death in 1748 it was inherited by his son Friedrich Wilhelm von Vernezobre, landlord in Briesen (Spreewald) and district administrator of the Cottbus district , who later fell into financial decline.

At the beginning of its history, the three-storey main building with its courtyard open to the street and two commercial wings on either side of the entrance was a little off the beaten track near the city ​​wall and the park behind the house extended to today's Stresemannstraße .

After the Vernezobres moved out, the Abbess of Quedlinburg , Princess Amalie of Prussia , the youngest sister of Frederick the Great , used it as a summer residence in Berlin. After her death in 1787, it served as a quarantine station for the then spectacular smallpox vaccination of the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm III.

Johannes Rabe: Prince Albrecht in his study with August Sabac el Cher , 1853

The newly established Luisenstiftung was housed in the palace in 1811 until it was acquired by Prince Albrecht of Prussia around 1830 , who had it renovated and redesigned by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . Between 1860 and 1862 the architect Adolf Lohse carried out a further redesign . After Albrecht's death, his son Albrecht also used the building as an apartment. The valet August Sabac el Cher was in the service of Prince Albrecht . Even after the November Revolution of 1918, the building remained the property of the Hohenzollern family .

State Salon in the Palais, 1928

From 1928 to 1931 the imperial government rented the palace as a guest house, for example for the kings of Afghanistan (1928) and Egypt (1929).

After the " seizure " of the Nazi party in 1934 which related Sicherheitsdienst the building and used it for the SD main office and the office of the chief of the Gestapo , Reinhard Heydrich . The adjacent buildings on Wilhelmstrasse 101 and 103-106 later also belonged to the SS administrative complex comprising the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais and the neighboring Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (today: Niederkirchnerstrasse ).

The palace was severely damaged in an air raid on November 23, 1944. After the occupation of Berlin, the Soviet military administration in Germany expropriated the entire private property of the Hohenzollern family without compensation. The house became the property of the city of Berlin.

The Berlin Senate was in 1949 still "impressive ruin" without regard to historic preservation beyond concerns. He later leased part of the property cleared in 1955 to the operator of an autodrome with the company's motto "Driving without a license!" Louis Ferdinand von Prussia , the boss of the House of Hohenzollern, renounced the property claims of his family in 1961.

The Topography of Terror memorial, which has been operated by the foundation of the same name since 1992, has been located on the grounds of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais and the neighboring arts and crafts school since 1987 . The Topography of Terror documentation center on the history of the Reich Security Main Office and the Gestapo opened there on May 6, 2010 .

literature

  • Reinhard Rürup (Ed.): Topography of Terror. Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on the "Prince Albrecht site". A documentation. Verlag Willmuth Arenhövel, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-922912-21-4 .

Web links

Commons : Prinz-Albrecht-Palais  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Armin Dahl: History of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais
  2. ↑ Gernot Ernst and Ute Laur-Ernst: The city of Berlin in print graphics, Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2009, p. 151, ISBN 978-3-86732-055-9 .
  3. ^ Bert Becker: The Dutch Palais : To the history of the house and its inhabitants in: Board of the German-Dutch Society e. V. (Ed.): In the footsteps of the Dutch between the Thuringian Forest and the Baltic Sea, II. Symposium, printed as a manuscript, Berlin 1994, pp. 103–123, here p. 115, with evidence
  4. ↑ Zur Sprengung, Topografie (see  literature ), p. 192, on the Autodrom, p. 202

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 22 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 8 ″  E