Truman mansion

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Truman Villa, street side

The Truman Villa , formerly called Villa Müller-Grote or Haus Erlenkamp , is located at Karl-Marx-Straße 2 in Potsdam-Babelsberg .

history

Garden side of the Truman Villa
The Truman Villa at the time of the Potsdam Conference , 1945

The "Erlenkamp House" in what was then Kaiserstraße 2 in Neubabelsberg was planned by the architects Karl von Großheim and Heinrich Joseph Kayser and built between 1891 and 1892. The client was Carl Müller-Grote (1833–1904), owner of the Grotesche publishing house and publisher of Theodor Fontane's works . The villa served as his summer residence and was an early meeting point for important personalities. A regular guest was Edwin Redslob , the Reichskunstwart of the Weimar Republic , who co-founded the Tagesspiegel in 1945 .

The house was named "Truman Villa" because the President of the United States Harry S. Truman lived here during the Potsdam Conference ; for this reason and because of its white paintwork, the villa was also given the nickname “Little White House ”. From July 15, 1945, Truman lived in the villa for 17 days with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Defense Advisor William D. Leahy . From the Truman mansion, President Truman issued the atomic bomb order on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .

Shortly before the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8, 1945, the "Erlenkamp House", located on the SA road from 1933 to 1945 , was confiscated by the Soviet accommodation management, and the residents had two hours to leave the building. In the run-up to the Potsdam Conference, the house was prepared for its accommodation purpose and then used as a residential area by the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet occupation forces in Germany , Marshal Georgi Schukow , until his recall in spring 1946 . Although Zhukov was also head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), which was based in Karlshorst , he preferred to be close to the military.

In the years that followed, the building, now located on Karl-Marx-Strasse, served as an SED party school, a polytechnic high school (1961–1974) and a furniture store.

After having been on the real estate market for years, the villa was bought by the FDP- affiliated Friedrich Naumann Foundation in 1998 and renovated from 1999 to 2001. Before the construction work began, a fire caused by arson had caused severe damage, particularly to the valuable interior. The old villa was supplemented in 2000 by a modern office building designed by the architect Diethelm Hoffmann . The foundation has had its headquarters here since April 2001.

architecture

The villa is a two-storey plastered building with articulated walls and cornices made of natural stone with a high hipped roof made of glazed roof tiles . The street facade with the risalit of the two-storey hall is influenced by the English country house character, while the garden facade with a retracted loggia , two side elevations and shield gables is designed in the forms of German neo-Renaissance .

literature

  • Paul Sigel, Silke Dähmlow, Frank Seehausen, Lucas Elmenhorst: Architectural Guide Potsdam. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-496-01325-7 .

Web links

Commons : Truman Villa  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Schmidt: Müller-Grote, Carl. In: ders .: German booksellers. German book printer. Volume 6. Berlin / Eberswalde 1908, pp. 1092-1094 ( online at Zeno.org ).
  2. ^ A Soviet center of power in Potsdam-Babelsberg - Soviet legacy . In: Berlins Taiga - Your companion for excursions into Soviet history . July 14, 2017 ( berlinstaiga.de [accessed September 3, 2017]).
  3. ^ Arson: historic Truman villa in Potsdam destroyed . In: Die Welt , September 27, 1999.

Coordinates: 52 ° 23 '44.5 "  N , 13 ° 7' 21.4"  E