Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus: From Luftwaffe to the Cold War

Why is it significant?

Stand back across Wilhelmstraße and take in the colossal limestone facade stretching for more than two hundred and fifty meters along the block. You are looking at the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, originally erected in nineteen thirty-six as the Reich Air Ministry for Hermann Göring.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand back across Wilhelmstraße and take in the colossal limestone facade stretching for more than two hundred and fifty meters along the block. You are looking at the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, originally erected in nineteen thirty-six as the Reich Air Ministry for Hermann Göring. It was the largest office complex in Europe at the time, containing over two thousand offices and four thousand windows, built to orchestrate Nazi air warfare.

Miraculously surviving Allied bombing raids virtually intact, the building became the administrative nerve center of East Germany after the war: the House of Ministries. Walk closer to the pillar colonnade on Leipziger Straße to see the striking socialist realist porcelain mural by Max Lingner, celebrating idealized happy workers, farmers, and soldiers marching toward the communist future.

But the real story here was defiance. On June seventeenth, nineteen fifty-three, thousands of angry East Berlin construction workers marched directly onto this square to protest crushing production quotas. The protest exploded into a nationwide anti-communist uprising that was brutally crushed only when Soviet tanks rolled into the streets and opened fire.

Today, this monumental building houses Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance. Walk south toward Niederkirchnerstraße to see the original Berlin Wall.