Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose

A sober walk from the new synagogue to the Siegestor: the destroyed main synagogue, Kurt Eisner, the dodgers' alley, the Gestapo, the Brown House, the Munich Agreement and the students who said no

Munich · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Ohel Jakob: The Synagogue That Came Back

   St.-Jakobs-Platz 18, 80331 München, Germany

   Stand in the middle of St.-Jakobs-Platz and face the building that looks like a block of pale, rough-cut stone with a glowing lantern of glass set on top. This is Ohel Jakob, the main synagogue of Munich. This walk through the Nazi era begins not with the darkness, but with what returned after it.

   The synagogue opened on the 9th of November 2006, sixty-eight years to the day after the pogrom night of 1938, when synagogues burned all over Germany. The date was chosen deliberately. The heavy stone base recalls the Temple in Jerusalem, built to last. The glass above, wrapped in a fine bronze mesh, recalls a tent, the dwelling of a people on the move. Ohel Jakob means the Tent of Jacob. Beside it stand the community centre and the Jewish Museum, together a whole Jewish quarter in the heart of the old town.

   Below the square, an underground passage links the community centre with the synagogue. It is called the Corridor of Remembrance, and its walls carry the names of the Jews of Munich who were murdered in the Holocaust. Every visitor to a service, every child going to a celebration, walks past those names first.

   The building did not come easily. Its driving force was Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Munich Jewish community since 1985, who survived the war as a child hidden on a farm in Franconia. She insisted the synagogue belonged in the centre of the city, not in a back street. And in 2003, police uncovered a plot by a neo-Nazi group to bomb the ceremony for laying the foundation stone. That is why you see police here day and night... a reminder that this story did not end in 1945.

   The name itself is a memory. The first Ohel Jakob, an Orthodox synagogue on Herzog-Rudolf-Straße, was set on fire during the pogrom night of 1938. Munich's great main synagogue had already been torn down months earlier, on Hitler's personal order. To understand how a city came to that, we have to go back twenty years. Walk north through the old town to Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße, and look down at the pavement.

2. 2. Kurt Eisner Memorial: The Shot of 1919

   Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße, 80333 München, Germany

   Look down at the pavement here on Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße: set into the stones is the bronze outline of a man lying where he fell. Most people step right over it without noticing. That is almost the point.

   The man was Kurt Eisner, a journalist and theatre critic from Berlin, a socialist, a pacifist, and a Jew. On the night of the 7th to the 8th of November 1918, as the First World War collapsed, he proclaimed Bavaria a republic. The Wittelsbach family had ruled Bavaria for seven hundred and thirty-eight years, and their rule ended in a single night, almost without a shot. Eisner became the first prime minister of the new Free State of Bavaria.

   His party was crushed in the elections of January 1919. On the morning of the 21st of February he walked along this street towards the parliament, his resignation speech in his pocket. A young aristocratic officer, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, stepped up behind him and shot him in the head and back. Eisner died on the spot.

   The story goes that Arco wanted to prove himself to the Thule Society, a secretive far-right circle in Munich, which had rejected him because his mother was Jewish. His death sentence was commuted, and he served his time in Landsberg prison... where, it is said, he had to give up his cell to a new prisoner named Adolf Hitler.

   The murder threw Bavaria into chaos: a short-lived Soviet Republic in the spring, then its bloody suppression by government troops and Freikorps volunteers in May 1919, with hundreds dead. Out of that fear and violence, Munich turned sharply to the right, and it became a refuge for nationalist and antisemitic groups from across Germany. One of them was a tiny new party where a former corporal had just started to speak. The memorial in the pavement dates from 1989. Now walk west towards Lenbachplatz and turn into Herzog-Max-Straße, where Munich's main synagogue once stood.

3. 3. The Lost Main Synagogue of Herzog-Max-Straße

   Herzog-Max-Straße, 80333 München, Germany

   At the corner of Herzog-Max-Straße and Maxburgstraße, find a low, dark block of stone with a Hebrew and German inscription. Around it is ordinary city: traffic, offices, people hurrying to the shops. It is very easy to walk past... and for decades, that is exactly what Munich did.

   On this site stood the main synagogue of Munich, consecrated in 1887 and designed by the architect Albert Schmidt. It was a large, confident building in the Romanesque revival style, standing only a few streets from the Frauenkirche. For Munich's Jewish citizens, many of them doctors, merchants, lawyers and artists, it was a statement in stone: we belong to this city.

   In June 1938, Hitler visited the art building just around the corner and saw the synagogue. He ordered it gone. The Jewish community was told on the 8th of June, and demolition began the very next day. This was five months before the November pogrom, at a time when the rest of the world still imagined it was dealing with an ordinary government. The site was turned into a car park.

   Then came the 9th of November 1938. The Nazi leadership gathered in Munich every year on that date to commemorate the failed putsch of 1923, and that evening Joseph Goebbels gave a speech in the Old Town Hall that unleashed the pogrom across Germany. In Munich that night, the Ohel Jakob synagogue burned, Jewish shops were smashed, and Jewish men were arrested and sent to the camp at Dachau.

   The memorial stone was set up in 1969. It is small, and for a long time it was almost the only sign in the centre of Munich that a Jewish community had ever existed here. Stand with it for a moment. Then head west to Arcisstraße and walk north up it to Königsplatz, to the place where the party that gave these orders had its headquarters.

4. 4. NS-Dokumentationszentrum: The Site of the Brown House

   Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1, 80333 München, Germany

   In front of you rises a plain white cube with narrow vertical slats over its windows, standing at the corner of the wide, empty-feeling Königsplatz. It looks almost too clean for what it holds. It stands exactly where the headquarters of the Nazi party used to be.

   That building was the Brown House, a nineteenth-century mansion called Palais Barlow, which the party bought in 1930 and opened as its national headquarters in 1931. From here the party was run, membership files were kept, and careers were made. In 1935 Munich received the official title Capital of the Movement. The city had not only tolerated the Nazis... it had given them a home, money and a stage.

   Look across at Königsplatz. In the 1930s its lawns were paved over with granite slabs for marches and rallies, and Münchner nicknamed it the Plattensee, the lake of slabs. The grass only came back in 1988. Inside the white cube, the windows are placed so that, floor by floor, you look out at the buildings whose story you are reading on the walls.

   The Brown House was wrecked by bombs and its ruins cleared after the war, and then for decades the plot stood empty. Munich took a very long time to face this past head on. The documentation centre only opened on the 30th of April 2015, seventy years to the day after American troops entered the city. Its exhibitions do not ask how Hitler seized Munich; they ask how Munich made Hitler possible.

   Notice the address: Max-Mannheimer-Platz. Max Mannheimer was a Jewish survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau. For decades he travelled to school after school to tell teenagers what had happened to him and his family, until his death in 2016 at the age of ninety-six. The square that once held the party's headquarters now carries his name. Walk a few steps east to the corner of Arcisstraße, to the long limestone building with two balconies above its doors.

5. 5. Führerbau and the Temples of Honour

   Arcisstraße 12, 80333 München, Germany

   On your left stands a long building of pale limestone with heavy square columns and two balconies above its entrances. Right beside it, on the corner of Brienner Straße, a square stone platform rises from the ground, completely overgrown with trees and bushes. Both belong to the same story.

   The building is the Führerbau, built between 1933 and 1937 to designs by Paul Ludwig Troost, Hitler's favourite architect, who died before it was finished. It held Hitler's Munich offices and rooms for receiving guests. Its twin to the south held the party's administration. Today the Führerbau is the University of Music and Theatre, and Hitler's former office is said to be used as a practice room.

   On the night of the 29th to the 30th of September 1938, Hitler, Mussolini, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French prime minister Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement in this building. It handed the Sudetenland, the border regions of Czechoslovakia, to Germany. Czechoslovakia itself was not invited to the table. Chamberlain flew home promising peace for our time. Less than six months later, German troops marched into Prague.

   Now the overgrown platform. Here, and on a second one across the street, stood the two Temples of Honour, open colonnades built in 1935 to hold the bronze coffins of the sixteen Nazis killed in the failed putsch of 1923. SS men stood guard, and the dead were declared the eternal watch of the movement. In January 1947 the American army blew the temples up. Only the plinths remain, and the vegetation has been allowed to take them over.

   There is a final twist. After the war, the Americans turned the Führerbau and its twin into the Central Collecting Point, where the Monuments Men gathered hundreds of thousands of looted artworks and returned them to their owners. Hitler's building became a lost-and-found for Europe's stolen art. Now walk east along Brienner Straße, past the Karolinenplatz obelisk, to a small square with a flame behind bars.

6. 6. Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: Facing the Gestapo

   Brienner Straße, 80333 München, Germany

   In this small square on Brienner Straße, walk up to the dark stone column with a barred opening. Behind the bars a flame is burning, and it does not go out. This is the Square of the Victims of National Socialism.

   The memorial with the eternal flame was set up in 1985, and the square was redesigned in 2014. It is dedicated to everyone persecuted and murdered by the regime: Jews, Sinti and Roma, political opponents, gay men, people with disabilities, forced labourers, and all those who were simply in the way. Now turn around and look across the street at the large modern bank building. That is where the reason for this square's location stood.

   On that site stood the Wittelsbacher Palais, a romantic red-brick palace built in the 1840s for the Bavarian crown prince, where King Ludwig the First lived after he gave up the throne. From 1933 it became the headquarters of the Bavarian political police, which turned into the Gestapo. Its cellars were turned into cells, and people were interrogated, beaten and sent on from here to the camps.

   In February 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose were brought here after their arrest at the university. Sophie was questioned for many hours by the Gestapo officer Robert Mohr. He later said that at first he had almost believed her innocence... until the evidence left no doubt. Neither of them betrayed their friends.

   One of the regime's first concentration camps, Dachau, opened in March 1933, less than twenty kilometres from here. It was announced openly in the newspapers by Heinrich Himmler, then the acting police president of Munich. Nobody could say they had not been told. The palace was badly damaged in the war and its ruins later demolished. Now walk on east, then turn into Theatinerstraße and look for a narrow lane on your left leading through to Residenzstraße.

7. 7. Viscardigasse: The Dodgers' Alley

   Viscardigasse, 80333 München, Germany

   You are in a short, narrow lane linking Theatinerstraße with Residenzstraße, right behind the great open loggia of the Feldherrnhalle. Now look down at the cobbles. A winding trail of bronze-coloured stones runs through the grey ones, like a path someone traced with a golden pen.

   On the 9th of November 1923, Hitler and his followers marched through Munich in an attempt to seize power, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. At the Feldherrnhalle, just around the corner, the Bavarian State Police blocked the way and shots were fired. Sixteen of the marchers and four policemen died that day. Hitler fled, was arrested, and wrote much of Mein Kampf in prison at Landsberg.

   After 1933 the regime turned that defeat into a cult. A memorial plaque to the sixteen dead was fixed to the side of the Feldherrnhalle facing Residenzstraße, with an SS guard of honour standing beside it, and everyone who passed was expected to raise an arm in the Hitler salute. So people who did not want to, quietly turned off into this lane and walked around the back. Münchner nicknamed it the Drückebergergassl, the dodgers' alley.

   Be honest about what this was. It was not resistance in the heroic sense. It was a small sideways step, a refusal made with the feet. But in a dictatorship, even a habit like that could be noticed, and the story goes that the lane was watched. The bronze trail was laid in 1995 by the artist Bruno Wank to mark the path of all those who chose not to salute.

   Today a plaque on the Feldherrnhalle remembers the four policemen who died stopping the putsch in 1923. It took a very long time for them to be honoured; for twelve years, the city honoured only the men they had stopped. Walk the bronze line yourself, out onto Residenzstraße, and then head north to the square with the bronze horseman in front of the palaces.

8. 8. Wittelsbacherplatz: Ruins, Rubble and Reckoning

   Wittelsbacherplatz, 80333 München, Germany

   Step into the calm square with the bronze horseman in the middle, framed by stately pale palaces. The rider is the Elector Maximilian the First, cast to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and set up in 1839. Everything around you looks as if it has stood here undisturbed for two centuries. It has not.

   Munich was hit by more than seventy air raids during the Second World War. Thousands of people were killed, and by 1945 most of the old town lay in ruins. The palaces around this square were burned-out shells. What you see is a reconstruction, and that was a choice. Many German cities rebuilt in a modern style after the war. Munich decided to restore its historic streets and facades, so that the city would look like itself again.

   And the rubble had to go somewhere. Women and men cleared it brick by brick, the famous Trümmerfrauen, and much of it was carted north of the city and piled up into hills. Those hills, landscaped and planted, later became the park of the 1972 Olympic Games. When you see people sledging or watching a concert there, they are sitting on the ruins of the old city.

   Look around at the palaces on the square. After the war the Siemens company moved its headquarters from divided Berlin to Munich, and this square became its address. During the war Siemens, like many German companies, had used forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners, including women from the camp at Ravensbrück. Around the year 2000, Siemens joined other German firms in founding a fund to compensate surviving forced labourers. It came late, decades late, but it came.

   That is the uncomfortable thing about this square. The beauty is real, and the reckoning behind it is real too, and neither cancels the other. Now leave the square to the north-east and walk up Ludwigstraße, the grand avenue, to the long building with four seated stone figures on its front steps.

9. 9. Bavarian State Library: Books Burned, Bombed and Stolen

   Ludwigstraße 16, 80539 München, Germany

   Stop in front of the long brick palace on Ludwigstraße and look at the broad steps leading up to its entrance. Four seated stone figures guard them: Thucydides, Homer, Aristotle and Hippocrates, history, poetry, philosophy and medicine. This is the Bavarian State Library, one of the great libraries of Europe.

   It was built between 1832 and 1843 by Friedrich von Gärtner for King Ludwig the First, who wanted his avenue lined with temples of learning. Inside are millions of books and some of the most precious manuscripts in the world. Books are the thread of this stop, because the Nazi years attacked them three times.

   The first attack was fire. On the 10th of May 1933, in cities across Germany, students and party members burned books by Jewish, socialist and pacifist authors. In Munich the bonfire was lit on Königsplatz, the square you saw earlier. The poet Heinrich Heine had written a century before that where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.

   The second attack came from the sky. Allied bombs destroyed most of this building, and around half a million volumes were lost. The rarest treasures survived because librarians had moved them out of the city to safer places in time, crate by crate. After the war the library was rebuilt behind its old facade.

   The third attack is the quietest. During the Nazi years, books stolen from Jewish families, from emigrants and from organisations that had been banned flowed into German libraries, this one included. Today the library's researchers go through its shelves, volume by volume, looking for owners' stamps, names and dedications, and return what they can to the heirs. Every returned book is a small life found again. Now continue north along Ludwigstraße to the university, where the two fountains splash on either side of the road.

10. 10. Geschwister-Scholl-Platz: The Leaflets of 18 February 1943

    Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany

    In front of the main building of the university, look down at the cobbles. Scattered among them, as if someone had just dropped them, lie sheets of paper with typed text and photographs of young faces. They are made of ceramic and set into the ground, and they never blow away.

    They are copies of the leaflets of the White Rose, a small group of students and their professor who decided in 1942 that silence was complicity. They wrote six leaflets calling on Germans to resist, copied them at night, and posted them to addresses in cities across southern Germany. They also painted slogans such as Freedom and Down with Hitler on walls in Munich after dark.

    On the morning of the 18th of February 1943, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie carried a suitcase full of the sixth leaflet into this building while lectures were running. They laid piles outside the lecture halls. At the last moment, from the gallery around the great atrium, Sophie pushed the remaining sheets over the balustrade, and they fluttered down into the hall. The building custodian saw them and held them until the Gestapo came.

    Four days later, on the 22nd of February, the People's Court under its president Roland Freisler sentenced Hans, Sophie and their friend Christoph Probst to death. They were executed at Stadelheim prison that same afternoon. Sophie was twenty-one, Hans twenty-four. Christoph Probst was twenty-three and the father of three small children. According to witnesses, Hans Scholl called out long live freedom before he died.

    The leaflets did not die with them. A copy of the sixth was smuggled to Britain, and later in 1943 British planes dropped it over Germany in vast numbers as the manifesto of the Munich students. Inside the building, in the atrium, there is a small memorial exhibition, the DenkStätte Weiße Rose. Then cross Ludwigstraße to the square on the other side, named after the professor who wrote that last leaflet.

11. 11. Professor-Huber-Platz: The Professor Who Wrote the Last Leaflet

    Professor-Huber-Platz, 80539 München, Germany

    Across Ludwigstraße from the main building, stand by the round fountain on this second square, the twin of the one you have just left. The two fountains splash on either side of the avenue like a pair of open hands. This one carries the name of a man who was older, quieter and less famous than the students.

    Kurt Huber was a professor of philosophy and music at this university, born in 1893, and a passionate collector of Bavarian folk songs. A childhood illness had left him with a limp and a hesitant speech, and he never quite fitted the academic world. Yet his lectures were packed. Students said that when he spoke about the philosopher Leibniz, everyone in the hall understood he was really talking about freedom of conscience.

    Through those students, Huber found the White Rose, and in February 1943, just after the catastrophe of Stalingrad, he wrote its sixth leaflet himself. It was addressed to his fellow students and called on them to rise against the party that had stolen their freedom. That was the leaflet Sophie Scholl pushed over the balustrade.

    He was arrested at the end of February 1943. The university even stripped him of his doctorate. On the 13th of July 1943 he was executed at Stadelheim together with Alexander Schmorell, one of the founders of the group, and in October their friend Willi Graf followed them. Schmorell had grown up between two cultures, with a Russian mother, and in 2012 the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad declared him a saint, Saint Alexander of Munich.

    Today two squares face each other here, one for the brother and sister, one for the professor, with the traffic of Ludwigstraße running between them. It is fitting: the students and the teacher who joined them, on equal terms. Now walk north along Ludwigstraße, just a couple of minutes, to the great triumphal arch where the avenue ends.

12. 12. Siegestor: Dedicated to Victory, Destroyed by War, a Warning for Peace

    Ludwigstraße, 80539 München, Germany

    Stand in front of the triumphal arch that closes the end of Ludwigstraße, on its southern side, the side facing the old city. Up above the arches, in clear capital letters, runs an inscription in German that sums up this entire walk in nine words.

    The Siegestor, the Victory Gate, was commissioned by King Ludwig the First and built between 1843 and 1852, modelled on the Arch of Constantine in Rome. On top rides Bavaria in a chariot drawn by four lions. On the north side, the original dedication still reads: to the Bavarian army. It was built to celebrate soldiers and victories, as triumphal arches always are.

    In the Second World War the gate was badly damaged by bombs, and the lion chariot on top was wrecked; it was only recast and returned years later. After the war there were voices that wanted it pulled down altogether. Instead, it was restored in the 1950s in a deliberately simplified form, and you can still see where the decoration is missing, where smooth stone stands in for carving. The scars were left visible on purpose.

    And the writer Wilhelm Hausenstein gave the south side its new inscription: Dem Sieg geweiht, vom Krieg zerstört, zum Frieden mahnend. Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace. Read it slowly. It is perhaps the most honest sentence carved anywhere in this city.

    Think back over the walk. A synagogue that came back, a prime minister shot in the street, a synagogue torn down by one man's order, the house where a party ran a country into the abyss, the agreement that betrayed a neighbour, a flame for the victims, a lane for those who would not salute, books burned and bombed, and students and a professor who said no and paid with their lives. Munich was the capital of the movement. It is also the city of the White Rose. This walk ends here, under an arch that learned to say something better than victory.