The Wilhelmstrasse
Life in Berlin is almost unthinkable without "Wilhelmstrasse", the Wilhelm Street. The street name causes an alarm although nowadays it has lost the former meaning. Named after the later Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Wilhelmstrasse exists since 1709. As of the 19th century Prussian ministries are located in it and from 1871 to 1945 empire ministries. Before the war the Wilhelmstrasse was called for the Foreign Office and its policy symbolically. I does not surprise that the trial against members of the Foreign Office and other authorities of the Reich in Nuremberg between January 6, 1948 and April 11, 1949 was called Wilhelmstraße Lawsuit . The Germans deepened wrong politics with a geographical location too much.
Vanishing point of the III.Reich was not the German Reichstag, but the new Chancellery, the Reichskanzlei. Hitler had scolded the old Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse Nr. 77 as a "cigar-box" and ordered building alterations which started in 1933. But these were not enough for Hitler. A new, gigantic complex had to replace the old one. He entrusted his chief architect Speer with the erection of a new gigantic 421 m long building at the Vossstraße. The "Völkische Beobachter", the party newspaper appreciated the New Chancellery as "the first monumental building of the Großdeutsche Reich", the Pan-German empire. Already at the planning two bunkers, a small and a great one were taken into account. They were accessible by three hatches that were hydraulically operated even a freight elevator for lorries was installed.
The "Führer Bunker", however, was built under or next to the old Chancellery. When the old Chancellery was extended in 1935, a bunker with the measures of 21, 2 x 21,2 m was built. At first the ceiling strength was 2.35 m. Later when the air raids got more intense the concrete ceiling was extended to 3.35 m. An approx. 80 m long corridor connected the bunker with the new Chancellery. In 1943 the "Führer Bunker" was built. The wall thickness came to 3.60 m, the ceiling to 3.50 m of reinforced concrete.
Next to these three central bunkers there were four more underground shelters for the "Leibstandarte" and their vehicles in the vicinity of the new Chancellery. After the war the Soviets used granite and marble of Speer`s magnificent building for their hero monuments in Treptow and at the Nord-Süd-Achse. Other shelters near the Wilhelmstrasse were the Goebbels bunker in Behrenstrasse, the bunker for the ministery for armament and ammunition and the Adlon Hotel bunker at the Pariser Platz, the Kaiserhof Hotel bunker in Mohrenstrasse as well as the bunker of the ministery of transport in Wilhelmstrasse and the shelter in the forecourt of the Ministery of Air (RLM) in Leipziger Strasse.
The most dreaded quarters in the Berlin, maybe in whole of Germany, was the Prinz Albrecht Straße - today Niederkirchnerstraße- in the rectangle with the Wilhelmstraße between Leipziger- and Anhalterstraße. The Gestapo head office (secret state police) was in the Prinz Albrecht Straße Number 8, and at corner Wilhelmstraße 102 and Prinz-Albrecht-Straße HQ of the SS and headquarters of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the postal address of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler however, was Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse Nr. 8.
The most cynical, most brutal and most dreadful supervisory system which had seen the world till now consolidated itself in this geographical triangle. Himmler and Heydrich had the With the combination of SS, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and the SD-Hauptamt Himmler and Heydrich had such terrifying power which they should make unassailable between the years 1933-1945. The orders went from here to the Einsatzkommandos (operational commandos) which butchered thousands of innocent people behind the Eastern Front. Adolf Eichmann used his organizational mean talent from here to send millions into the gas chambers. The orders for the holocaust were formulated here by Himmler and Heydrich on order of Hitler and Görings. Heydrich then called a meeting in a villa at the Wannsee (Lake Wann) to delegate the "Endlösung", the final solution to the managers of the Reich.
On January 20, 1942 Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich invited 15 high officials of the topmost Reich, NSDAP and SS authorities into a guesthouse of the secret service of the SS , (SD) "at the Großer Wannsee" in Berlin Zehlendorf. Today a memorial place "house of the Wannsee meeting". Only conference point of the meeting: Final solution of the Jewish question. During this meeting the decision on the holocaust was not taken but it was rather part of the measures for the administrative putting into action of the fundamental decision for the extermination of the European Jews which was already met by Adolf Hitler during the preparation for the war against the Soviet Union.
Although Heydrich had ordered the most severe confidentiality Eichmann`s meeting protocol found its way into the files of the Foreign Office and was discovered in 1947. This meeting and this key document which was later disclaimed by neo Nazis as a fake are irrevocably regarded as a proof of the systematic extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals