Frauenkirche
2h 30m · Admission ticket not included
We meet up in front of Frauenkirche, where our story begun. In 1913, a small time Austrian painter started making and selling to tourists small drawings of some of the main touristic attractions in Munich. Just a couple of years later, the same person joins the German Workers Party (DAP, founded in 1920) after an intense night of debates and exchange of political views in a former beer hall at today’s number 38 Tal, called Sterneckerbräu, nowadays a modern computer store. From that moment on is all uphill for the young Adolf Hitler. Our tour will take us next to Hofbrauhaus beer hall, the main meeting point of the Nazis. Here, in the main room, from the small balcony, Hitler shouted out the party’s rules and regulations. Imagine the hall filled with people chanting the national anthem, applauding and being hypnotized by their new leader. Our next stop is in front of Altes Rathaus. This is the spot from where Hitler and Joseph Goebbels launched the Night of Broken Glass, the first pogrom against those of Jewish faith. Continuing our tour we will reach the Feldherrnhalle, a monumental loggia built in the 19 th century to honour the tradition of the army. On the left side of this building is the site of the brief battle that ended Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and caused his arrest. After 1933 the Nazis compelled
anyone walking by the Feldherrnhalle to give the Nazi salute. Many in Munich still didn’t sympathize with the regime, and started taking a detour through a back alley to avoid giving the salute (therefore nicknamed Dodgers’ Alley). We shall finish our tour with a final visit in the Königsplatz, to get a glimpse of the Führerbau, a representative building for Adolf Hitler, this being the place where the Munich Treaty was signed in 1938. Hitler’s former office is now a days a music school. There we can also see the Nazi Documentation Center, built on the side of the Braun Haus, the party’s headquarters from 1933 until 1945, and the ruins of the monument built by the Nazis to the 14 men who died during the Bier Hall Putsch of 1923. Königsplatz was the heart of the Nazi movement, a stage used by the Nazis for mass rallies and book burnings.
