Wilhelmstraße (ministries quarter)
Once the administrative spine of the German state, this unassuming street was where the Nazi dictatorship was governed. The Reich Chancellery, the Foreign Ministry and Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda all stood within a few steps of one another here.
About this place
For more than half a century, Wilhelmstraße was shorthand for German power, much as Whitehall or the Wilhelmstrasse's modern equivalents are elsewhere. From 1933 the Nazi regime concentrated its apparatus of government along this single corridor in Mitte. Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery, expanded after 1938 with Albert Speer's monumental New Reich Chancellery on the adjoining Voßstraße. A few doors away stood Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry and, facing it across the old Wilhelmplatz, Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, from which the regime controlled the press, radio, film and culture. Most of these buildings were shattered by Allied bombing in 1944 and 1945 and during the Battle of Berlin, and the East German authorities cleared the surviving ruins in the early 1950s, seeing them as relics of militarism. Today the street is lined with apartment blocks and offices, and a series of illustrated information boards marks where the seats of Nazi power once stood.
Key facts
- 1933 year — Wilhelmstraße became the command centre of the Nazi state after Hitler took power
- 8 address — Goebbels ran the Propaganda Ministry from Wilhelmstraße number 8
- 1950 decade — East Germany demolished the last bombed ruins of the ministries in the early 1950s
📍 Leipziger Platz 12, 10117, Berlin