Rathausmarkt
Hamburg's grand civic square in front of the ornate City Hall, a public stage the Nazis renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz and draped in swastika banners for Hitler's balcony speeches. Spared the worst of the 1943 firestorm, it quietly took back its old name, and its democracy, only after the war.
About this place
Laid out after the Great Fire of 1842 and loosely modelled on Venice's Piazza San Marco, the Rathausmarkt is the ceremonial heart of Hamburg, framed by the vast neo-Renaissance City Hall completed in 1897 and, along one side, the white arcades bordering the Kleine Alster. For a free Hanseatic city that had governed itself for centuries, it was above all a stage for civic life. That is precisely why the Nazis wanted it. In 1933 they renamed the square Adolf-Hitler-Platz, hung the balcony of the City Hall with swastika banners, and used it for the regime's public self-representation, with Hitler himself speaking here to assembled crowds in 1934 and again in 1939. At the edge of the square stands the Hamburger Ehrenmal, a stark memorial to the fallen of the First World War whose mournful relief the regime found intolerable and stripped away in 1938. When Operation Gomorrah unleashed its firestorm on the city in July 1943, this grand centre was largely spared while working class districts nearby were annihilated, a contrast that still unsettles anyone who understands it.
Key facts
- 1933 year — The Nazis renamed the square Adolf-Hitler-Platz, and it reverted to Rathausmarkt only in 1945
- 2 speeches — Hitler addressed crowds from the City Hall balcony above the square, in 1934 and again in 1939
- 1938 year — The regime stripped Ernst Barlach's mourning relief from the war memorial as too pacifist
📍 Altstadt, 20095, Hamburg