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Wilhelmstraße, or Wilhelmstrasse (see ß;For the spelling, see, inter alia, Paul Seabury: The Wilhelmstrasse, Joachim Joesten, The "New" Wilhelmstrasse, and the works of George Frost Kennan. The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary gives only this spelling; so do the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and all five of its quotations. ; ) is a major thoroughfare in the central Mitte and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Germany. Until 1945, it was recognised as the centre of the government, first of the Kingdom of Prussia, and later of the unified German Reich, housing in particular the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office. The street's name was thus also frequently used as a Metonymy for overall German governmental administration: much as the term "Whitehall" is often used to signify the British governmental administration as a whole. In English, "the Wilhelmstrasse" usually referred to the German Foreign Office.See Daisy, Princess of Pless by Herself, p. 63. OED, "Wilhelmstrasse"
Further south of Unter den Linden it passes the nowadays built-over former Wilhelmplatz vis-à-vis Voss-Straße, it crosses Leipziger Straße near Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz, and Niederkirchnerstraße, known until after World War II as Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. At its southern end, Wilhelmstraße originally met with Friedrichstraße, which runs roughly parallel to the east, on the Mehringplatz circus, before the street course was westerly redirected to the Stresemannstraße junction about 1970.
Between Unter den Linden and parallel Behrenstraße, the road is closed for motor vehicles as a protection of the Embassy of the United Kingdom.
Several further governmental departments took their seat on Wilhelmstrasse, such as the Reich Ministry of Finance (No. 61), the Imperial Colonial Office (No. 62), the Prussian state ministry (No. 63), the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture (No. 72), and the Reich Ministry of Transport (No. 79, from 1919). The lavish Palais Strousberg of bankrupt "railway king" Bethel Henry Strousberg on No. 70 was bought by Prince Hugo of Hohenlohe in an 1876 auction and rented out to the British ambassador Lord Ampthill, until it was finally purchased by the United Kingdom in 1884. In 1877 the Borsig Palace was erected on the corner with Voss-Strasse.
The Foreign Office moved into the former Reich President's palace, the old building being refurbished in grandiose style at the behest of Nazi Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Vis-à-vis on Wilhelmplatz, the Baroque Ordenspalais was refurbished as seat of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda led by Joseph Goebbels. In 1935/36 his party fellow Hermann Göring had the huge Ministry of Aviation edifice designed by Ernst Sagebiel built on the corner with Leipziger Strasse. The adjacent Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in the south became notorious as the seat of the Sicherheitsdienst of the Reichsführer-SS and the Sicherheitspolizei chief-of-staff; merged into the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt terror complex under Reinhard Heydrich in 1939. Most of the public buildings along Wilhelmstrasse were destroyed by Allied bombing during 1944 and early 1945 and during the following Battle of Berlin.
The communist GDR regime regarded the former government precinct as a relic of Prussian and Nazi militarism and imperialism, and had all the ruins of the government buildings demolished in the early 1950s. In the late 1950s there were almost no buildings at all along the Wilhelmstrasse from Unter den Linden to the Leipziger Strasse. The only major surviving public building in the Wilhelmstrasse was just Göring's Reich Air Ministry, which had escaped major damage during the war. As one of the few intact government buildings in central Berlin, it was used by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany and the (East) German Economic Commission, later by the German People's Council of the Soviet occupation zone, its People's Chamber successor and several East German ministries and government departments. As Haus der Ministerien it was at the centre of the popular demonstrations during the workers' uprising of 17 June 1953.
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 cut the street in half. In 1964 the East Berlin section of the street was named after the former GDR Minister-president Otto Grotewohl, who had died in office on 21 September. Several embassies of "befriended" countries were erected on the corner with Unter den Linden from about 1970 onwards. The new embassy building of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was erected from 1974 to 1978 on Wilhelmplatz. In the 1980s, several Plattenbau (concrete slab) apartment blocks were built on the cleared premises along East Berlin Otto-Grotewohl-Straße. The flats were quite popular among the nomenklatura, as they provided an undisturbed view across the Wall's towards West Berlin. The former "death strip" is today the site of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The British Embassy, whose original building had been destroyed by bombing, was rebuilt on the site. Queen Elizabeth II officiated at the grand opening in July 2000. Other public institutions on Wilhelmstraße include the ARD-Hauptstadtstudio (television studio) of the ARD broadcasting organization at the northern Spree riverside, the E-Werk techno club, the Topography of Terror museum at the former Reichssicherheitshauptamt site, and the Willy-Brandt-Haus headquarters of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on the southern corner with Stresemannstrasse.
Many of the occupants of the GDR apartment blocks are recent immigrants, and there are a number of shops and restaurants catering to Russians and Turks. In recent years the City of Berlin has placed a series of historical markers along Wilhelmstraße, showing where the well-known buildings of the pre-war era stood. On 8 November 2011 a memorial in honour of the failed assassin Johann Georg Elser was inaugurated at the site of the former Reich Chancellery.
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