Foreign Ministry

The front part of the Foreign Ministry is a modern transparent building, with an atrium open to the public and a coffee shop inside. The bulk of the Ministry is housed in the imposing second building, built for the Reichsbank (the central bank) in 1933-1934. It was one of the first major construction projects of the Third Reich. The current design won over modernist proposals by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who were condemned by the Nazis as “building Bolshevism”. The building is even larger as it appears – it has three underground stories, where gold stolen from all over Europe was stored during the war and now Foreign Ministry’s archive is housed. From 1958 to 1990 the building served as headquarters for East Germany’s Communist Party.

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