Schloss Bellevue

Originally built as a summer residence for Prussian royalty, the Bellevue Palace became a guesthouse for the Nazis in 1939. In the preceding decade it had lived many lives, as an art gallery, a school, and a museum of ethnography and German folk history.

After World War II, its park was transformed into vegetable gardens—but the gardeners didn’t notice that statues of historical military figures had been buried there by citizens to prevent wartime destruction. The statues were not recovered until 1993. The following year, Bellevue became—and today remains—the president of Germany’s primary residence.