Restoration of Potsdam church, symbol of Nazi past, sparks controversy in Germany

The controversial reconstruction of a German church that symbolized Adolf Hitler’s official seizure of power in 1933 reached a decisive milestone on Thursday, August 22, with the inauguration of its brand new tower in the center of Potsdam, about thirty kilometers from Berlin.
Present at the ceremony, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier acknowledged that the Garrison Church was a reminder “painful and fatal episodes” from the German past, especially the “Potsdam Day” March 21, 1933, when Reich President Hindenburg officially received Hitler, his cabinet and the members of parliament. Despite this heavy reminiscence, the German President justified this restoration by declaring: “A place that no longer exists would not have facilitated a work of critical memory”. Witness to the opposition that the project has aroused for years: a hundred people demonstrated peacefully near the building.

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The history of the Garrison Church in Potsdam, built between 1733 and 1735 by order of Frederick I^is Prussia, almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in April 1945, is particularly busy.
It was this Protestant temple that the Nazis chose, on March 21, 1933, for the inaugural session of the parliament resulting from the legislative elections that Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party had just won.
A photograph that has gone down in history shows Hitler, who had been Chancellor for less than two months, welcoming the Reich President, the elderly Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, upon his arrival at church.

By choosing this church, where the tombs of Frederick I and his son Frederick II are located, Hitler intended to symbolically position himself as the heir to the kings who made Prussia great.
Addressed to President Steinmeier, a petition signed by thousands of people denounces “a building that is not only a central symbol of Prusso-German nationalism but also of the extreme right”. A text which forced the German head of state to give this clarification: “We do not hide the dark areas of the past, but we make them visible in order to learn from them”An exhibition in the building will therefore be intended to educate visitors about the history of this place and the National Socialist symbol that it represented.

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The new church, the renovation of which is not yet complete, “is not a place of veneration of militarism, nationalism and the authoritarian state”hammered the head of state. He is thus sending a message to the extreme right and in particular to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which is leading the polls before the regional election organized on September 22 in the state of Brandenburg, whose capital is Potsdam.
The restoration of the Garrison Church, the last remains of which were razed in the late 1960s at the request of the East German authorities – Potsdam was then in the communist GDR – is largely financed by the federal state.