The main building on the
Landwehr Canal was erected between 1911 and 1914 in a
neoclassical style as the seat of the
Imperial Naval Office, until 1916 led by Grand admiral
Alfred von Tirpitz. It was also the headquarters of the
Imperial Admiralty Staff and the
Imperial Navy Cabinet directly subordinate to Emperor
Wilhelm II. Already in 1938, the head of the intelligence agency under Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris and Lieutenant Colonel
Hans Oster evolved plans for a
coup d'état in the course of the
German occupation of Czechoslovakia.
20 July plot enters the Bendlerblock, July 1944 In the early 1940s, the OKH Army Office under the leadership of General Friedrich Olbricht became the focus of military resistance to the Nazi regime. In October 1943, Colonel
Claus von Stauffenberg was transferred to the General Army Office as chief of staff. The bomb went off, but Hitler survived. As the day progressed and the news spread, the conspirators were unable to take control of Germany. Following their arrest in the Bendlerblock by order of General
Friedrich Fromm, the resistance fighters Colonel von Stauffenberg, General Friedrich Olbricht,
Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, and Stauffenberg's adjutant
Werner von Haeften, were executed by firing squad that same night in the courtyard of the building. A fifth plotter, Generaloberst
Ludwig Beck, was allowed to shoot himself. Fromm's opportunism did not pay off: he was arrested for connivance the next day, condemned to death and executed on 12 March 1945. During the
Battle of Berlin in the last days of
World War II in late April and early May 1945, General
Helmuth Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, used the Bendlerblock as his headquarters before surrendering to General
Vasily Chuikov of the Soviet
Red Army at 6:00 a.m. on 2 May.
Post-war era and others were executed The section of the Bendlerblock around the courtyard, where Stauffenberg and the other conspirators were executed, now houses the
Memorial to the German Resistance. It is also used as one of the ceremonial sites where new members of the
Wachbataillon of the
Bundeswehr (German military's drill unit) take their oaths. Following German reunification, the Federal Minister of Defence's Berlin office was moved to the Bendlerblock. On 27 August 2025, the
government of
Chancellor Friedrich Merz held its first cabinet meeting at the Bendlerblock. == Use in filming ==