Historical notes Once a hunting ground of the
Electors of
Brandenburg the
Großer Tiergarten park of today was designed in the 1830s by landscape architect
Peter Joseph Lenné. In the course of industrialization in the 19th century, a network of streets was laid out in the
Hobrecht-Plan in an area that came to be known architecturally as the
Wilhelmine Ring. In 1894, the
Reichstag building by architect
Paul Wallot opened as the seat of the
German parliament. The lawn between the contemporary
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures). The Reichstag building was the site of the
Krolloper opera house, built in 1844, which served as the parliament house after the
Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933. It was demolished by
air raids in 1943. On 15 January 1919 the socialist
Karl Liebknecht was shot by
Freikorps soldiers in the park near the lake
Neuer See. The corpse of
Rosa Luxemburg, murdered on the same day, was found in the nearby
Landwehrkanal on 1 June 1919. The first
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) of
Magnus Hirschfeld was situated at the former
In den Zelten street, near the contemporary
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, from 1919 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. A site next to the Tiergarten park is the former location of a villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4 where more than 60 Nazi bureaucrats and doctors worked in secret under the "
T4" program to organize the mass murder of sanatorium and psychiatric hospital patients deemed unworthy to live. The German national memorial to the people with disabilities systematically murdered by the Nazis was dedicated in 2014 in Berlin at that site. ==Großer Tiergarten==