Cecilienhof is the most unusual royal residence in Potsdam — not a Baroque palace but a mock-Tudor English country house, built in 1917 for Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie. With its half-timbered gables, cottage gardens, and 55 chimneys, it looks completely out of place in Prussia. It was the last palace built by the Hohenzollern dynasty, completed just a year before the war ended and the dynasty fell.
The palace is famous above all as the venue for the Potsdam Conference of July and August 1945, where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill (replaced mid-conference by Attlee) divided post-war Europe and Germany. The conference rooms have been preserved as a museum, and the round table where the three powers negotiated is still in place. It is a genuinely strange and moving experience: a fake English house in a former Prussian park, set up for weeks as the stage on which the fate of Europe was decided. The palace sits in the Neuer Garten on the shores of the Heiliger See, a short cycle or bus ride from the old town.