Garrison Church

The Garrison Church (Garnisonkirche) was Potsdam's most important baroque church — a tall tower with carillon bells visible across the city, built in 1735 and the spiritual centre of the Prussian military. It was damaged in the 1945 bombing and the ruins blown up by the East German government in 1968 to make way for a radio mast. The tower is now being reconstructed, and the base-level documentation centre was opened in 2023.

The reconstruction is controversial: the church's association with the 1933 "Day of Potsdam," when Hitler appeared beside Hindenburg in its interior in a ceremony designed to cloak Nazism in Prussian respectability, means that rebuilding it is a politically charged act. The documentation centre at the base of the reconstruction addresses this history directly and honestly — it is one of the more thoughtful sites in Potsdam for understanding the darker threads of the city's past. The tower itself, when complete, will restore the carillon to the Potsdam skyline.

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A story
The original Garrison Church was where Frederick the Great was baptised, where Prussian kings worshipped, and most infamously where Adolf Hitler shook hands with President Hindenburg in 1933 on the "Day of Potsdam" — a staged ceremony designed to link the Nazi movement with Prussian military tradition. The East German government demolished the ruins in 1968. The reconstruction of the tower (but not the nave) has been controversially funded and begun; debate about whether to rebuild a building with such a complex historical meaning continues.