The Reich Chancellery was the traditional name of the office of the Chancellor of Germany in the period of the German Reich from 1878 to 1945. The Chancellery's seat, selected and prepared since 1875, was the former city palace of Adolf Friedrich Count von der Schulenburg (1685–1741) and later Prince Antoni Radziwiłł (1775–1833) on Wilhelmstraße in Berlin. Both the palace and a new Reich Chancellery building were seriously damaged during World War II and subsequently demolished.
Image: Bundesarchiv Bild 146 1998 013 20A, Berlin, Reichskanzlei
Image: Bundesarchiv Bild 183 R89708, Berlin, Neue Reichskanzlei
The New Reich Chancellery under construction in 1938
The New Reich Chancellery, pictured here on the junction of Hermann-Göring-Straße (now Ebertstraße) and Voßstraße in 1939
Prince Antoni Henryk Radziwiłł was a Polish and Prussian noble, aristocrat, musician, and politician. Initially a hereditary Duke of Nieśwież and Ołyka, as a scion of the Radziwiłł family he also held the honorific title of a Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire. Between 1815 and 1831 he acted as Duke-Governor of the Grand Duchy of Posen, an autonomous province of the Kingdom of Prussia created out of Greater Polish lands annexed in the Partitions of Poland.
Lithograph after a sketch by Wilhelm Hensel, about 1810
Contemporary portrait, 1797
Chopin plays piano in Radziwiłł's Berlin salon at Palais Radziwill (Henryk Siemiradzki, 1887);