Cecilienhof Palace

Cecilienhof Palace occupies an unmatched dual place in German history: it is both a Tudor-style English country house built for the Hohenzollern family and the venue of the Potsdam Conference, the July-August 1945 meeting where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill decided the post-war order of Europe. The palace was built between 1914 and 1917 for Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie, designed by Paul Schultze-Naumburg in the style of an English Tudor manor. The building is deliberately informal for a royal residence arranged around a main courtyard with half-timbered gables, tall brick chimneys, mullioned windows, and a prominent bay window. The interior features oak-panelled rooms, carved fireplaces, and comfortable furnishings rather than ceremonial Baroque state rooms. The most historically significant space is the Great Hall, where the Potsdam Conference took place, still containing the round table used during negotiations, the original chairs with nameplates, and the Soviet flag mounted above the main entrance. The palace sits on the Jungfernsee shore in the north of Potsdam within a 20-hectare English landscape park, making it one of the most serene palace settings in the Berlin-Brandenburg area.