The story of this place
Opened in 1894 with the defiant inscription 'Dem Deutschen Volke' — To the German People — the Reichstag became the stage for Germany's darkest turn. On the night of 27 February 1933, flames gutted the debating chamber; the Nazis blamed communists and, next day, suspended civil liberties in the decree that made dictatorship legal. Soviet soldiers raised the red flag over its ruins in a staged 1945 photograph seen worldwide. Gutted and abandoned during the Cold War beside the Berlin Wall, it was reborn after reunification: Norman Foster crowned it in 1999 with a glass dome where visitors walk above the debating chamber, a deliberate symbol of transparent democracy.