Hitler's Vienna: Empire, War & the Holocaust

The UNESCO historical city center of Vienna is where all adventures in Vienna begins. Over the next 2 hours we explore and uncover the biggest highlights Vienna's old town has to offer.

This monument is the city's first memorial to the darkest moment in Vienna's recent history, fascism and war. It is made out of 4 parts, each with its own special reference to this terrible period. For the "Hitler's Vienna tour by Jan", this monument makes an insightful introduction to the tour by reminding us of the ultimate result and consequences of the story this tour studies.

The Hofburg was the principal residence of the Habsburg monarchy in Vienna. The tour will explore a part of this massive imperial complex. Its newest additions, like the Burggarten, Neue Burg, Heldenplatz, were constructed not long before Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna. Our tour through The Hofburg is an immersive experience that sets the stage for learning about the imperial world that Hitler first met at age 18 in 1907.

The Academy of Arts is where Adolf Hitler applied to become a student. He failed the entrance exam. Twice. He spent the next 4 years living on the streets, in shelters and men's hostels, painting watercolour postcards for tourists. Hitler's early life is full of adversities and provides insight to the ways he dealt with them and how they shaped him.

The Ringstrasse boulevard, and what it represents, is the most significant transformation of Vienna in recent times. The old medieval walls, bastions and glacis were replaced with a 4,5 km long boulevard. The space along the Ringstrasse was populated by dozens of Vienna's most important public institutions, all represented by monumental palaces in all historical styles. Hundreds of smaller, but equally magnificent, palaces, private residences, offices, hotels, banks and covered the space between the giants. Hitler loved it.

Heroes' square is the grandest space in the Hofburg palace. A gathering spot, parade ground, and forum. It was here, on the terrace of the Neue Burg, overlooking a fully packed square, that Adolf Hitler, on the 13th of March, declared the "Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Our tour and story end on this square but not before exploring the visible traces and relics of fascistic influence on the square and cityscape of Vienna.

At Judenplatz, we step into the heart of Vienna's medieval Jewish community — and into one of the city's most powerful sites of memory. You'll see the excavated remains of the 13th-century synagogue, destroyed in the Vienna Gesera, the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1420–21, now preserved beneath the square as part of the Museum Judenplatz. Standing above them is the Holocaust Memorial by artist Rachel Whiteread: a windowless concrete cube shaped like an inverted library, its base inscribed with the names of the camps where Austrian Jews were murdered.