Hotel Excelsior

Hotel Excelsior occupied number 112/113, Königgrätzer Straße on Askanischer Platz in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. It was once one of the largest and most luxurious hotels in Europe but its destruction during World War II resigned it to the German capital's list of lost historical landmarks.Early yearsOtto Rehnig - the architect responsible for the similarly fated Hotel Esplanade Berlin - was commissioned to design a hotel to accommodate the floods of passengers arriving in at the Anhalter Bahnhof across the street. When the Excelsior first opened on 2 April 1908 after over two years of construction work it accommodated a modest 200 rooms but when an additional section was built on Anhalter Strasse 6 in 1912/13 the hotel had already almost doubled in size.The untimely re-opening of the hotel on the eve of World War I meant that the building spent its early existence comparatively empty. As the war progressed the hotel’s fortunes dwindled. The saviour of the Excelsior appeared in 1919 in the form of Curt Elschner (1876–1963). In 1903 he took out a lease on the Hotel Metropol in Erfurt, before taking over the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg and then a number of other hotels and restaurants across Germany. After his war service Elschner spent a short time in 1919 working as an advisor and frontman to the politician and industrialist Hugo Stinnes, when the latter was elected into parliament in Berlin, before Elschner finally took the reins of the Excelsior.