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Wilhelmstrasse


Wilhelmstrasse (German: Wilhelmstraße, see ß) is a major thoroughfare in the central Mitte and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Germany. Until 1945, it was recognised as the centre of the government, first of the Kingdom of Prussia, later of the unified German Reich, housing in particular the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office. The street's name was thus also frequently used as a metonym for overall German governmental administration, much as the term "Whitehall" is often used to signify the British governmental administration as a whole; in English, "the Wilhelmstrasse" usually referred to the German Foreign Office.

The Wilhelmstraße runs south from the Spree riverside through the historic Dorotheenstadt quarter to the Unter den Linden boulevard near Pariser Platz and Brandenburg Gate, where it takes on a line slightly east of south through adjacent Friedrichstadt, until its juncture with Stresemannstraße near Hallesches Tor in Kreuzberg, an overall distance of about 2.4 km (1.5 mi).

Further south of Unter den Linden it passes the nowadays built-over former Wilhelmplatz vis-à-vis Voss-Straße, it crosses Leipziger Straße near Leipziger and Potsdamer Platz, and Niederkirchnerstraße, known until after World War II as Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. At its southern end, Wilhelmstraße originally met with Friedrichstraße, which runs roughly parallel to the east, on the Belle-Alliance circus, before the street course was westerly redirected to the Stresemannstraße junction about 1970.


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