Collecting History

Its first exhibits were weapons belonging to the Prussian army—guns, rifles, and sabers—which were stored in the Zeughaus for use from the early 18th century.

The arsenal building, constructed between 1695 and 1730, was also used to keep war trophies.

One very special piece is this bicorne belonging to Emperor Napoleon I. It was a piece of loot which made its way into the Zeughaus after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

In the late 19th century, when military history museums had also been established in other German and European countries, Emperor William I suggested that the armory be turned into a "Hall of Fame of the Brandenburg-Prussian Army" as a museum. The exhibition which opened in 1883 glorified the history of the Hohenzollern rulers.

Through acquisitions, transfers, and donations, but also exchanges, it soon held one of the largest militaria collections in Europe. Its objects ranged from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. This great helm from the late 12th century was an archaeological discovery in Lower Pomerania. It came to the Zeughaus via the cabinet of curiosities in the Berlin Palace and was originally a gift to King William I of Prussia (1797–1888).

The royal museum of the armed forces was owned by the Prussian Ministry of War. During the First World War, special exhibitions were held on pieces of loot from battles. The museum's systematic collection focused on uniforms, items of equipment, and ally and enemy weapons.

After defeat in the war, the end of the monarchy, and the foundation of the Republic in 1919, the museum was assigned to the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education. Over the next few years the government had little need to present military history and there were barely any financial resources available for new acquisitions. The return of pieces of loot from the First World War to France, established by the Treaty of Versailles, cut into the museum's most recent collections.

This was not the first time it had happened: in 1760, during the occupation of Berlin in the Seven Years' War, Russian and Austrian troops almost entirely cleared out the armory. And in 1806, after the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt, it was plundered by Napoleon's soldiers moving triumphantly into the Prussian capital. In 1848, however, Berlin revolutionaries used Zeughaus weaponry in their fight against the reactionary Hohenzollern monarchy.

From 1934 the National Socialist regime started to take control of the museum. A revised exhibition opened 2 years later which was intended to convey a view of history in line with National Socialist ideology. During the Second World War, propaganda exhibitions took over this function. In September 1944 the Zeughaus was badly damaged by aerial bombs. Many of the museum's objects that were boxed and evacuated were captured by advancing Polish and Soviet soldiers during transport. Others were later looted at civilian evacuation sites.

In May 1945 the Zeughaus was in ruins and its collection scattered. The allied victors deemed Prussian and German militarism to be one of the roots of National Socialism. The Allied Command of the City of Berlin therefore decided to disband the museum as a place and refuge for this history.

The representatives of the "worker and farmer state of the GDR" Pieck, Grotewohl, and Ulbricht founded the tradition of political gifts. The Heliand fragment seen here is one such gift, presented to Wilhelm Pieck in 1951 during a visit to Czechoslovakia. The fragment, created around 850, is one of the earliest written texts in German.
As a "special inventory" collection, the tradition of political gifts not only represented the powerful individuals of the Republic; it also represented the socialist fraternal countries and the international network of friendship and solidarity.

Between 1958 and 1959 historical museum items were returned to Berlin (GDR) from the Soviet Union and the MfDG added these to its collection. They included items from the Zeughaus and Imperial Navy collection, such as the ship bell from the SMS Kronprinz warship which belonged to the Imperial Fleet during the First World War.

This dress belonging to Prussian Queen Luise (1776–1810) was repatriated from the collections of the Hohenzollern museum, opened in 1887. Other repatriations included items from the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden as well as various fashion and costume collections.


Until the 1970s, cities and municipalities in the GDR "transferred" parts of inventories or individual pieces, including objects belonging to aristocratic lords and bourgeois landowners. Until the 1980s, the Volkspolizei people's police force or customs department "loaned" items. Its status as a national museum of the GDR seemed to justify the fact that regional and local museums were instructed to donate or loan prestigious objects, desired in terms of their content.


Through research on their origin, the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) has reinstated identified objects and collections or is in negotiations for doing so.

The MfDG was unprepared for the fall of the Berlin Wall; over the next few years it tried to catch up with the rapidly changing political climate.

The "Die DDR ins Museum" (the GDR into the museum) collection appeal that ran shortly after the monetary union aimed to preserve the threatened GDR state, at least in museum form. The collection embraced current political situations. Banners from the demonstration in Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989 were shown from April to May 1990, quite symbolically in the now-closed "Sozialistisches Vaterland DDR" (GDR, the Socialist Fatherland) exhibition. In addition, homemade escape vehicles for passing the German-German border were displayed from September to November 1990.



On August 29, 1990 the GDR Council of Ministers decided to disband the MfDG by September 15, 1990. The MfDG's property and collection were transferred to the DHM for display. At the time, the MfDG collection comprised approximately 450,000 items and compilation objects.

On October 28, 1987, the act founding the Deutsches Historisches Museum was carried out in the Berlin Reichstag building. From the beginning, founding director Christoph Stölzl (born in 1945) emphasized the importance of original objects for the future work of the institution. Helmut Kohl's gift of presenting the institution with "Das Lied der Deutschen" (The Song of the Germans) by Hoffmann von Fallersleben at the inauguration ceremony shows just how important the policy of meaningful testimonies was.

The year of the fall of the Berlin Wall presented new challenges for the institution and called its role into question. The small founding team made up of fewer than a dozen employees moved from West Berlin to the Mitte district. The new building was replaced by the Zeughaus, with an exhibition hall designed by I. M. Pei which opened in 2003. In addition to specific collecting activity for a future permanent exhibition, the MfDG's material heritage was substantially and structurally redefined.

This sudden growth in objects also created conceptually new priorities in current exhibition and publication projects. The amount of research was immense, and included countless questions concerning origin, whereabouts, submission, location, and exchange. Supply losses and wartime defeats throughout the existence of the Zeughaus were great obstacles to developing the collection.

Its range of collecting activities, including not only political histories but also various aspects of life, its abundance of exhibitions creating discussion and controversy, its many publications, and its integration into German and international networks have turned the DHM into a national museum—a museum that doesn't give firm answers to historical questions but rather encourages critical interpretation.

The political legacy of the National Socialist state and the GDR was assigned to the DHM for development. This included sets of several thousand objects from the German War Art Collection as well as the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (Archive Foundation of Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR; SAPMO).

The collection of political banners from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, consisting of several hundred objects, should also be highlighted here.

The private collection of Rainer Burkhart, including around 6,000 tin cans from the 19th and 20th centuries, is another set of objects strengthening the collection's focus on everyday life.

Sets from photographers Walter Ballhause, Kurt Schwarzer, and Henry Ries were significant new additions to the institution's image archive.

The purchase of the largest existing collection of "kaiserpanorama" stereoscopic dioramas expanded the image archive and added new highlights to the collection.

Some acquisitions were made with the support of third parties, such as the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie (German Class Lottery Association) and the Museumsverein der Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum (Museum Society of the Deutsches Historisches Museum Association). The latter supported the acquisition of 2 waxworks by Kaspar Bernhard Hardy (1726–1819), whose work had already been praised by Goethe.

The question of what the DHM collects today for future generations and under what support cannot be overlooked. We need to constantly keep re-examining this, because—as Marc Fehlmann, the collection director from 2016 to 2017, once put it—we cannot predict what future generations will take away from a collection.