Petschkův palác

The Petschek Palace is a monumental neoclassical building in Prague's New Town, built between 1923 and 1925 to designs by the architect Max Spielmann. It originally served as the headquarters of the banking house Petschek & Co., founded by the influential Prague Petschek family to safeguard their financial interests after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The five-story reinforced-concrete building was meant to demonstrate the bank's economic power and stability through its imposing size and its elaborate granite and travertine facade. Despite its historicist exterior, the palace was technologically state-of-the-art for its time. It had a pneumatic tube network, full air conditioning, an underground garage, and paternoster elevators, which are still in operation today. Inside, original crystal chandeliers from Bohemian glassworks, marble, scagliola, and ornate stucco ceilings bear witness to the luxurious furnishings of the former bank.

The building's history, however, is deeply marked by the dark chapters of the 20th century. During World War II, the palace served as the headquarters of the Gestapo in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The basement held interrogation cells where thousands of people, including resistance fighters, Jews, and political opponents, were brutally interrogated and tortured. Many of the prisoners were subsequently executed or deported to concentration camps. After the war, the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB, took over the building and used it as the center of its political intelligence service. Similar methods of repression and persecution were used here as well, which earned the building the mocking nickname "Pečkárna" among the population. This phase of communist terror is still often overlooked or controversially debated in public perception today.

Today the palace, declared a National Cultural Monument in 1989, houses part of the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade. Visitors can see the historical significance of the site on a memorial plaque at the corner of the building and in the renamed street, "Street of Political Prisoners." Part of the basement contains a small exhibition with a reconstructed interrogation cell that serves as a memorial. Visiting the memorial is only possible by prior registration, however, and it is run by an organization that is the subject of controversy in the Czech Republic. The building thus remains a place of ambivalence, one that brings together both the economic heyday of the First Republic and the horrors of fascism and communism.