Hotel Excelsior

It occupied number 112/113, Königgrätzer Straße (today's Stresemannstrasse) on Askanischer Platz in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

When the Excelsior first opened on the 2nd of 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 almost doubled in size.

[citation needed] The untimely re-opening of the hotel on the eve of World War I meant that the building spent its early existence relatively empty.

Under Elschner's management, the 1920s witnessed the Excelsior transformed into a 7,500 square metres (81,000 sq ft) hotel complex.

Using contemporary deluxe US hotels as inspiration, Elschner installed new power and water systems and gas heating, and the coal-powered bakery and kitchens were introduced to electricity.

At the beginning of World War II, Elschner fled Germany, and in 1942, the NSV (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt), a welfare subsidiary of the NSDAP, took over ownership of the Excelsior.

Between 1967 and 1972, the architect group G. Krebs and Sobotka & Müller erected a building with 500 apartments, shops, and business offices on the hotel site for the "Excelsior-Petrol Station GmbH & Co KG".

It is believed that it was here, on 11 November 1918, that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg's leftist revolutionary group renamed themselves the Spartakusbund (The Spartacus League).