Iconic Photos

The above extraordinary photo captured in April 1936, showed the funeral of the German Ambassador Leopold Von Hoesch, with the people clearly giving the Nazi salute on the balcony of the Germany Embassy on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking The Mall.The above image and footage were unearthed for the Discovery Channel programme: ‘Wartime London with Harry Harris’, a London cab driver and historian who has driven a taxi for two decades.

The Grenadier Guards and Nazi soldiers march together down The Pall Mall with a coffin with a swastika on it. Well-liked by most British statesmen, including Sir Anthony Eden and Sir John Simon, von Hoesch was considered as the best hope for enhancing the Anglo-German relations during the early 1930s. Hoesch (1881–1936), a career diplomat but no Nazi, would be disturbed by this display of Nazi pageantry at his funeral–he frequently feuded with Hitler over the disarmament and vocally denounced Hitler’s invasion of Rhineland. If it were not for this untimely death, it was most likely that he would have been recalled.

Von Hoesch was replaced by his nemesis, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, currently occupied by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Science, was the former home of the German Embassy and within the sight of the Buckingham Palace. Ribbentrop modernized the building near the Foreign Office, with Albert Speer himself flying in from Berlin to design a grandiose embassy that would convey some of the portentous glamour of the Third Reich. Speer was also responsible for a staircase inside the building made from Italian marble, donated by Mussolini. No. 7 was used as a base to house German military attachés and the headquarters of the Nazi espoinage machine in London.

The Germans were kicked out at the outbreak of war, and the building was stripped of its Nazi fixtures before it was rented to the Royal Society in 1967. There are still signs that this was once a Nazi residence, including the border designs of swastikas on the floor of one public room. A memorial to Giro, Leopold von Hoesch’s dog which died in 1934 when he made a fatal connection with an exposed electricity wire, was also buried here. The dog’s grave on the front garden to No 9, with the epitaph “Giro: Ein treuer Begleiter” (“Giro: A true companion”), remains Great Britain’s sole Nazi memorial, situated somewhat inappropriately in an area filled with monuments to heroes of the British Empire.