On the east side of Odeonsplatz, beside the neo-Renaissance arcade of the Feldherrnhalle, runs a narrow alley called Viscardigasse. It is unremarkable in almost every way — a service lane, barely four meters wide, connecting Odeonsplatz to Theatinerstraße through the back of a building complex. Most visitors don't notice it at all.
But set into the paving stones is a trail of brass studs tracing a path through the alley. They were placed there in 1995 by the city of Munich, marking the route that thousands of ordinary citizens took every day during the Third Reich to avoid performing the Hitler salute.
The Mandatory Salute
Following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 — which ended in a violent confrontation at the Feldherrnhalle, killing four police officers and sixteen putschists — the site became sacred ground in Nazi mythology. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he transformed the Feldherrnhalle into a shrine. An honor guard was stationed there around the clock. Every person who passed was required by law to extend their right arm in the Hitler salute.
SS officers stood watch. Compliance was enforced. Refusal or hesitation was noted, and in the worst cases reported. For Munich's Jewish population and for anyone who privately opposed the regime, the daily performance of this ritual — the physical act of saluting as you walked to work or to market — was a repeated humiliation, a small but constant reminder of who held power.
The Detour Through Viscardigasse
Viscardigasse offered a way around. By turning off Theatinerstraße into the alley and exiting on Odeonsplatz slightly to the north, a pedestrian could bypass the Feldherrnhalle entirely — and the mandatory salute with it. The detour added perhaps ninety seconds to any journey.
The alley became known colloquially as the Drückebergergasse — roughly translatable as "dodgers' alley" or "shirkers' lane." The word Drückeberger was itself a loaded term in Nazi Germany, used to describe draft-dodgers and cowards. Using the alley was a visible act of small defiance, one that carried real risk: SS informants operated throughout Munich, and being seen using the detour instead of the salute route could attract unwanted attention.
Yet people used it. Every day, for twelve years.
Who Took the Alley
Historical documentation of individual alley users is fragmentary. Much of what we know comes from postwar testimony and memoirs written by Munich residents who survived the period. Among the documented or well-attested cases:
- Members of Munich's Jewish community who had not yet been forced from the city used the alley as a matter of survival. Being seen failing to salute at the Feldherrnhalle could lead to immediate confrontation, arrest, or worse.
- White Rose-adjacent individuals — students and faculty connected to the resistance network centered at the Ludwig Maximilian University, located nearby — reportedly used the alley as a matter of personal principle.
- Ordinary civilians with no organized political affiliation who simply found the salute personally intolerable. These are the hardest to document and arguably the most significant: the quiet, daily refusals of people who left no written record of their reasoning.
Manon Rosenberg, a Munich resident whose memoir was published decades after her death, described using Viscardigasse "every time I had to cross Odeonsplatz — which was every day. It felt important to do it. It felt like keeping something private that they hadn't managed to take."
The Brass Trail Today
The brass studs set into the pavement in 1995 trace the original detour route through the alley. They're small — roughly 5 centimeters in diameter — and easy to miss if you're not looking. Walk into the alley from the Odeonsplatz end and look down: the trail runs along the center of the lane, following the natural walking path.
The installation was created as part of a broader effort by the city of Munich to acknowledge the period honestly. Munich occupied a peculiar position in postwar Germany: it was the "capital of the movement," the birthplace of National Socialism, the site of the failed Putsch that Hitler later mythologized, and the location of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Coming to terms with this history required more than memorials to victims; it required acknowledging the complicity of the city itself, and also the small resistances within it.
How to Find Viscardigasse
From Marienplatz, walk north on Theatinerstraße for approximately five minutes. As you approach Odeonsplatz, look for the narrow alley opening on your left, just before the Feldherrnhalle comes into view on the right. The alley is marked with a small street sign: Viscardigasse.
Enter from the Theatinerstraße end and walk through. As you emerge onto Odeonsplatz, turn right: you'll see the Feldherrnhalle directly in front of you, with the Theatinerkirche's yellow facade to your left. The view from here — the ceremonial grandeur of the loggia, the square beyond — is the same view the detour users would have had as they rejoined the main street, having slipped the ritual for another day.
The Broader Munich Resistance Context
Viscardigasse is a single alley, but it exists within a larger context of documented resistance in Munich that is often overshadowed by the city's role as the movement's birthplace. The White Rose resistance group operated from LMU Munich until the arrest and execution of Sophie and Hans Scholl in 1943. Georg Elser, a carpenter from the Swabian Alps, placed a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller in 1939 that came within thirteen minutes of killing Hitler. The Freiheitsaktion Bayern group attempted a military coup in the city's final days of the war in April 1945.
None of these acts succeeded in their immediate aims. The Schäfflertanz alley did not bring down the regime. But these acts of resistance — large and small — are part of the same Munich, the same city that housed the Glockenspiel and the Viktualienmarkt and the Frauenkirche. The brass studs in Viscardigasse are a reminder that history is made by people making small choices, every day, in narrow alleys.
The alley is four meters wide and takes thirty seconds to walk through. What happened in it, repeated by thousands of people over twelve years, is one of the quiet moral facts of Munich's history. It deserves thirty seconds of your attention.
Stop 8 in the AudioVenture Munich Tour
Viscardigasse is Stop 8 in the AudioVenture Munich audio tour — a premium stop included in the full tour, available for €4.99 one-time purchase. The narration covers the Putsch, the salute requirement, the alley's wartime use, and the 1995 memorial installation. Three stops are always free on the tour, with no login or credit card required — start there, and the full walk is available whenever you're ready. Find AudioVenture on the iOS App Store.