Buy a $26 Million Jewel of a Mansion Nestled Among German Palaces
Built just outside of Berlin in 1923, the villa sat squarely in the demarcation zone.
During the sliver of time between world wars, when Germany wasn’t suffering from hyperinflation or teetering on the knife’s edge of civil war, a flour tycoon named Kurt Kampffmeyer built a 15,000-square-foot villa on a lake in Potsdam, about 12 miles southwest of Berlin.
The house was a mishmash of styles—part baroque, part neoclassical—and overlooked an area comprising (former) imperial landholdings. The Jagdschloss Glienicke, a hunting lodge originally built for Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, is across the water from the villa, as is the Babelsberg Palace, built for Emperor Wilhelm I. Yet another palace, the Schloss Cecilienhof, a mock-Tudor palace that was completed a year before the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917, is in walking distance. The whole network of parks and palaces in Potsdam is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.