Regina Palast Hotel

The Regina Palast Hotel is the British delegation’s headquarters in Munich during the conference: a monumental hotel whose formal grandeur contrasts with the practical business and political unease unfolding inside it. Its rooms accommodate the delegation’s hierarchy and work, while its corridors become the scene of Legat’s encounter with two detained Czechoslovak officials.

Architecture and Setting

Built in 1908, the hotel is described as an immense, monumental cube of grey stone. Inside, Versailles-style reception rooms and a basement Turkish bath sit alongside three hundred bedrooms spread over seven floors, giving the building both ceremonial scale and the logistics of a large working institution.

The British delegation is allotted twenty rooms along the front of the third floor. Their windows look across the trees of Maximiliansplatz towards the distant twin Gothic spires of the Frauenkirche. This outward view of Munich contrasts with the hotel’s enclosed routines: room assignments, luggage, office work and the restriction of Legat’s movements.

The Delegation’s Rooms and Work

The suite assigned to Neville Chamberlain includes a bedroom with a four-poster bed and a Louis XVI drawing room furnished with gilt chairs and French windows opening onto a balcony. Legat gives the next-best rooms to Sir Horace Wilson, William Strang, Sir William Malkin, Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, Nevile Henderson and Ivone Kirkpatrick. In what the narrative presents as an act of self-sacrifice, Legat and Lord Dunglass receive smaller rooms across the corridor, with views into the courtyard. The detectives, the Prime Minister’s doctor, Sir Joseph Horner, and the secretaries Miss Anderson and Joan Sackville are also assigned courtyard-facing rooms.

A large double-aspect room in the south-east corner serves as the delegation’s office. The secretaries set up two Imperial typewriters and a Remington portable, unpack stationery, and work among open sandwiches and bottles of mineral water. Legat places the Prime Minister’s red boxes on the desk and arranges an international call through the hotel operator to 10 Downing Street. The old-fashioned telephone makes this connection laborious: he has to shout over the operator before the Principal Private Secretary can come to the line.

A Place of Restriction and Confrontation

The hotel is also where Legat is instructed to remain for the duration of the conference. Wilson assigns him the room-allocation task, and Legat follows the instruction while suspecting that Wilson may understand why he has come to Munich and intends to keep him away from the German delegation. The hotel thus functions not merely as accommodation but as a boundary around Legat’s access and activity.

That boundary is crossed in the corridor when Legat hears a man demanding to speak to an Englishman. He finds Dr Hubert Masarík, chief of staff to the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, struggling to get past four men in suits. Masarík identifies the men as Gestapo officers and says that he and his colleague, Dr Vojtek Mastny, the Czech Minister in Berlin, are being held in a room. Legat approaches and offers help. The confrontation brings the political crisis into the delegation’s hotel, turning a space organized for diplomatic work into a site where the coercive power behind the conference is directly encountered.