Office of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia

The Office of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia is the Nazi governing authority whose directives shape the fate of the biometric centre established in the Landauer House. Its intervention brings the Reichsprotektor to inspect the facility, then ends the research when it cannot measure distinctions the regime treats as self-evident. The office thus joins bureaucratic command to racial ideology: it demands scientific proof, but only on terms that rule out a result that contradicts Nazi assumptions.

Authority and inspection

The office’s announcement that the Reichsprotektor will visit Město sends the Glass Room into a flurry of preparations. Staff hear contradictory reports about whether he will inspect the Biometric Centre, when he will arrive, and whether he will want to meet everyone or see the building empty. The uncertainty ends when the office in Prague Castle issues the official itinerary: the centre must be ready at eleven in the morning, with all staff assembled.

Reinhard Heydrich’s convoy arrives exactly on time. The sequence of vehicles culminates in a dark green Mercedes convertible bearing the Hakenkreuz and the number plate SS–3, a visible ranking that places Heydrich immediately below Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in the account’s symbolic hierarchy. The visit makes the Protector’s authority tangible: the office’s itinerary brings the highest levels of Nazi power into a building already repurposed for the regime’s work.

The centre’s closure

The office later informs the centre that it is to close and its staff are to return to their previous occupations. A call to head office in Berlin confirms the reason: the Reichsprotektor considers the research unjustified because the scientists have found no way to distinguish Nordic, Slav and Semitic populations by scientific means. The order rests on a contradiction. The regime treats racial difference as obvious to any person of common sense, yet dismisses the centre’s failure to quantify that supposed difference as evidence that its work is flawed.

Closure dismantles the institution materially as well as administratively. Personnel pack their suitcases and receive rail passes to Berlin, Jena and Leipzig. Instruments and files are boxed for transfer; furniture is redistributed to offices in Město, Prague and Warsaw. Technicians unscrew the Hollerith machines from the garage floor and load them onto trucks for an undertaking expected to make more fruitful use of them: the new camp complex near Oświęcim in Silesia. The office’s decision therefore does not simply halt a failed research project; it disperses its equipment into another, more consequential setting.

A building under successive authorities

The Landauer House makes the office’s reach part of a longer history of changing control. In a later account of the building, a State Committee for Architectural Heritage member explains that the Landauer family left in 1938 and that the house was built by a prominent capitalist family to the design of Rainer Abt. Its original features include a two-hundred-and-thirty-square-metre living room, glass walls, chrome supports and an onyx partition; the original plate-glass windows were destroyed by a bomb during the war and replaced with smaller panes. The building’s modernist form survives, but its use and ownership do not remain with the family that commissioned it.

Under later state authority, the house serves as a children’s gymnasium and physiotherapy space, while officials debate whether it should be restored and opened as a museum. The Heritage Committee presents it as an architectural treasure; former caretaker Josef Laník recalls maintaining it through wartime bombing and claims that he and his sister defended it against the Nazis before handing it over to Soviet forces. These accounts preserve different claims to the building: architectural achievement, public access, custodianship and political succession.

Heritage and contested memory

When Liesel returns to the Glass Room decades later, the crowd and the official speech about the house’s place in European architecture make its preservation feel less like a simple recovery. She is uncomfortable in the crush and asks Hana to take her outside. The setting that once belonged to a family and then served an occupying institution has become a public object whose history is being narrated by the authorities of a new political order.

A later museum encounter sharpens the gap between designation and lived meaning. Milada tells Marie that the family left in 1938 and that the house is now city property and a museum. Yet the narrative resists the idea that the building has become a sealed exhibit: the piano behind the onyx wall sounds with an accumulating resonance, connected to children’s noise and adults’ crying. Across its successive uses, the house remains more than a monument administered by the state. The office’s brief authority over it belongs to a chain of appropriations that preservation alone cannot resolve.