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History of Humboldtmühle
From a mill that used to belong to a monastery to a top-class clinic
The location of Medical Park Berlin Humboldtmühle has a long history. As early as the 14th century, where the river flows into Lake Tegel there was first a watermill. Initially owned by a margrave, the mill was soon pawned. The proceeds were to finance military operations in the March of Brandenburg. As a result, in 1361 the mill fell into the hands of the civilian Johann Wolf who sold it on in the same year to the then prominent Spandauer Benedictine convent.
The mill remained under the ownership of the church for 200 years until the electoral prince Joachim II integrated it into the newly founded Tegel manor in 1652. The electoral prince Friedrich II then allowed it to be auctioned off together with the nearby Hermsdorfer mill. After frequent changes of ownership the mill eventually came into the ownership of Major Alexander Georg von Humboldt, father of the famous natural scientist and explorer Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
The facility was actually upgraded to a windmill, yet the time of water and windmills was drawing to a close. In 1848 the era of the steam engine also started on the Tegel stream.
It was the entrepreneurs Cohn & Rosenburg who developed the mill into a high-performance large-scale mill in 1867 and gave it the present-day name of ‘Humboldtmühle’. A catastrophic fire affected the mill in 1912 and lead to the construction of the large-scale mill as it largely remained until the 1990s. In 1924 the Viktoria mills invested in the company and operated it until its closure in 1988. Up until the final days the mill covered half of Berlin's flour requirements. Exploding labour costs and antiquated technology forced the mill's closure. With the purchase of the mill the entrepreneur Ernst Freiberger realised his first property project in 1988. He had previously already made a name for himself with the company ‘Freiberger Lebensmittel GmbH’ when in 1976 he took over a pizza delivery business on the brink of bankruptcy on the site of the former Bolle dairy farm in the Berlin neighbourhood of Alt-Moabit, and turned it into Europe's largest manufacturer of deep-frozen pizzas, baguettes and pasta.
Ernst Freiberger redesigned the mill to be a modern hotel and service centre. While strictly maintaining aspects relating its historic preservation, a hotel was produced with 125 rooms and suites. In addition, 15,000 m² of office space and hundreds of new jobs were created. The hotel was closed in 2007.
Now, Medical Park Berlin Humboldtmühle Clinic continues the tradition of this historic location of providing services to people.
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