and their five children. A few months later, at a New Year's Eve party, Louis met Hedwig Leythen, known as Hedda, a German-born hotel guest who had been raised in America. Louis soon divorced Tilli and married Hedda. During the "Golden Twenties", the Adlon remained one of the most famous hotels in Europe, hosting celebrity guests including Louise Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Emil Jannings, Albert Einstein, Enrico Caruso, Thomas Mann, Josephine Baker, and Marlene Dietrich, and also international politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt, Paul von Hindenburg, and Herbert Hoover. The hotel was a favorite hangout of international journalists, including William L. Shirer, who mentions it frequently in his writings. The hotel's lobby and public rooms were also popular with foreign diplomats. The hotel remained a social center of the city throughout the Nazi period, though the Nazis themselves preferred the Hotel Kaiserhof a few blocks south and directly across from the Propaganda Ministry and Hitler's Chancellery on Wilhelmplatz. In 1938, financial difficulties forced Louis Adlon to sell the annex of the hotel at 70a Wilhelmstraße, the former Hotel Reichshof, to the government, which converted it to offices for the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The Adlon continued to operate normally throughout World War II, even constructing a luxurious bomb shelter for its guests and a huge brick wall around the lobby level to protect the function rooms from flying debris. Parts of the hotel were converted to a military field hospital during the final days of the Battle of Berlin. The hotel survived the war without any major damage, having avoided the bombs and shelling that had leveled the city. On the night of May 2, 1945 a fire, allegedly started in the hotel's wine cellar by drunken Red Army soldiers, left the main building in ruins. Louis Adlon himself was arrested in his home near Potsdam by Soviet troops on April 25 after they mistook him for a general due to his title of "Generaldirektor". He died on a street in Falkensee on May 7, 1945, of heart failure according to the death certificate. East German Hotel Adlon Although the main wing of the hotel on Pariser Platz had been destroyed, the damaged but surviving wings at 70a and 70b Wilhelmstraße reopened for business in August 1945, with 16 guest rooms and a small restaurant in a former function room. Although operating as the Hotel Adlon, it