of the Müggel Area and the Müggel Hills”) with prehistoric artifacts from the Müggel region. Visitors could learn something about the culture of the local inhabitants during the stone age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, as well as about the Sprewanen, a Wendish tribe which lived in the Dahme-Spree region. A famous exhibit item was a molar from a mammoth. Another part of the exhibit provided the evidence that there was formerly a large hall on the Kleiner Müggelberg which probably served as a place of ritual worship for the Sprewanen. In 1928 two stairways were constructed up the Kleiner Müggelberg. In 1942 the museum's artifacts were moved to the Schmetterlingshorst restaurant, where they could be viewed there together with the world-famous butterfly collection of the restaurant's owner, Büttner. Both collections were destroyed in bombing raids during World War II. In 1945 as the Soviet army approached Berlin the tower was declared a military object and used as a radio transmission tower as well as an observation post for artillery units. As was the case with the Bismarck vantage point on the neighboring Großer Müggelberg, the Müggel tower was to be blown up by German troops before the arrival of the advancing Soviet army. The tower restaurant proprietor Walter Wichelhaus prevented this destruction by cutting the electrical cable leading to the explosives. After the war a restaurant was again provided for visitors, and in 1956 HO Köpenick took over operation of the Müggel Tower grounds. In January 1957 the Müggel Tower was closed because its dilapidated state made it unsafe; the following month the Berlin magistrate decided to stabilize the tower with a new foundation and the addition of a steel truss construction. As part of this work the restaurant was to be enlarged, but on the afternoon of 19 May 1958 the tower burned down completely, the probable cause being welding activities during the renovation. Today’s tower That same year the Berliner Zeitung launched an architectural competition for a new construction, which attracted 32 designs. These were exhibited to the public in August 1958 in the Köpenick city hall and a month later in the newspaper's pavilion at the Friedrichstraße train station. The opinions expressed by visitors in a book made available for the purpose confirmed the choice of the jurors. The proposal by a student collective from the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee headed by Jörg Streitparth, Siegfried Wagner and Klaus