Joseph Kroll ran a successful winter garden in Breslau — the Silesian city now called Wrocław — and impressed the visiting Prussian King Frederick William IV in 1841. The king ordered a similar establishment for Berlin and granted Kroll a free site on the parade ground beyond the Brandenburg Gate. The court architect Friedrich Ludwig Persius designed a vast pleasure palace with three halls, thirteen boxes, and fourteen private rooms. It opened on 15 February 1844 with forty waiters serving up to five thousand guests at a time, sixty musicians on the bandstand, and gas lighting from "400 flames" — newly installed and considered a marvel. Johann Strauss the Younger brought his orchestra from Vienna in 1845. Kroll died in 1848. His daughter Auguste ran the place for decades through fires, bankruptcies, and rebuilding, presenting Lortzing's operas in summer and animal acts in the gardens.

By 1894 the Kroll family had given up. The Prussian royal theatre company bought the building, rebuilt it as the Neues Königliches Operntheater, and made it the city's second state opera house alongside the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Igor Stravinsky's music premiered here. Gustav Mahler conducted. Enrico Caruso sang. Demolition began in 1914 to make way for an even more lavish replacement, but the First World War interrupted the wreckers. After Weimar Germany ran short of money, the Volksbühne theatre company finished the rebuild in 1924. From 1927 to 1931 the Kroll became the experimental wing of the Berlin State Opera under conductor Otto Klemperer, with stage designs by László Moholy-Nagy, Caspar Neher, and Giorgio de Chirico — modernism so far ahead of conservative tastes that political pressure forced its closure on 3 July 1931 with a final performance of The Marriage of Figaro.

On 27 February 1933 the Reichstag building across the square caught fire. The Nazi government blamed Communists, suspended civil liberties, and arrested opposition deputies. The new Reichstag elected on 5 March needed somewhere to meet, since their own building was uninhabitable. The empty Kroll, with its big main hall and convenient location, was chosen. On 23 March 1933, in this room — with Communist deputies in hiding or under arrest, with Social Democrats holding the only votes against — the Reichstag passed the Ermächtigungsgesetz, the Enabling Act, transferring legislative power from the parliament to Hitler's cabinet for four years. The vote was 444 to 94. The Weimar Republic ended in this opera house. Every parliamentary session of Hitler's regime was held here afterwards: declarations of war, anti-Jewish laws, and on 30 January 1939 — six years after his appointment as Chancellor — Hitler's speech publicly threatening, in his words, "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

The final Reichstag session in the Kroll Opera House met on 26 April 1942. The deputies — by then all Nazi Party members or party-affiliated, with no opposition remaining — passed a decree proclaiming Hitler "Supreme Judge of the German People," giving him the formal authority to override the courts and the civil service in any case he chose. After that the Reichstag never met again. The German parliament had finished delegating itself out of any role at all. Later in 1942 the building briefly returned to its original purpose, hosting performances of the Berlin State Opera after the Staatsoper Unter den Linden was destroyed in an air raid. RAF Bomber Command struck the Kroll itself on 22 November 1943. Soviet forces fought through the area in 1945 during the Battle for the Reichstag. What was left of the building was demolished in 1951.

A restaurant kept operating in the gardens until 1956, the last fragments cleared in 1957. Albert Speer's Welthauptstadt Germania plans for Hitler had called for the site to host a vast Führer's Palace on the western edge of an enormous Großer Platz. None of it was built. After 1990 and reunification, the new German Chancellery rose nearby. The Kroll site itself remained an open lawn — a deliberate refusal to build anything that might either hide or replace what had happened here. The bronze plaque set in 2007 reads simply, in German, that the Kroll Opera House stood on this spot, that it became the seat of the Reichstag from 1933, and that the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 was passed in this place. There is no memorial monument. The empty grass is the memorial.