At its inception in 1997, the Chancellery took its offices in the neoclassical former Cadet Corps building along Ujazdów Avenue in central Warsaw. Built between 1900 and 1903 under Russian-controlled Congress Poland, the building originally provided the home to the Alexander Suvorov Cadet Corps of the Imperial Russian Army. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Cadet Corps building was transformed into a municipal hospital, and following the Russian retreat, a German Army hospital. Shortly following Poland regained its independence on 11 November 1918, troops from the Polish Infantry Academy in Ostrów Mazowiecka negotiated the withdrawal of German troops and medical patients out of the Cadet Corps building in return for safe passage out of the new republic. The building quickly came under the administration of the new Polish Army's Infantry Academy. During the 1926 May Coup, the Infantry Academy supported the government of President Stanisław Wojciechowski and Prime Minister Wincenty Witos against Marshal Józef Piłsudski. As a consequence, the victorious Piłsudski-influenced government forced the Infantry Academy to vacate the building's premises, beginning a two-year period of refurbishing the structure. The General Inspectorate of the Armed Forces moved into the structure in 1928; Piłsudski himself moved nearby to a connecting palace, living there until shortly before his death in 1935. At the start of the Second World War four years later, the southern wing of the building suffered damage during the Siege of Warsaw, with the structure's surviving floors and wings transforming into an SS barracks and its damaged southern portion into an execution ground during the Nazi occupation.