GERMANIA-SPEER: Germania: Hitler's Big Plans for Berlin

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Germania: Hitler's Big Plans for Berlin

One of Hitler's favorite daydreams was a new, rechristened Berlin -- Welthauptstadt Germania, the worthy and illustrious capital of the One Thousand Year Reich. Together with pet architects like Albert Speer, the Führer liked to unwind from a hard day of military disaster on the Russian Front by plotting the lovely Germania, where everything was monumental, marble-plated, and situated on a boulevard at least a mile wide. Speer's office had a whole room given over to a scale model of the city of the future, which Hitler could access from the Chancellery gardens and pore over in private.

He instructed his designers to take their inspiration from the glory days of Rome, Athens, and Paris, and then to blow the proportions up to Valhalla-size. Money was no object, and the required labor force would solve unemployment. Swathes of tenements were marked for demolition to create a giant cross stamped on the heart of Berlin: east-west would follow the Strasse 17 Juni and Unter den Linden, north-south bisecting it somewhere in the Tiergarten. Work began in the 1930s, but pesky World War II got in the way, and Allied bombers took over demolition duty. Here are the high (or low) points of the monstrous metropolis that never was.
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ALBERT SPEER

I was sometimes shocked but in the same way I was enthused about the possibilities he saw in the field of new buildings and it was a mania in any case and, as I see nowadays, it was an expression of the whole system of his schemes. But in the time when I was working for him I thought those buildings are just matching the political era which was coming with Hitler, with his successes in which were still to be due.

It shouldn't be forgotten that to be in the middle of a powerful group, a very powerful man admired by people, is so tempting that it's very difficult to get away. Thinking back to my time when I was at the height of planning those huge buildings, of course it was a chance to be one of the well known, even in the history of arts, and this was a chance no young man would willingly destroy. And afterwards when I was a minister, the sweetness of power also was tasting very good to me. Certainly all power corrupts and certainly in Hitler's circle the power was [of an] extraordinary scale, so the corruption was much larger than [it] is normally.

Finance Minister's Nightmare

"If the Finance Minister could realize what a source of income to the state my buildings will be in fifty years! Remember what happened with Ludwig II. Everyone said he was mad because of the cost of his palaces. But today? Most tourists go to upper Bavaria solely to see them. The entrance fees alone have long since paid for the building costs. Don't you agree? The whole world will come to Berlin to see our buildings. All we need to do is tell the Americans how much the Great Hall cost. Maybe we'll exaggerate a bit and say a billion and a half instead of a billion. Then they'll be wild to see the most expensive building in the world."

Adolf Hitler

(Quoted in Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich", Chapter 10.)