GERMANIA-SPEER

Germania Redux

2012-02-12T20:36:00.001+08:00

The 1930–31 worldwide economic collapse halted Berlin’s social housing experiment, leaving the Nazis to beat a dead horse. Just as the “Brown” cloud approached, Berlin’s 1931 Building Exhibition (titled “Dwelling of Our Time”) introduced modernism to a wider audience. Berlin’s historicist tradition of outstanding villas in suburban districts (Hermann Muthesius’s 1907–08 half-timbered Haus Freudenberg or Behrens’s 1911–12 classical Haus Wiegand) had already been updated with Hans and Wassili Luckhardt’s Le Corbusian Zwei Einfamilienhäuser (1928) and Mendelsohn’s Expressionist Haus Sternefeld (1924). Yet the 1931 Exhibition publicly interjected “Bolshevist” aesthetics into bourgeois—as opposed to proletariat—homes. Mies translated his German Pavilion at Barcelona into a lush exhibit house that the Nazis labeled a “horse stable.”

Though grand planners, Berlin’s Nazis built little. Only bits survive—such as Ernst Sagebiel’s Aviation Ministry (1936–37) and Tempelhof Airport (1936–41). Hitler impacted modernism not through buildings but inadvertently through expellant “gifts” (mostly to the United States—Gropius, Mies, and ultimately Mendelsohn). Although architecture—the “Word in Stone”—was critical to Hitler’s ideological program, it proved too costly after his war machine’s ignition. Still, until the bitter end, Hitler crouched as amateur architect over vast models with his amanuensis, Albert Speer. How sad for the profession that the 20th-century leader most architecturally impassioned was a tasteless criminal. Hitler’s architectural proclivities were vivid—a reactionary parochialism intended to resist “Bolshevist” cosmopolitanism and a perdurable monumentality in keeping with world domination. As Nazi preferences hardened, the Dessau Bauhaus was chased to Berlin (during Mies’s directorate), where the Gestapo finally padlocked it. Nazi aesthetics mirrored—with opposing predilection—the Weimar Socialists’ belief that architectural style symbolized specific political views. However, the Nazis added a destructive, racist edge. The Nazi-fomented Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass, 1938) saw 9 of 12 Berlin synagogues aflame, including Ehrenfried Hessel’s famed Fasanenstraße Temple (1912).

Speer’s New Chancellery expansion (1938–39) housed Hitler. Stretching an intimidating quarter mile, its 480-foot gallery doubled the length of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. Hypertrophy drained Speer’s classicism of all humanism (entasis, for example, disappeared). Megalomania roamed across Speer’s unrealized “Germania” Berlin Plan (1937–42). This north/south avenue connected an 825-foot-diameter rotunda and 400- foot-high triumphal arch. Contemporary praise of Speer (Krier, 1985) ignores his errors. Speer blithely muffed axial transitions any Beaux-Arts journeyman could manage. Existing conditions at the Chancellery necessitated a slight axial rotation. Speer properly positioned a “Round Hall” to resolve this, then neglected to utilize it, merely crimping the bend within the poché. Where his Berlin Plan’s axis turned, he positioned his gargantuan rotunda but again earned no profit. The existing Reichstag, which Hitler wanted incorporated into “Germania,” had been built several degrees shy of due north/south. Speer merely ignored this, causing one side of his grand plaza to warp bizarrely. Speer’s architectural goose-stepping could successfully accommodate only 4 of the 360 compass degrees.

Greater Berlin 1933 to 1945

2012-02-12T20:35:00.001+08:00

Capital of Adolf Hitler’s “Third Reich.” Hitler planned to rebuild Berlin as a vulgar imperial capital to govern and intimidate the huge empire he intended to carve out of Europe and western Russia. The totally rebuilt city was to be called “Germania.” It was designed by his personal architect, Albert Speer. Hitler tinkered with scale model plans for Germania to his final days, even as he led Berliners into moral and physical devastation. Berlin was occupied by four Allied armies from 1945. West Berlin was later formed from the British, French, and American occupation zones, while the old Soviet zone became East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). The Western Allied military presence was more voluntary than an occupation from 1949 to 1994. The Soviet occupation was rougher. The first rudimentary structures of the Berlin Wall were erected on August 13, 1961. Its cynical builders called it the “anti-fascist defense barrier.” The Berlin Wall remained in place until November 9, 1989, when it was torn down and the city reunited. Allied occupation forces officially departed Berlin on September 8, 1994.
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For the city of Greater Berlin, the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization) resulted in the loss of its municipal self-administration and the placement into power of a Prussian State commissioner under the direct control of the Prussian minister of the interior, Hermann Goering, who purged the city administration of civil servants with democratic party affiliations or those of Jewish descent. Berlin’s schools were affected by this measure. Starting in 1937, principal matters of urban planning and representative architecture in the capital of the Third Reich were placed under the responsibility of Adolf Hitler’s personal confidant, the architect Albert Speer. At the same time, the successive waves of political repression and ostracism against minorities hit segments of all the classes of the Berlin population: Among the first to be interned in the makeshift concentration camp set up in 1933 in nearby Oranienburg were activists of both working-class parties, liberal politicians, publicists, and Christian priests of both confessions. Anti-Semitic purges also hit large parts of Berlin’s universities, the liberal and artistic professions, and the upper class, triggering off a brain drain to Great Britain and the United States from which the capital’s intellectual and cultural life never fully recovered. State terror was moderated for a short period around the Olympic Games of 1936 to provide an opportunity to present Berlin as a modern and highly civilized metropolis to the international public, while the celebration of the (alleged) seven-hundred-year anniversary of Berlin in the following year was extensively used to display the reconcilability between Nazi ideology and Berlin’s sense of local pride.

Also in Berlin, the so-called Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938 marked a first climax of public anti-Semitic terror supported by state authorities. During the years of World War II, the Reich capital acquired an eminent and to some extent ambivalent role in the history of the Holocaust. On the one hand, it was the site of the large administrative staffs designing and organizing the registration, expulsion, exploitation, deportation, and murder of the Jewry in Germany as well as in occupied Europe. Of the 161,000 Jews living in Berlin in 1933, only 1,000 to 2,000 still lived in Berlin at the end of the war. The great majority emigrated, while 56,000 were killed by the Nazi terror, often following long years of increasing discrimination and eventual denunciation by their fellow citizens. On the other hand, no other urban agglomeration in Germany provided comparable possibilities to escape and thereby resist the Gestapo thanks to the anonymity that is typical in large cities. Berlin offered myriad opportunities for going underground, hiding with the help of informal networks, and adopting false identities. Thus, although the last two years of the war were marked by the intensified terror of Berlin Nazi ‘‘Gauleiter’’ Goebbels’s ‘‘total war’’ mobilization, by increasing the chaos and the disintegration of the city’s vital functions due to bombing raids, mass evacuation, and, in the last weeks of the war, massive westward flight from the approaching Red Army, it was also a site of survival for thousands of individuals persecuted by the Nazi terror machinery.

Book Excerpt: A Conversation With Albert Speer

2012-02-12T20:34:00.002+08:00

Excerpted from “Witness to an Extreme Century” by Robert Jay Lifton. Copyright 2011 by Robert Jay Lifton. Excerpted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, in his memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century,” interviews Albert Speer about his 15 years as a prominent Nazi and “Hitler’s architect.”

* * *

Three of our four meetings took place at his home on the outskirts of Heidelberg, and the fourth at his isolated retreat in southern Bavaria. His Heidelberg home seemed isolated enough, high in the hills behind the city’s famous castle. I remember the house seeming cavernous, its furnishings neither attractive nor cozy. Speer himself was welcoming but I was struck by how old he looked (he was then seventy-three), by the awkwardness of his movements (he had considerable difficulty getting up and sitting down, leading me to wonder whether he had Parkinson’s disease), and by his “thousand-mile stare” (the term we used to describe the psychological remoteness in repatriated American prisoners of war in Korea in 1953). The word I used to characterize his general demeanor was weary (though I should add that a little more than a year later he was to be enlivened by a passionate love affair with a younger woman).

Speer was interested in talking to me, and made clear that nothing he said was confidential. But he quickly suggested an agenda of his own centered on his bond with Hitler. He told me how he had heard the Nazi leader speak at his university in Berlin in 1930, was “really spellbound” at the time and remained so for the next fifteen years covering the entire Nazi era. His question for me was how, in retrospect, he could have been so enthralled by such a man. He then made a startling proposal: that he undergo psychotherapy with me in order to better understand how that had happened. The strong implication was that the relationship still had a hold on him, from which he wanted to extricate himself. I was much interested in hearing more about his conflict but had no wish to take on responsibility for his psyche. I needed my freedom as a researcher and did not see my task as one of easing the pain of a prominent former Nazi. Nor did I wish to have our meetings structured around his way of framing his problem. So I suggested instead that we explore in some detail his relationship with Hitler without my becoming his therapist. Speer agreed and we did so, but we were able to explore much else that enabled me to relate this strange bond to larger questions of evil and knowledge of evil, and of death and immortality.

Speer explained that the speech that had so moved him was Hitler’s relatively intellectual and historical treatment of German history, as opposed to his more demagogic, rabble-rousing street version. The narrative was one of revitalization: now Germany is weak and everything seems hopeless but by uniting behind Hitler and the National Socialist movement – and above all renouncing the guilt for World War I assigned by the Versailles Treaty – Germany and its people can once again be strong. Speer was then a twenty-five-year-old instructor in architecture in a collapsed economy and he and others around him were experiencing only despair about their future. Images of … humiliated German troops returning from World War I twelve years earlier were still fresh in his mind, as were postwar scenes of every kind of social chaos. Hitler’s words were for him transformative, a message of new hope and a promise, as he put it, that “all can be changed” and “everything is possible.” Feeling “drunk from the talk,” Speer walked for hours through the woods outside Berlin, seeking to absorb what he had heard. He was in the process of experiencing a secular form of a classical religious conversion, described by William James as “perceiving truths not known before” that enable a “sick soul” to “give itself over to a new life.” Intense “self-surrender” is accompanied by new spiritual strength. Speer demonstrated the emerging power of the combination of national and personal revitalization, which I came to see as the psychological core of Nazi appeal throughout the German population.

Speer joined the Nazi Party soon after that speech and told me of his rapid rise within tis circles, first as an enthusiastic party worker and then as an architect. From his sensational early success in designing the light and space for the large Nuremberg rallies, beginning in 1933 (as depicted by Leni Riefenstahl in her film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will), he progressed to the planning of vast buildings, even cities, to extol the omnipotent Nazi regime and, above all, its Fuhrer. He emphasized how, in becoming “Hitler’s architect,” he was drawn toward a vision of personal immortalization, of “having a place in future history books,” “building for eternity,” and becoming in that way “someone who is surviving his own life.” The sense of immortality, which I emphasize in my work, intoxicated Speer to the point of becoming something close to a promise of literally living forever. So grandiose were the projections he and Hitler made together that some of the buildings were to hold as many as 150,000 people on vast balconies in a new Berlin that would become the center of the world, dwarfing the grandeur of Paris and the Champs-Elysees. Few of the structures were actually built but many were imagined, as part of what Speer called “a daydream that was a very serious daydream.”

On one of my visits to the Heidelberg home, he showed me a large glossy book that had just been published, titled Architecture of the Third Reich. It contained gaudy photographs of buildings I noted to be “profoundly vulgar” and “totalitarian,” and Speer seemed initially to share that judgment: “I admit that the proportions are all wrong,” he said, and “I criticize the grandiose side.” Then, without the slightest trace of irony, he added, “But of course it was what the client wanted.” He attributed all excess to that “client,” but he could hardly dissociate himself from the grandiosity involved. Indeed, his pride in the volume was clear enough as he clutched it affectionately and pointed also to pictures of rally sites he had designed: “I was one of the first to use light in nighttime as a device for creating space. The searchlights came so high that when you were standing inside you saw it as being in the stratosphere.” He did not say that his innovative lighting enabled the Fuhrer to be seen as descending from the heavens. I thought of Speer’s overall contribution to the mystical appeal of the Nazi movement, converting Nazi darkness into a manipulated sense of illumination. Witnessing his enthusiasm for that early work and his nostalgic pride in projections of architectural world domination, I felt that whatever sympathy I had for Speer was dissolving. It occurred to me that Nazi architectural hubris had a certain parallel to its biological hubris: apocalyptic architecture followed upon apocalyptic biology.

Speer made it clear that Hitler was more than a mere client: he was the closest of collaborators. Hitler was not only a constant critic and appreciator of Speer’s architectural suggestions; the Fuhrer became himself an architect and even provided sketches of his own. As they imagined the unprecedented grandeur of buildings, highways, archways, and cities, their thoughts blended to the degree that it became unclear who had provided the original idea. The two men shared this descent into a version of apocalyptic fantasy: they were re-creating a perfect Nazi world from the ruins of what they were destroying. It is this merger in fantasy that constituted their architectural folie a deux.

Yet however superior Speer’s knowledge of architecture, Hitler remained the guru. As Speer put it, “I was so much in that ambience that I was infiltrated with [Hitler’s] ideas without realizing how much I was infiltrated.” He said that even now, when working on his writing, he frequently has the experience in which “I see that it’s an idea Hitler had in some way” and “I’m quite astonished.” In their particular fashion, the two men formed a close personal relationship. Speer would later write that if Hitler were capable of having a friend, he, Speer, would have been that friend. But gurus, especially the most paranoid and destructive among them, do not have friends; they have only disciples. Speer believed that Hitler was drawn to him as a fellow artist, and that appreciation worked both ways: “For an artist to see somebody at the head of the state who is something of an artist too … has a gift of excitement. Being overwhelmed by … a Wagner performance or a ballet in Nuremberg, this for me was a strong, positive influence.” They also shared an intense theatricality – Speer with his dazzling night-lighting of rallies, and Hitler, whose “whole life,” Speer told me, “was acting, performance, theatre.”

Speer’s merging with Hitler resembled the kind of fusion of guru and disciple that I encountered in studying fanatical religious cults, notably Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the nineties. But with Speer and Hitler the fusion involved the shared hubris of a perceived artistic and structural project to transform the world. In that way Speer was probably, at least for a period of time, the disciple most important to Hitler in affirming his omnipotent guruism. But Speer also provides for us a kind of window to more ordinary German people who also experienced fusion with a guru/leader rendered godlike. As Speer poured out details of his interaction with the Fuhrer, I could be there with the two men at various levels: observing them pore over their architectural plans as “friends” and “colleagues”; and imagining their fusion in a version of architectural madness perceived as an all-consuming gift to the world. And here was this man sitting opposite me describing quite rationally and methodically this most bizarre expression of evil from his past – wishing to separate himself from it and renounce it, but not entirely. No wonder that Speer was so difficult for me to grasp.

An important clue to his psychology was the anxiety he began to develop in connection with his projections of grandiose building. As he explained to me, he found himself as a young architect with little experience thrust into a situation without rules or boundaries, one in which “nothing is fixed.” He had no clear tradition or architectural group that could guide and constrain him, so that professionally “I could do what I wanted,” and despite Hitler’s support, “I was alone.” The Fuhrer’s involvement, far from a steadying influence, obliterated limits and took the fused duo more deeply into unmanageable architectural fantasy. At some level of his mind, Speer perceived this gap between the grandiosity of the shared vision and what could be called architectural reality. He also had inner doubts about the quality of the architecture, “fear as to whether it would stand [the judgment] of the times, of how it would be acknowledged in future times.” Related to that fear was his discomfort, as a highly educated upper-middle-class intellectual, among the mostly crude members of the Nazi inner circle.

He told me about experiencing two kinds of symptoms. The first took the form of claustrophobia: in certain enclosed spaces, particularly when on trains, he would feel anxious and would nearly pass out. On one occasion the symptoms were sufficiently severe that there was talk of stopping the train in order to get him to a hospital. The second set of symptoms required no particular locale, and were those of acute anxiety (or panic attack): he would experience a feeling of great pressure in his chest and a terrified sense that he was dying. These two sets of symptoms occurred only during his time of intense, unlimited architectural dialogue with Hitler and what he called his accompanying “burden.” In my work I have related such symptoms both to feeling too much (the overwhelming anxiety) and too little (the numbing toward what one could not allow oneself to be consciously aware of). Speer was fending off his conflicts not only about his illegitimate architectural freedom, but about his overall role in the Nazi regime. Something in him began to doubt the Hitlerian vision of brutally remaking the world.

In our discussions he tried to explain – or explain away – his problem mainly in terms of his susceptibility to Hitler’s charisma. That charisma was real enough but Speer would seem at times to hide behind it in order to avoid the probing of still more difficult questions of his own ethical responsibility. What I believe was involved in these symptoms was his struggle against the realization of the fraudulence of the Fuhrer’s larger vision, and of his own corruption personally and professionally. His architectural folie a deux with the Fuhrer epitomized the problem. As in the case of doctors at Auschwitz, Speer could adapt sufficiently to diminish his anxiety and serve the regime, in his case with high energy and intelligence. His symptoms contributed to that adaptation by covering over existential truths, and then disappeared when he ceased to be “Hitler’s architect” and became instead minister for armaments. Nor did they reappear during his imprisonment or the years following his release … .

In keeping with my concerns about different forms of participation in evil, I focused much of our discussion on Speer’s relationship to the “Final Solution,” the Nazi program of systematic mass murder of the Jews. Over the years he had claimed ignorance and uninvolvement, a claim that seemed increasingly untenable, and toward the latter part of his life he backtracked and admitted having sense that “something was happening to the Jews,” without having wished to learn any more about what that was. As evidence mounted against his earlier claims, many who had been sympathetic to him became critical, including one of his biographers, Gitta Sereny, who concluded that he was “living a lie.” In order to explore the matter with him I pressed him on the sequence of his attitude toward Jews and encounters with their suffering.

He made clear to me that he was by no means immune to the anti-Semitism of the time, resonated to it in Hitler’s early speech, resented “rich Jews in furs” during times of economic deprivation, was critical of the Jewish domination of the medical profession, and, more to the point, of what he took to be the inordinate Jewish influence on German architecture in determining who received commissions for buildings. As he rose in the regime, Speer did not emphasize anti-Jewish ideas in speeches or writings but blended with the existing ambiance, with an anti-Semitism that was, as he put it, “standard” and “legalized” so that “one felt at home in it.” He was aware of Hitler’s rage toward the Jews, but the two men did not talk about the subject during their architectural meditations, or later when they were preoccupied with armaments. But he recalled … how the Fuhrer would, in small groups of his inner circle, “Speak in that cold, slow voice in which he revealed terrible decisions” and declare that he would “destroy the Jews.” Speer even came to realize that doing so was a central motivation, Hitler’s “engine.” The murderous “engine,” that is, did not interfere with Speer’s fusion with his guru; indeed one could say that the fusion required that he himself connect in someway with the engine.

Speer admitted to me that he encountered considerable evidence of Nazi brutality and Jewish pain: the suicide of a distinguished scientist his family knew at the University of Heidelberg, a scene at a railroad station in which a few hundred “miserable looking people” he knew to be Jews were “loaded on trains to be taken from Germany,” and selective tours of Nazi concentration camps in which he claimed to be convinced by his manipulative hosts that the inmates were in reasonably good shape. More damning, he told me of providing certain materials for the work camp at Auschwitz in 1943 and having at the time “some insight into the bad conditions of such camps.” But he insisted that the construction materials were only for improving the facilities, and when I asked about his knowledge of the rest of Auschwitz and its role in extermination, he insisted sharply that “I knew nothing of the other.” I had never before heard anyone claim in this way close knowledge of the slave labor function of Auschwitz and ignorance of its function as a death camp. (Nor did we discuss Speer’s early participation in removing Jews from their Berlin homes and later suppression of that episode, or his providing, as minister of armaments, slave labor to German industry.)

Speer told me how he “pushed aside very quickly” all such matters, sensing that dreadful things were happening to Jews but stopping short of fully realizing what they were because “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see it.” Very much at issue was his sense that confronting the truth would have undermined his entire Nazi worldview and deepest life commitments and required him “to admit that all this was for nothing, that it wasn’t right.” At the end of our third interview I noted that one had two choices with Speer: either one could believe that he was consciously lying all along, or one could see him as involved in a sustained inner struggle around the psychology of knowing and now knowing. I favored the latter view. I thought he was “living a lie” but that he had not experienced it as a lie. Because of his extreme psychic numbing, he had ceased to feel almost anything of the abuse and suffering of Jews. And because of his “derealization” (emphasized by Mitscherlich in connection with Nazi behavior), he could avoid experiencing his participation in the Holocaust as actual or real. Speer could explore his participation in a regime he now condemned but could never allow himself to experience the dimension of guilt associated with its mass killing. Therefore, he could never allow himself fully “to know.” His wish to focus exclusively on his emotional bondage to Hitler – and with my help find a “cure” for it – was an effort to psychologize his Nazi behavior in a way that avoided ethical truths. None of this makes him any less culpable for what he did and did not do, but it does help explain his contradictory statements about what he knew.

Throughout, I had been more critical of Speer and more reserved about his “repentance” than had such people as Alexander Mitscherlich, George Mosse (a scholar whom I knew and greatly respected), and Erich Fromm (the well-known psychoanalyst who befriended Speer and expressed great enthusiasm for his change). Still, I had conversed with him in a civil, even friendly fashion, finding him at least at moments likable, and had been impressed by the fact that someone so high in the regime was making this kind of articulate turnabout – even if Hitler was always there with us. I concluded that our interviews had revealed extraordinary dimensions of enthusiasm and corruption, of complex immersion in evil – and that to learn about all this I had no choice but to sit in that room with him and his Fuhrer.

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

By Robert Jay Lifton

Free Press, 448 pages

Germania: Visions of Grandeur

2012-02-12T20:32:00.004+08:00

Had Hitler won the war, his plan was to transform Berlin into Germania -- the city he planned with architect Albert Speer. A film, a tour and the twists of time have conspired to create new interest in his evil vision.

Berlin bears many historical scars, but only a few point to the maniacal vision of its future harbored by Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer: A few spots where roads were widened in preparation for the central axis of Germania; a few traffic tunnels that have since been filled in; some streetlamps designed by Speer which survived the war intact.

The rest is all ideas -- miniature models, sketches, blueprints. Germania, with its imposing concrete monstrosities, its monuments to a victory that never came, was swallowed in the rubble and ash that covered Berlin in 1945.

There are only a few examples of Nazi architecture left standing today to give visitors a sense of what Hitler's ideology of hate and domination looked like when rendered in concrete and stone.

One of them is the building currently housing the Ministry of Finance. It's no accident then, that this is the starting point for a new city walk entitled "Capital of the Reich, Germania -- Destructive Visions" offered by tour operator Stattreisen Berlin.

Guide Hartmut Kappel immediately addresses one of the questions foremost in the minds of the 20 people who gathered on a Sunday afternoon in search of Germania: How do you conduct a tour where you can't really show people anything?

The walk led the group through central Berlin, along the axis where Hitler planned to build his mammoth new "Chancellery of the Reich," as well as a huge victory arch designed to dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and Germania's crowning glory, the Große Halle, or "Great Hall." The structure was intended to accommodate a million people, and was capped with an impractically large dome that would have been over 200 meters (700 feet) high and 250 meters (800 feet) in diameter.

As if to underscore the insanity of the plans, Kappel took the tour participants past an unassuming parking lot in front of a late-GDR era apartment complex. The area beneath the parking lot, he explained, was the site Hitler's bunker -- the place where his vainglorious imaginings of the Thousand Year Reich and the new "World Capital Germania" took their final, undignified end.

"I don't sensationalize this aspect of the tour," said Kappel. "It's a conscious decision, because the personal tragedies that unfolded don't have to do with the topic, which is: Why did the Third Reich exist, and how was it possible?"

Film caused new interest
Still, Kappel acknowledged that there is a persistent fascination about all things connected with the Third Reich, and of late, a resurgent interest in the relationship between Hitler and Germania's architect, Albert Speer.

The interest can partly be explained by the showing on German public broadcaster ARD of a new three-part movie, "Speer and He," examining that relationship. Kappel said that Stattreisen planned its Germania tour to coincide with the media coverage of the film.

"Speer and He" takes a critical look at Speer's role in the darkest chapter of German history. How much did he know about Hitler's plans to rid Europe of Jews, and to what extent did he manipulate his legacy after the war?

Though he expressed remorse during the Nuremberg trials, Speer always maintained that he knew nothing about the Nazis' crimes against the Jews. He was one of a handful of leading Nazis (including Rudolf Hess) to escape execution following the trials, serving a 20-year prison sentence instead.

The director of "Speer and He," Heinrich Breloer, makes it clear that Speer was more deeply implicated than he claimed. The film concentrates on Speer's plans to evict thousands of Jews from their Berlin homes to clear building space needed to realize Germania.

"He was more than just a cog in the works," said Breloer. "He was not only entangled in the works, he was the terror itself."

Academyof Artcomes back home
Part of Speer's defense was that he cooperated with the Nazis in order to fulfil his dream of becoming a great architect. He pursued this dream in the building that, until 1937, housed Berlin's Academy of Art. Speer and his staff took over the space on Pariser Platz that was once the heart of Germany's intellectual, artistic community, and it was there that he developed and exhibited the models for Germania.

On this same location this past weekend, German dignitaries gathered to set right a mistake of the past, officially opening the new Academy of Art as a place where artists can be as political as they like without fearing the kind of censure the Nazis routinely imposed on "dissidents."

Deanne Corbett, DW-WORLD.DE

Albert Speer Part I

2012-02-12T20:32:00.000+08:00

Albert Speer, the son of an architect, was born in Mannheim, Germany 19 March 1905. He grew up in the family residence in the picturesque university town of Heidelberg under rather emotionally cold conditions.

Like his father young Albert studied hard and became an architect, though Speer himself actually had preferred a degree in mathematics.

He completed his architectural studies at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg and became assistant to Professor Heinrich Tessenow, a champion of simple craftsmanship in architecture.

He met and fell in love with Margarete Weber, a lovely open minded girl. After a period couple and after completing studies they got married without the blessing of the Speer family as his fiancée was not of the same class but later things sorted out anyway.

In 1931, Speer joined the NSDAP and soon was offered a succession of commissions for the party. He felt fortunate to have been given this opportunity to build and create in a world full of unemployment. His talent and ability were quickly recognized and soon he came to the attention of the leader of the party, Adolf Hitler.

Because of the same burning interest for architecture Speer became one of Hitler's best friends. That in a different way than the others around the Führer as Speer had no political intentions or eager for power. In 1933 the Nazi Party won the elections getting to rule Germany.
After proving his skills in a variety of small and large projects Speer spent more and more time in the "inner circle" at the Führer's side.

Hitler demanded buildings that could stand the test of times for a thousand years! The skilled architect Speer was the man to give him that.
A real challenge!
Speer was asked to build the new Reich's chancellery and he accepted. Hitler needed the building already one year later but Speer assured him that it all would be ready in time!

A promise Speer probably hoped not to have given as it seemed impossible to draw and construct the large official building in that time. Hitler was amused as he wanted to see if the young architect really could manage to do what he told.

Albert Speer employed an army of labour to work in shift. He planned everything in detail, supervised it all and could take an impressed Hitler for a tour before the date agreed upon. The Führer expected to find workers on the site at least making last adjustments, but the place was not a construction site - it was a huge impressively Reich Chancellery ready to be used at that very moment!

Through this Speer proved that he was not only a talented architect but also a great organizer.
Together Hitler and Speer made plans for the new Berlin, a capital that was to be the finest and most important in, all of Europe. All was set to be completed in the early 1950's but the work was finally halted by the war.

When Doctor Fritz Todt, the genius behind the great autobahn project, died in a plane crash Hitler chose Speer to succeed Todt as Reichs minister of armaments and munitions. Speer was never interested in politics, never used a military weapon and knew nothing of armaments but responded to the call of duty and accepted. His genius proved adaptable and he soon proved himself to be the right man for the job. He mobilized German industry by introducing principles of mass production, "democratic" economic leadership, improvisation, and a general anti-bureaucratic approach that resulted in a dramatic boost in Germany production. The result was that things ran smoother, better and faster. As usual he acted without pretence and won the hearts and minds of his colleagues and workers around Germany and even in some of the occupied Western countries(!) Speer became a powerful man despite (or thanks to) his unconventional methods. He was trying to minimize bureaucracy and kept the working men and women in mind.

At the end of the war he did his best to save the infrastructure and even whole cities from destruction for the sake of the German people. At great personal risk he disobeyed Hitler's orders calling for the ruthless demolition of anything possible use to the enemy on evacuated German territory. In addition, he actively enlisted others to preserve resources for German reconstruction once the war was over by using his position to countermand Hitler's orders. He couldn't see how making the civilians suffer even more could change a war that was already lost.

After Hitler's suicide, and inn accord with his political testament, Karl Dönitz, the commander of the Navy, was appointed the new Führer.

As most of Germany was occupied by allied forces and Berlin was lost, Dönitz, Speer and a few others were left with only a small area of Germany and some occupied territories to the north over which to rule. Dönitz ordered the end of the destruction of resources in Germany and the remaining occupied territories. He also tried to negotiate a peace treaty but in the end had to surrender unconditionally.

After the war, Speer was the only one of the accused to plead guilty at the Nuremberg trials. His life was spared but he was sentenced to 20 long years in prison. Dönitz who wasn't politically involved until the very end received a 10 years sentence.

During the years of imprisonment, Speer kept in contact with his family and in secrecy started to write his memoirs. In 1966 he was released from Spandau prison.
The great architect and organizer Albert Speer passed away in 1981.

Albert Speer is said to have prolonged the war for at least a year, with the consequent death of hundreds of thousands and widespread ruin. It also gave the Nazis more time to pursue their mass murder of Jews, Russians, Gypsies and others deemed not fit to live.

The Holocaust

Albert Speer studied at the technical schools in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Berlin, and acquired an architectural license in 1927. After hearing Hitler speak at a Berlin rally in late 1930, he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party January 1931 and so impressed the Führer by his efficiency and talent that, soon after Hitler became chancellor, Speer became his personal architect.

He was rewarded with many important commissions, including the design of the parade grounds, searchlights, and banners of the spectacular Nürnberg party congress of 1934, filmed by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will.

A highly efficient organizer, Speer became 1942 minister for armaments, succeeding the engineer Fritz Todt. In 1943 he also took over part of Hermann Goering's responsibilities as planner of the German war economy. From Todt, Speer inherited the Organisation Todt, an organization using forced labor for the construction of strategic roads and defenses.

Under Albert Speer's direction, economic production reached its peak in 1944, despite Allied bombardment. In the last months of the war Speer did much to thwart Hitler's scorched-earth policy, which would have devastated Germany.

Speer was jailed in 1946 for 20 years in the post-war Nuremberg trials. After his release he wrote his memoirs, grew wealthy, and until his death in 1981 worked hard at being a penitent, presenting himself as someone who should have known what was being done, but did not know. Albert Speer offered himself as the scapegoat for Germany's collective guilt.

On the stand at Nuremberg Albert Speer stood out among the accused as the one "good Nazi." A dedicated servant of the party who, as Hitler's minister of wartime production, was the Nazis' principle exploiter of forced labor.

Albert Speer Part II

2012-02-12T20:31:00.000+08:00

Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny's biography meticulously re-creates for the reader the professional, emotional, and psychological life of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later his Minister of Armaments. Throughout the 12-year history of the Third Reich, Speer remained one of Hitler's most trusted confidants and one of the most powerful political leaders of the Nazi party.

Researched and written over an eight year period, Albert Speer weaves together information from innumerable personal interviews with Speer, his family, close friends, and professional colleagues, the author's own solid grasp of German history, and critical readings of Speer's own writings, including various drafts of his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, first published in 1969.

Throughout, Sereny consciously avoids the pitfall of many Speer biographers, who seek to either blame or exculpate Speer for the Nazi's atrocities. Instead, she succeeds in helping the reader understand a "morally extinguished" man and place into context "all the crimes against humanity which Hitler initiated, which continue to threaten us today, and of which Speer, who was in many ways a man of excellence, sadly enough made himself a part." Well over 700 pages, Albert Speer is not a quick read, but superbly written and meticulously researched, it is a pleasure to read, providing unprecedented insight into one of the most complex figures in modern German history. --Bertina Loeffler

The Good Nazi : The Life and Lies of Albert Speer by Dan Van Der Vat, Albert Speer

The New York Times Book Review, David Murray

Dan van der Vat, a Dutch-born British journalist, makes an effective case in The Good Nazi, a well-written and sceptical account, that while the slippery (Albert) Speer knew for years about the atrocities, he was able to pretend that he only "suspected ... that something appalling was happening" to Europe's Jews. As a result, he was one of only two top- ranking Nazis to escape the hangman, drawing a 20-year prison sentence instead.

Auschwitz Bergen-Belsen Belzec Sobibor Treblinka

On the stand at Nuremberg, Albert Speer, the self-described "second man in the Reich," denied any direct knowledge of the Final Solution. But was he really the innocent functionary he claimed to be? And was he sincere in accepting his share of the Nazis' "collective guilt"? This hard-hitting biography says no--that Speer's avowals of ignorance and repentance were a self-serving sham.

Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

From 1946 to 1966, while serving the prison sentence handed down from the Nuremburg War Crimes tribunal, Albert Speer penned 1,200 manuscript pages of personal memoirs. Titled Erinnerungen ("Recollections") upon their 1969 publication in German, Speer's critically acclaimed personal history was translated into English and published one year later as Inside the Third Reich. Long after their initial publication, Speer's memoir continues to provide one of the most detailed and fascinating portrayals of life within Hitler's inner circles, the rise and fall of the third German empire, and of Hitler himself.

Speer chronicles his entire life, but the majority of Inside the Third Reich focuses on the years between 1933 and 1945, when Speer figured prominently in Hitler's government and the German war effort as Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Federal Capital and later as Minister of Arms and Munitions. Speer's recollections of both duties foreground the impossibility of reconciling Hitler's idealistic, imperialistic ambitions with both architectural and military reality. Throughout, Inside the Third Reich remains true to its author's intentions. With compelling insight, Speer reveals many of the "premises which almost inevitably led to the disasters" of the Third Reich as well as "what comes from one man's holding unrestricted power in his hands." -- Bertina Loeffler

Charlane A. Wainwright from Syracuse, New York, USA , December 1, 1997 - Albert Speer's book in historical context

Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" presents a historical view of daily events within the highest ranks of the Nazi power structure. He is able to humanize the Third Reich to a chilling degree, since he demonstrates again and again how little different these men were from many men. The very ordinariness of the high ranking German officials presents the reader with a vivid illustration that this could happen again!

Albert Speer may have a bit of self-interest in his presentation of events through his own eyes, but the most striking sense of the book is that he is, in fact, an extremely likeable man, and a man of thoughtfulness and conscience. His personal struggle to accept the wider meaning of his wartime activities demonstrates the capacity of a decent man to be swept away in indecent activity on the basis of personal pride in a job well done, a personal search for recognition and admiration, and an all too human ability to see through blinders for a very long time.

When we see some of the events currently taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, especially in places where there is considerable ethnic cohesion and substantial economic distress, we see once again a fertile field for a drift into human atrocity. Given the locally accepted concepts that German people were "special" as well homogeneous, that perpetuation of the economic reorganization of Germany was critical to a return to tolerable life, and that the return to pride in self and nation would allow all Germans to lift their heads once again, Albert Speer took his place among others of talent and energy. They made a government and an economy WORK.

The sad fact that the Third Reich was led by a lunatic, who became even more insane and maniacal as time went by, was partially an accident to history.

Many good men, especially bright young men, follow a leader in the wrong direction, and later come to defend their wrong choice of leaders in part from loyalty, and in part to explain themselves to themselves. They cannot see that their emperor has no clothes because they are too close to him, and because they cannot bear to look at the fact that they were duped.

Eventually, realization comes, but often far later than it would have if they had not been totally embroiled already.

After I read Albert Speer's book, I admired him for coming forward to present his personal story of a man who did it all wrong, but who owed himself and humanity an account, and paid it.

The Two Worlds of Albert Speer : Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor by Henry T., Jr. King, Bettina Elles

SPEER REVIEW by T.S. Peric, Cleveland, Ohio , October 19, 1998

“I knew Albert Speer better than any American,” said Henry King during an interview, at 26-years-old, the youngest prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and the author of “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer: Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor” (University Press of America). It was not a comment filled with braggadocio. In 1946, fallow and a few years out of Yale Law School, King dreamt the dreams of many young men: accomplish a great deed or participate in a grand undertaking.

Hearing about a friend’s appointment to the American “team” at Nuremberg, King immediately applied for a position. Within a few months, he arrived at Nuremberg in the middle of a rainstorm and soon found himself collecting evidence against Erhard Milch, deputy chief of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), who was charged with participating in Nazi slave labor and human experiment programs. King also interviewed Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering and Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of staff of Germany’s military high command.

But frozen in King’s memory were the interviews with Speer in a bleak interrogation room. “Speer was remarkably composed and unshaken; he seemed to possess an inner security and objectivity that many of the others lacked,” King recalls. His composure was all the more remarkable because of the unique and key role he played in the Third Reich. “From 1942 to 1945 not only was he one of the men closest to Hitler, but he was also one who influenced Hitler’s decisions. At one time in late 1943, Speer was reputed to be Hitler’s heir apparent.”

Speer was unemotional, analytical, almost regal in his deportment. And unlike the other 20 defendants, he accepted full responsibility for his actions. “The question that haunted me then and still does today was why Speer, who appeared so decent and honest, was a close collaborator of Hitler,” King writes. “Why had he served such a monster?” Nearly half a century would intervene before King could offer any answers.

Speer spent the next 20 years locked away in Spandau prison (kept incommunicado except to his attorney and family). After his release, he became a best-selling author with “Inside the Third Reich” (1970) a personal look into the sanctum sanctorum of the Nazi leadership and “Spandau: The Secret Diaries” (1976) which described his imprisonment. King continued practicing law, including a stint as general counsel to the U.S. Foreign Economic Aid Program, moving to the private sector and eventually settling in as a professor of international law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

In 1966, King re-established contact with Speer, but was unable to pursue his goal of a book until his retirement from TRW where he served as general counsel of Automotive Operations. King interviewed Speer repeatedly (including Speer’s last interview, one month before his death in 1981). He consulted the Nuremberg records, his own notes and the literature on Speer and the Nazis. He also interviewed Speer’s daughter and Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, who observed the interaction between Hitler and Speer.

King’s book carefully plots the conditions and events in Speer’s life that drew the architect toward the summit of Nazi power. Speer was politically naïve, despite his aristocratic background, growing up in a cold, emotionless family, where intellectual prowess was demanded and ambition expected. Introduced to the Nazis at Berlin’s Institute of Technology, Speer fell victim – as did millions of Germans -- to the zeitgeist of Nazi Germany before the war, a time when the promise of a new Reich seemed to represent an unfettered, glorious future.

Speer’s ability to organize was quickly recognized, reaching new heights at the Nuremberg rallies. His Pantheon-like “Cathedral of Lights,” established Speer’s chilling brilliance for displaying raw power. The final, crowning jewel that firmly enthroned Speer to the Nazis fold was his artistic talent which brought him within handshaking distance of Adolph Hitler. Now, Hitler, the failed Viennese artist, would live vicariously through Speer’s artistic triumphs.

The Nazis’ world was Albert Speer’s first world, according to King. It was among the Nazis that Speer performed with remarkable thoroughness and unquestioned devotion, rising to the position of the Third Reich’s Architect and Minister of Armament Production. Indeed, if Speer’s artistic triumphs contributed to the physical manifestation of how the Nazi’s viewed themselves, his star as Armament Minister shone even brighter. Experts estimate that Speer’s contribution to industrial production lengthened the war by at least two years.

Despite Speer’s success, he began to enter his “second world,” according to King, even before Germany’s surrender. Speer was the only top Nazi to act in defiance of Hitler—and did so openly. He refused to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth policy” that would destroy the remains of German industry. Speer’s second world is “where his horizon broadened and his values changed,” writes King. “The second and succeeding world of Albert Speer was the horizontal world of the questioning spirit. This was a world of ethical and cultural values, a humanistic world . . .”

In “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer,” King deftly presents how naiveté, seduction and ambition drove Speer to the pinnacle of Nazi power. He concludes that Speer was clearly unique among the top Nazis that survived the war. Speer accepted responsibility for his actions and offered mea culpas for his sins. During and after his imprisonment, Speer pondered his actions and began to search for some degree of redemption until the end of his life.

While supporting the prison sentence Speer received, King ably demonstrates that Speer was not some cardboard character from the Nazi past. Rather, he was a complex and brilliant individual who confronted issues of good and evil on a scale that most of us cannot imagine. King succeeded in his search for a great undertaking with his successful role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

More than one half century later, he succeeds with another marvellous undertaking: the writing of “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer.”

BOOKS on Albert Speer:

Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth(1995) – Gitta Sereny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny

http://www.webofstories.com/rp/gitta.sereny

Speer : the final verdict, 2001 – Fest, Joachim C

BBC Vision of space = Albert Speer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUzX46Xk7Fw

Wartime Architects: Creating Amid Chaos

2012-02-12T20:30:00.001+08:00

A German poster printed in Dutch that says “Atlantic Wall; 1943 is not 1918.”

Credit: Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

MONTREAL — The history of architecture during World War II is barely talked about. We all know Albert Speer, the man who slavishly carried out Hitler’s megalomaniacal architectural fantasies; some know about Mies van der Rohe’s exile in Chicago. The rest seems to have quietly — and in some cases conveniently — faded from view.

“Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War,” an engrossing, often unsettling new show at the Canadian Center for Architecture here, is a major and belated step in coming to terms with this awkward chapter in modern architectural history. Simply put, it’s one of the most important architecture exhibitions I’ve seen in years. Organized by Jean-Louis Cohen, the show covers a dizzying range of projects conceived from 1937 to 1945, many of them not well known. Some are expressions of idealism, others of incredible cynicism and savagery. By the end I found myself rethinking not only the role that architects played during one of the most murderous and destructive periods in human history, but also almost everything that came immediately after it, from the cold war conviction that technology could deliver a better way of life to the causes of suburban sprawl. The exhibition opens with two images — one depicting the half-crumbled ruins of Guernica after the April 1937 Nazi terror bombings, the other showing two women wandering across the wasteland of Hiroshima, umbrellas in hand, on a wet day sometime after the dropping of the atom bomb in August 1945.

From there you are funneled into a small, cylindrical room decorated with the portraits of 34 architects, from Speer to Le Corbusier, who spent much of the war unsuccessfully lobbying the Vichy government for work, and including victims like Szymon Syrkus, a prisoner at Auschwitz who was recruited by the SS to design greenhouses for a section of the camp devoted to agriculture.
This juxtaposition — of images of total devastation and innocent-looking head shots — sets up the framework for the show. The war, Mr. Cohen wants us to remember, was about destruction, not creation; at the same time, not all architects waited it out in American universities. How did the many who continued designing and building invest their creative intelligence?

The answers are not all dispiriting. The Tecton Group’s 1939 proposal for an air-raid shelter in Finsbury, in London, is an impressive work of architecture: a wide concrete cylinder, buried in the earth, with a ramp spiraling down its interior wall, big enough to hold 7,600 people. (If you go to the London zoo, you’ll see a foreshadowing of the design in the spiraling ramps of the Penguin Pool, built by the same firm a few years earlier.)

Less spectacular but more relevant to today are some of the low-cost workers’ housing projects that were built to serve the booming military-industrial complex, especially in America. Richard Neutra’s 1940s Channel Heights Defense Housing in San Pedro, Calif. — a complex of simple prefabricated houses arranged around a gently sloping park to take advantage of the waterfront views — is a fine example of how to build housing that is cheap, affordable and humane.

In suburban Pennsylvania, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s “Aluminum City Housing,” a complex of simple modern wood-clad houses joined by covered galleries, could serve as a pretty good model for low-cost housing today.

These imaginative triumphs, however, are overshadowed by something else: the way the grinding machinery of war increasingly demanded a regimented and dehumanized society, for which a large number of architects were happy to provide the physical framework.

One of the many chilling examples of this is Ernst Neufert’s 1943 proposal for a Hausbaumaschine (or house-building machine), an enormous industrial shed that would have moved along rails, stopping every few hundred feet so that workers could pour the next segment in an endless row of identical concrete housing units. The project, never built, is a particularly sinister expression of a world where life is stripped of individual identity, and where human beings are treated as interchangeable parts in a gigantic machine.

Neufert’s vision is just one of the most extreme examples of a more pervasive mentality. During the war entire new factory cities were organized and built with the straightforward efficiency of assembly lines. Oak Ridge, the super-secret site of the Manhattan Project in rural Tennessee, was a model of functionalist planning, with shopping malls flanked by repetitive blocks of prefabricated housing. (The housing was segregated according to race and class, with high-level military officials and scientists living in single-family homes, white laborers in apartment blocks and blacks in encampments of shacks.)

Peenemünde, home of the sprawling German airplane plant on the Baltic Sea where the V-2 rocket was developed, was a work camp laid out in a similar (if slightly more traditional) axial plan, with concrete-frame, brick-infill structures. In 1943, after Peenemünde was bombarded by Allied forces, German architects began work on an even more extreme version of rational planning: a network of underground factories in central Germany. The most architecturally significant of these, Eberhard Kuen’s Messerschmitt aircraft factory in southeastern Germany, built by slave labor, had an assembly line on rails integrated into its concrete structure and connected to the local train system.

This model of large-scale standardized planning reached its most sadistic level, of course, in the death camps, which were often designed with as much care as the factory complexes. Every square foot at Auschwitz was carefully calculated and measured, and the three square feet allotted to each prisoner — one-tenth of a typical barrack at the time — could be read as a sickening perversion of the Bauhaus idea of existenzminimum, an effort to calculate the exact amount of space needed to live a simple yet decent life.

(In the insightful catalog that accompanies the exhibition Mr. Cohen tells us that the architects of Auschwitz were trained at the best German schools, and one of the many surprises of the show is the variety of activities that were taking place at the complex, which included a chemical plant and greenhouses as well as the death camps. The greenhouses, still in operation, are used to grow chrysanthemums that are shipped across Europe.)

What haunts you about the show is not just how much creative energy was devoted to building the infrastructure for evil, but how the mentality of war eventually seeped into every corner of society, and remained there long after the war was over. The drive toward standardization was echoed in the conformity of cold war-era planning strategies. And the “decentralization” of cities proposed by planners worried that they were easy targets for bombers continued, on a much larger scale, as suburban sprawl.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, and the publication of books like Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” that the profession began to purge these tendencies and start to find a new way forward. In some ways we are still wrestling with the same problems.

ARCHITECTURE AND IDEOLOGY

2012-02-12T20:27:00.003+08:00

Casa del Fascio

Totalitarianism darkened Europe as economies collapsed in the 1930s. Architecture played a critical role in Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) plans for a reinvigorated Germany. A onetime Viennese watercolorist with a penchant for architectural subjects, Hitler saw the value of great public buildings in boosting national pride and signaling the permanence of his Thousand-Year Reich. His friend Paul Troost (1879–1934) had designed interiors for luxury ships and understood his Führer’s lust for theatricality. Troost’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich (1933–1937), was a museum for ‘‘pure’’ art, not the ‘‘degenerate’’ modernism then being purged. Its style became the official Nazi one: grandiose classicism, but simplified and rendered rigid and coldly sublime. The German architectural tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) was married to a primitive Greek classicism. After Troost died, Albert Speer (1905–1981) took his place in Hitler’s affections, conceiving a utopian rebuilding of Berlin as ‘‘Germania’’ with a preposterously oversized dome as its focus. Like Hitler, Speer saw Germany as a new Roman Empire dominating all of Europe and developed a suitably grandiose architecture, clad in stone. His built projects shared a megalomania, including the Zeppelinfeld Stadium, Nuremberg (1934–1937), for mass Nazi rallies and the Reich Chancellery, Berlin (1938), center ofHitler’s cult of personality. Its echoing halls, one nearly five hundred feet long, were meant to instill awe in visiting dignitaries. Hitler’s grim final days were spent in an underground bunker out back. Much of Speer’s work was bombed to rubble during World War II, and he was later imprisoned for his role in organizing slave labor and death camps. He is the twentieth century’s most controversial architect.

If the totalitarian regime in Germany rejected modernism, that in Italy was more receptive. Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) found an avid following among a young generation of architects, including the brilliant but short-lived Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943), who helped found Gruppo 7 in 1926. Gruppo 7 was a gathering of Milanese modernists who pressed for what they called Rationalismo: antiindividualistic and pro-Fascist; embracing functionalism in design but tempering it with historical references to the glories of the Italian past. Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, Como (1933–1936), a Fascist headquarters and community center, evolved through various conceptions into a harmonious and cubistic work of pure geometries and white walls stripped of any ornament. Its rationalist composition embodied in a gridlike reinforced concrete frame was apparently simple but actually quite complex, blending functionalist dicta with principles from the Roman past, including perfect proportions, an interior atrium, and marble cladding. It has won a legion of admirers. In time for Terragni’s centennial in 2004 the New York architect Peter Eisenman (b. 1932) published Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, a book he had worked on for forty years that celebrated the subtleties of Casa del Fascio and Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, also in Como. Never built was Terragni’s proposed monument to the poet Dante (1265–1321) (1938) in the Roman Forum, likewise a fusion of modernist rationalism with reference to the historical past, specifically the hypostyle halls of Egyptian temples, where columns stood as thickly as trees in a forest—only at the Danteum the columns were to have been of glass. World War II discredited fascism, but the ideas of Terragni later helped inspire postmodernism: Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) pioneered neo-rationalism in the 1960s, seeking to infuse history into themodernist vocabularies of concrete, glass, and steel, much as Terragni had done.

THE OLYMPIC STADIUM IN BERLIN

2012-02-12T20:26:00.003+08:00

Like Mussolini, Hitler used the power of architecture to further the Third Reich, building the Olympic stadium in Berlin. This powerful venue designed by Albert Speer would hold the Olympic Games and was intended to show the world the supremacy of the master race. Many of the forced laborers died during its construction. It was the essence of totalitarian design in the service of power, fitted to stage many Nazi rituals and rallies, something Hitler loved.

International sporting event that Hitler presented to the world as a showcase for the achievements and the glories of the Nazi regime. The eleventh Olympiad, held in Berlin in 1936, had actually been awarded in 1933 to the German capital, before Hitler’s accession to power, and at first the Nazis denounced it as “a festival dominated by Jews.” But Hitler did a volte-face and decided to use the Olympics as a public relations opportunity for his regime. There was a three-week moratorium on the anti-Semitic campaign, and Richard Strauss and Carl Orff were commissioned to compose music for the occasion, while artists worked on massive illustrative paintings and statues. For the first time a relay of runners carried the Olympic flame from Greece to Germany, and from the German border all the way to Berlin the roads were lined with children waving Nazi flags, creating, for the benefit of the press, a strong impression of a happy citizenry enthusiastic for the Nazi regime. The opening ceremony provided the opportunity for Hitler to parade with 40,000 SA men while a choir of 3,000 sang Nazi songs. Although shot-putter Hans Woelke won the first gold medal of the games for Germany, subsequently public attention and adulation shifted to the black U.S. sprinter Jessie Owens, who won four gold medals, somewhat tarnishing the luster of supposed Aryan superiority.

References Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936. New York: Little, Brown. Krüger, Arnd, William Murray, and W. J. Murray, eds. 1972. The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics and Appeasement in the 1930’s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mandell, R. D. 1972. The Nazi Olympics. London: Souvenir Press.

Nazi architecture I

2012-02-12T20:26:00.000+08:00

Nazi architecture rejected modem style. Official Nazi policy required a monumental neoclassical design for big buildings. This is the outside of the giant Olympic Stadium in Berlin.

Given that the Nazis believed in the intrinsic grandeur of the German nation and tile role of the party in cultivating this, art was expected to illustrate the power and self-confidence of the German people, and to demonstrate in tangible form how the Nazis had helped to achieve this. As no cultural product is more instantly tangible than bricks and mortar, it was to architecture that the Nazis turned to give expression to this claim. The emphasis here was on gigantic, monumental buildings. Probably the most famous of these is the complex built at Nuremberg for the Nazi Party rallies. Nothing illustrates better the sense of how architecture could promote the message of German splendour than Nazi plans to transform Berlin into the new imperial capital city, "Germania". The plans set out deliberately to rival the glory of ancient Rome by building everything in the neo-classical style and on an enormous scale. Accordingly, the centrepiece of the scheme was to be a great hall, 16 times bigger than St Peter's in Rome, with a dome that rose 290m (951 ft) into the air. It was to be an unmistakable, marble-clad statement of both the glory of the German people and the strength and permanence of the Nazi regime.

Nazi architecture II

2012-02-12T20:25:00.001+08:00

The Königsplatz in Munich, where in 1935 two "Honour Temples" were erected for the remains of the 16 Nazis who died in the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The inside of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Despite their rejection of the modern style, the Nazis often used the most advanced building techniques hidden behind neoclassical facades.

As the Nazis believed in the superiority of Aryan people over all others, this message was one that artists had to incorporate into their works. The manner in which this was achieved is illustrated by the types of sculpture that appeared in the Nazi period. Basically, all carved or moulded three-dimensional representations of the human form - that is to say, of German people - depicted an idealized race of physically perfect supermen. Being cast in the Hellenistic style of ancient Greece, these images depicted Germans not just as modern-day heroes but also as the heirs to Europe's greatest cultural and imperial tradition, that of Alexander the Great and of Caesar.

ALBERT SPEER, (1905–1981)

2011-06-06T21:24:00.000+08:00

Best-known architect of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime.

Albert Speer operated at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, Third Reich political propaganda, and, beginning in 1942, large-scale armaments production and industrial organization. Born on 19 March 1905 in Mannheim, Germany, Speer rose to become one of the key figures in the short-lived but immensely powerful and destructive twelve-year Third Reich. Albert Speer studied under the influential architect and popular professor Heinrich Tessenow at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, absorbing his teacher’s interest in a restrained neoclassicism. This historical bent, combined with Speer’s considerable charisma and gifts for communication and organization, appealed immensely to the rising dictator Adolf Hitler, himself a frustrated architect inclined toward megalomania in matters architectural as well as political. Speer’s close friendship, or at the very least close professional association with Hitler, began after the death of the Nazi architect Paul Ludwig Troost in 1934; it led to a string of large-scale commissions for Nazi Party rallying grounds and stadia in Nuremberg, along with an outsized, imperial replanning of Berlin as ‘‘Germania,’’ the new capital of the Nazis’ vaunted ‘‘Thousand-Year Reich.’’

Together, Hitler and Speer developed detailed models of a new Berlin city center, complete with a domed Great Hall to accommodate rallies of up to 180,000 people; the quarter-mile-long Reich Chancellery on Vossstrasse (constructed 1937– 1939); projects for an array of new ministries; a gigantic triumphal arch known as ‘‘Bauwerk T’’; and, at the end of a monumental north-south axis through the heart of the city, a new railway station adjacent to the new Tempelhof Airport. Realized only in part, the plans and models nevertheless figured centrally in Hitler’s and Speer’s reconceptualizations of Berlin and Munich as ideal Nazi cities, embodiments of a new German community (Volksgemeinschaft). Among the führer’s and General Building Inspector Speer’s favorite topics of discussion were the ruins left by ancient empires at Karnak and Ur, which in turn inspired plans for the use of huge amounts of marble and granite in Berlin, so that the ‘‘Thousand-Year Reich’’ would one day leave similarly inspiring ruins as well.

Speer’s proximity to the führer, coupled with his organizational talents and political skills, enabled him to rise as a very young man to the pinnacle of power in the Nazi hierarchy. Having successfully maneuvered to succeed Fritz Todt (1891–1942) as minister of armaments production in 1942, at the age of thirty-seven, Speer used German and prisoner-of-war labor to erect monuments, Nazi Party rallying grounds, and industrial buildings throughout the Third Reich while overseeing the Reich’s immense infrastructure and its industrial and military supply chain. Speer, whom Karl Hettlage, one of his subordinates, called a ‘‘rational man par excellence’’ (Sereny, p. 296) credited much of his organizational success to the innovations of Fritz Todt and, before him, to ‘‘the real originator of [the] idea of industrial ‘self-responsibility,’’’ Walther Rathenau (Speer to Rudolf Wolters, 1953; quoted in Sereny, p. 296).

Because of Speer’s polish, sophistication, and qualified admissions of war guilt at the Nuremberg war trials of 1946, he received an unusually lenient sentence of twenty years in jail; many other members of the Nazi leadership were executed for their crimes. From jail in Spandau, near Berlin, Speer released sanitized versions of his immensely readable, informative memoirs. These helped make him an important, if still controversial, celebrity in West Germany right up to his release on 30 September 1966 and his death in 1981. Making the hardly believable claim that he was ignorant to the end about the Nazis’ Final Solution, the genocide of Europe’s Jews, the charming and enigmatic Speer combined the qualities of an haut bourgeois architect and master executive technocrat with the ideological relativism and willingness to compromise that snared so many during the darkest years of modern German history.

Speer’s architectural legacy has been to inoculate many German architects and government authorities against overt expressions of monumental, modern classicism, deemed too close to Hitler’s megalomaniacal visions. In reunified, post–Cold War Berlin, such official projects as Axel Schultes’s and Charlotte Frank’s modernist master plan for the government quarter of the early 1990s, their highly sculptural chancellery building (2000), and Sir Norman Foster’s high-tech renovation of the Reichstag building (1999) reflect this aversion to direct classical quotation. Instead, these buildings express the German government’s ambition to erect modern symbols of a new ‘‘Berlin Republic,’’ leader of a modern European nation that is perceived to be simultaneously open, democratic, and progressive.

Primary Sources Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York, 1970. ———. Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York, 1976. Secondary Sources Bärnreuther, Andrea. ‘‘Berlin in the Grip of Totalitarian Planning: Functionalism in Urban Design between Hostility to the City, Megalomania and Ideas of Order on a New Scale.’’ In City of Architecture/ Architecture of the City: Berlin 1900–2000, edited by Thorsten Scheer et al., 200–211. Berlin, 2000. Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London, 1995.

Speer son attacks plan to make Nazi complex a world heritage site

2010-07-05T20:31:00.000+08:00

Albert Speer, son of the man who designed Adolf Hitler's pompous Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg, attacked Sunday a plan to declare the tourist-magnet complex a UNESCO world heritage site.

Albert Speer senior designed the vast park as a place where hundreds of thousands of fanatical Nazis could worship Hitler as he spoke. It includes an avenue wider than an airport runway for parades and a vast, unfinished indoor congress centre.

The municipality of Nuremberg, fed up with the cost of maintaining the crumbling, cracked buildings, decided last month to seek UNESCO recognition for a swathe of buildings as a heritage site, effectively handing over the problem to the international community.

Albert Speer junior, 75, who is also an architect, said, in an interview with the German news magazine Focus, that a UNESCO listing was "a weird idea," the wrong way to deal with the Nazi site, and totally out of line with other nations' ways of preserving a repugnant past.

The city council, which is turning the site of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials into a museum, argues that this should be the principal part of the UNESCO heritage site, with the nearby Nazi monuments added to the set as "Exhibit A" of Hitler's crimes.

The Frankfurt architect said he was not necessarily arguing the whole Nazi site should be ripped down. He said Italy had demolished most of the monuments put up by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini "which was not right either."

His father, who was Hitler's chief architect in the 1930s but repented of his misdeeds after the Second World War, created the overall park plan and designed one of the multiple sites where Hitler could speak to vast audiences of uniformed Nazis, the Zeppelin Field.

Its grandstand, where Hitler could stand surrounded by hangers-on while he reviewed the parades, was based on a Greek temple and 360 meters wide. Nuremberg's trade-fair grounds now abuts the field.
A stadium, a plaza and the congress hall were the other venues.

Tourists from round the globe visit the vast Nazi site to get a feeling for Hitler's megalomania. A museum in one of the battered buildings explains how the Nazis impressed Germans with big, torchlit parades in the park.

Speer And Hitler: The Devil's Architect

2010-06-03T13:00:00.000+08:00

Plot:

This three-part docudrama tears open the veil of myths and half-truths obscuring a central figure of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer, and his alliance with the 20th-century's most horrifying embodiment of evil, Adolf Hitler.

Overview:

110 million troops mobilized in two thirds of the world's nations. The Third Reich at war with 53 countries. More than five years of death and horror triggered by the German people. How was it possible? How could an entire nation allow itself to become part of a cold machinery of hatred and destruction? "Speer & Hitler: The Devil's Architect" helps us understand what caused the Germans to unleash such devastation upon the world. This three-part docudrama tears open the veil of myths and half-truths obscuring a central figure of the Nazi regime. A man of profound contradictions, Albert Speer was a cultivated intellectual who allied himself with the 20th-century's most horrifying embodiment of evil... A man schooled in the humanities, yet who controlled Germany's wartime industry and used slave labor to increase production... A brilliant architect willing to build the ostentatious monuments of a doomed Thousand-Year Reich... A protegé who turned against his master during Hitler's last months and was the only Nazi leader at the Nuremberg trials to admit a certain responsibility for the regime's actions, if only in an abstract sense. Filmmaker Heinrich Breloer, writer and director of the Emmy Awardwinning miniseries "The Manns," is joined by many of the same creative minds who helped produce "The Manns." For the first time ever, three of Speer's children are interviewed on camera and confronted with painful truths about their father. Breloer's research is crowned by revealing facts found in previously unknown documents. Fictional re-enactments played out by a cast of leading film and TV stars provide emotional immediacy and allow an intimate look behind the staged self-portrayals of Hitler and his architect.

Germania 'Today'

2010-02-25T16:36:00.001+08:00

Speer and Hitler Planning Germania

2010-02-16T08:36:00.001+08:00

NAZI ARCHITECTURE

2009-07-09T12:27:00.002+08:00

Paul Troost was commissioned by Hitler to build this Temple of Honor (“Ehrentempel’’) to commemorate those who died in the abortive Munich putsch of 1923. The annual reenactment of this event became part of the Nazi calendar.

No art form has been more consistently associated with fascism than architecture. Yet architecture under fascism was more diverse than is popularly thought and cannot be reduced to a specific “fascist style.” Fascist architecture is more correctly defined by how it was used to support or carry out specific ideological aims or political goals, rather than as a coherent set of symbolic forms. As evidenced in particular by the sponsorship of large-scale public works in Italy as well as the personal involvement of Hitler in architectural projects in Germany and Austria, monumental building became a key element upon which a political ideology could be projected and, in some cases, through which specific policy goals could be enacted. While most interwar states favored some variation of classicism for their major public buildings, for several fascistic regimes, architectural production was more central to their cultural and social concerns. This was particularly true in Germany and Italy. By the end of World War II, a series of high profile architects and major public commissions had become firmly associated with their respective governments and leaders. Because of the massive scale of the projects, the involvement of political leaders, including the dictators themselves in specific instances, and the use of building and construction for the enactment of political and ideological goals, architecture continues to be crucial for our understanding of the relationship of art and politics under fascism.

Italy was not only the first state in which a fascist party came to power but also the first to use public commissions to establish an ideological connection between architecture and fascist politics. In the capital, many of these projects related to Mussolini’s interest in connecting his regime to the political symbols of Augustan Rome, a period of consolidation of political authority that was also well represented in such famous works as the Ara Pacis in the forum. Not only were Augustan sites like this forum excavated and studied but, in addition, imperial building types like the triumphal arch and the classical temple front were reintroduced in commissions for memorials and party buildings in Bolzano, Genoa, and Florence, among other cities. In addition, the interest in the urban form of the ancient forum, marked by an open space at the intersection of a major east/west and north/south axis, was also revived, particularly in plans for new cities such as the provincial city of Littoria (1932; now named Latina) and the famous Rome Universal Exposition (EUR) grounds begun in 1937. The latter was to be the site of a proposed 1942 World’s Fair, but the buildings were subsequently turned over to government administrative work. The prominent architect Marcello Piacentini led the team that developed EUR’s marble-clad buildings with stripped-down neoclassical details. Piacentini had already shown early on in the regime his ability to adapt classical prototypes to contemporary state and party ideological needs. Such ideological claims became active policy in 1935, with the very real expansion of imperial interests through the invasion of Ethiopia, after which Addis Ababa was remodeled and some sections of the city based on classical Roman urban prototypes.

Yet while a modified neoclassicism was used in particular projects, it is important to emphasize that no single official style can be claimed for Fascist Italy. The streamlined and modernist-inspired work of the group of architects known as the Italian Rationalists, as well as regional variations by lesser-known designers that invoked vernacular medievalist traditions, could also be adapted to an often contradictory Fascist ideology. The range of building styles and types reflected the interest of particular patrons, regional administrations, and immediate propagandistic needs that could encompass claims of Italy’s modernity and technological sophistication alongside arguments for a premodern return to the land. For example, the abstract forms and structural emphasis of the Rationalists were not rejected as too removed from the classicism favored in other commissions but rather celebrated in cases such as the famous Casa del Fascio in Como (1932–1936) by Giuseppe Terragni. Still, Terragni’s modern structural expression nevertheless was complemented by the use of traditional materials like marble that could be interpreted with a specifically nationalist rhetoric, as well as interior decorations that included not only abstract sculpture but also images of Mussolini.

The range of stylistic options that allowed for a variety of patrons and propagandistic interpretations of architecture existed as well in National Socialist Germany. However, given the key role of Hitler and his greater influence on major commissions, the plurality of formal variations was more limited for major commissions and the political instrumentality of the building process more intense than in other authoritarian regimes. Architecture in Germany was not only a matter of promoting the physical presence of the Nazi Party—for example, through such commissions as Paul Ludwig Troost’s party buildings for the Königsplatz in Munich (1933–1937). It was also a matter of enabling and promoting the governing principles of the regime in terms of a polycratic system of patronage for which Hitler was the final arbiter. Reflecting his interest as a young adult in becoming an artist and his experience in trying to live off of his sketches of buildings and tourist locations prior to World War I, Hitler had strong opinions about what he considered suitable state and party architecture. He was more decisive in his intervention in architectural production than were other fascist and authoritarian leaders.

Architecture had been crucial to National Socialist politicians and propagandists even in the struggle for power at the end of the Weimar Republic. Hitler signaled the importance of architecture to the Nazi Party by proclaiming in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that powerful architecture was an expression of a strong Volk, praising dynastic cultures like ancient Egypt and Rome while decrying Berlin and its Jewish department stores. But further, Nazi denunciations concerning the supposedly internationalist and Bolshevik tendencies of the flat-roofed architecture of the Bauhaus and other modernist architects became one part of the antidemocratic propaganda.

Yet once in power after 1933, neither party leaders nor Hitler came out with an officially decreed style. Rather, different kinds of architecture tended to be favored by specific patrons, while politically or ideologically suspect architects were purged from public commissions. In this sense, architecture followed the general Gleichschaltung, or coordination, of other cultural administrations. So, for example, the SS often favored medievalist architecture for its buildings, and certain industrial and military complexes like those of the Luftwaffe might use the steel and glass of modernism. Still, for large-scale public and party commissions involving Hitler, architects tended to stick to a stripped down neoclassicism massive in scale and solid in its masonry. Such buildings could be variably interpreted as either examples of an ideology of racial purity, in which contemporary Germany was linked to the supposedly Aryan peoples of classical Greece, or as manifestations of a new and powerful imperial state rivaling that of ancient Rome. Different patrons in the Nazi Party proposed these varying meanings for the built environment. Beginning in 1937 and the architect Albert Speer’s announcement of plans to rebuild Berlin as the first of five “Hitler Cities” (including Munich, Nuremberg, Hamburg, and Linz), it had become clear to all who wanted to gain Hitler’s attention that architecture and urban planning would be key to his peacetime initiatives.

But architecture served not only practical and ideological goals within the Nazi state. Architectural production was also integrated into specific policy initiatives and hence functionally related to the radicalization of racism and militarism. Speer’s architectural office in Berlin, for instance, began to promote as early as 1938 a new policy for the concentration of the Berlin Jewish community and the deprivation of its property rights. For the architects, this was a way of gaining control over the property of displaced German Jews that could then in turn be used for non-Jewish citizens who needed to be compensated should the government appropriate their property for the massive site clearing necessary for the rebuilding plans. Furthermore, architects and urban planners also took part in streamlining specific aspects of the most extreme anti-Semitic policies. For example, the ghettoization of Jews in Eastern Europe depended on the manipulation of space and structures by professionals; most grotesquely, the SS architectural staff at Auschwitz helped make it possible through efficient planning of space to kill even more of European Jewry. In these instances, as in others, the Nazi state was the extreme example of how far architecture could be instrumentalized to promote a fascist project.

While fascist patrons made use of architecture in Italy and Germany to the greatest extent, architecture could also play a significant role at particular moments for other fascistic or right-wing authoritarian states. Most famously, at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, not only was the face-off of the Soviet and Nazi pavilions much discussed, but, in addition, the steel and glass structure for the Spanish Pavilion by Josep Lluis Sert and Luis Lacasa was seen with its art (including Picasso’s Guernica) as a modernist rejection of the massive masonry structures of both the fascist and Soviet states. As a Republican building, it signaled the Popular Front policy of the government, which extended from the liberal to the left in their struggles against Franco. Yet while the pavilion might appear ideologically neutral because of its simple materials, the context of the other monuments of the fair, the content of the Spanish exhibition, and the use of the facade as a support for statements promoting the Republican government meant that the architecture naturally paralleled the antifascist message. After defeating the Republicans, Franco did not devote his regime to architecture anywhere as much as Hitler did, but he did patronize several large-scale ideological projects, such as the massive complex in the Valley of the Fallen (1959) to memorialize supposedly both the fascist and antifascist soldiers who had died in the Civil War, although the antifascist message remains unclear at best.

With the defeat of the Axis powers at the end of World War II, the scale of the interwar projects and, particularly, those that focused on neoclassical masonry construction became associated not only with the extreme fascist Right but also the bombast of the Stalinist Eastern Block. Such associations further played a postwar role as polarized definitions of fascist or communist architecture were juxtaposed to the apparently democratic architecture of modernism, even though such easy transparencies between architecture and ideology would not have been recognized before the Cold War. Civic and corporate patrons in democratic capitalist cities increasingly favored modernist architects and steel and glass structures as a way of distinguishing themselves from the interwar politicization of masonry construction. Public interest continued to be drawn most intensely to Hitler’s biography (including his early years as a failed artist) and the revelations brought forward by Speer, who completed several autobiographical accounts after his release in 1966 from Spandau Prison. In the postwar period, while modernists like Terragni had been relatively easily accepted as a focus of aesthetic study, Speer and other more traditional architects were not systematically treated in relation to their contribution to cultural policy. That situation began to change, particularly with the publication of several foundational texts from the late 1960s and early 1970s that confronted the role of architecture in fascist states.

References

Ades, Dawn, et al., eds. 1996. Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930–45. London: Hayward Gallery.

Etlin, Richard. 1991. Modernism in Italian Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ghirardo, Diane. 1989. Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jaskot, Paul B. 2000. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. New York: Routledge.

Miller Lane, Barbara. 1968. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Scobie, Alex. 1990. Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity. University Park: Penn State University Press.

And Tomorrow, the World?

2009-05-04T19:19:00.003+08:00

In May 1942, Professor Konrad Meyer delivered the memorandum 'Generalplan Ost: Legal, Economic and Spatial Foundations for Development in the East'. The plan, which exists only in summarised form, envisaged the creation of three vast 'marcher settlements' (Ingermanland, Memel-Narew and Gothengau) which would consist of 50 per cent German colonists, linked to the Reich at 100 kilometre intervals by thirty-six 'settlement strongpoints' whose inhabitants would be 25 per cent German. The plan would take twenty-five years to implement, would involve five million German settlers and would cost 66 billion Reichsmarks.

The deteriorating course of the war put a stop to the planning activities of Professor Meyer in the spring of 1943, although Himmler continued to fantasise about settlements in the East long after the Red Army had crossed the frontiers of East Prussia. Ultimately, as we know, the moral and material might of the Allies prevented the realisation of the nightmarish scenarios of the SS. The expulsion and flight of millions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe and the division of Germany for forty-five years ensued. But it is important to remember that German victory on the Eastern Front would have had wider consequences than those affecting the population of the Soviet empire.

Historians have long debated whether Hitler's final goal was simply the conquest of 'living space' in Eastern Europe or whether this was 'merely' the prerequisite for world domination (implying an ultimate conflict with Britain and America). Some historians, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jàckel, insist that Hitler was a 'continentalist', with his final objective consisting of the acquisition of Lebensraum in the East and the resolution of the 'Jewish Question'. Others, notably Giinther Moltmann, Milan Hauner and Meier Michaelis, have insisted that Hitler's ambitions were 'globalise. In fact, the two positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather reflect different emphases. The continentalists point to the frequency with which Hitler dilated upon the East, relegating his more expansive remarks to the world of fantasy; the globalists piece together his more random utterances about colonies or a war with America and take them seriously. Some historians, for example Andreas Hillgruber, have systematised Hitler's statements into a 'programme' for aggression:

After the creation of a European continental empire buttressed by the conquest of Russia, a second stage of imperial expansion was to follow with the acquisition of complementary territory in Central Africa and a system of bases to support a strong surface fleet in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Germany, in alliance with Japan and if possible also Britain, would in the first place isolate the USA and confine it to the Western hemisphere. Then, in the next generation, there would be a 'battle of the continents' in which the 'Germanic empire of the German nation' would fight America for world supremacy.

Subsequent research, while not endorsing the notion of a 'programme', does appear to confirm that Hitler's aims were global. It has drawn attention to Hermann Rauschning's liberal, rather than literal, accounts of Hitler's conversation in 1933-4, accounts originally designed, of course, to deter fellow conservatives from their liaison dangereuse with Nazism. In this period shortly after the 'seizure of power', Hitler announced his intention of 'creating a new Germany' in Brazil and taking over the Dutch colonial empire, Central Africa and 'the whole of New Guinea'. The allegedly dominant Anglo-Saxon influence in North America would be subverted 'as a preliminary step towards incorporating the United States into the German World Empire'. These objectives were accompanied by quasi-messianic declarations of intent about 'recasting the world', or the 'liberation' of mankind from the restraints of intellect, freedom and morality.

Hitler and his associates returned to these themes during the first flush of victory. In 1940 Ribbentrop and officials in the Foreign Ministry were thinking of augmenting the 'Greater European economic sphere' with a 'supplementary colonial area' carved from British and French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Northern Rhodesia, with Madagascar acquired for the purpose of 'resettling' the Jews. The Racial Political Office of the NSDAP began detailed planning for the creation of colonial regimes in Africa and for the regulation of relations between whites and blacks. Back in Europe, neutrality, benevolent or otherwise, was no guarantee against attack. Operation Tannenbaum was designed to conquer Switzerland, which was to be divided between its neighbours; Operation Polar Fox would secure the iron ore reserves of Sweden; while Operations Isabella and Felix would secure respectively Portugal and Gibraltar, in the latter case with or without the consent of Franco.

In the aftermath of a victory on the Eastern Front, Hitler would have been in a position to dictate terms to Britain. If the government had once again rejected his offers of peaceful coexistence, then the resources of the occupied East would have been deployed in a sustained air war against Britain, a war which, if won, could have resulted in the eventual activation of Operation Sealion (see the previous chapter). The war would then probably have extended into the late 1940s. Only a Russian recovery behind the Urals and an American intervention with atomic weapons would have averted the consolidation of Nazi rule throughout the continent of Europe and the conquered regions of the Soviet Union - and neither of these would have been guaranteed if Britain had been defeated.57 Indeed, they would have been positively unlikely if Hitler had made more effective use of his alliance with Japan, which formally joined the German-Italian axis in September 1940, against the Soviet Union or against the British Empire. Hitler could, for example, have agreed to concentrate on driving the British out of Egypt and the Middle East, leaving Japan to direct its military efforts against the British in Singapore and India. Alternatively, he could have coordinated the German and Japanese attacks on the Soviet Union. Either way, there would have been a pincer effect which would have been very hard to defeat. And, of course, the Americans would have still been on the sidelines, because Pearl Harbor would not have been attacked.

Instead, of course, the Japanese were allowed to conclude a neutrality agreement with Stalin just two and a half months before Barbarossa was launched, and were actually encouraged by Hitler to attack the United States in November 1941. The next month, on 6 December the Russian counter-offensive was launched; and, two days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the Americans into the war. To compound the mistake, Hitler declared war on the US on 11 December. This decision has often been seen as a short-sighted and fatal mistake. Yet Hitler seems to have envisaged confrontation with the United States from a relatively early stage. For some time, he persisted in the delusion that Britain would accept German leadership in a 'revitalised' Europe, turning with Germany upon the USA: 'I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America'. But, in the event that neither the prospect of an alliance with Britain nor an economic blockade would bring the USA to its knees, he seems to have been willing to contemplate transatlantic aggression. He toyed with the idea of air-strikes against America from bases in the Azores and Canary Islands, commissioning the development of Messerschmitt four-engine bombers, capable of delivering eight-ton payloads at a range of 11,000-15,000 kilometres. Similar ambitions were also apparent in his special 'Z plan' naval directive of 27 January 1939, for a fleet which by 1944-6 would be capable of challenging any power on the high seas from its vast base at Trondheim. The 800 ships were to include 100,000-ton battleships with a length of over 300 metres and guns of 53 cm calibre.

In sum, there is some evidence that Hitler's objectives were almost without limit. Nor was his planning hampered by questions of cost, human or otherwise, for war in his eyes had a positive, regenerative value for the 'health' of the race and nation. As he said, 'We may have a hundred years of struggle before us; if so, all the better - it will prevent us from going to sleep.'

How long would a Nazi empire have endured if Hitler had been successful in at least one part of his programme, the defeat of the Soviet Union? A hundred years, as he himself envisaged? Certainly, that was the assumption on which he based his grandiose projects for the reconstruction of postwar German cities. Hitler, the failed architecture student and small-town bohemian, was obsessed with architectural planning. During the last weeks of the war, with Soviet soldiers scuttling through the debris of Berlin, he spent much of his time reshuffling architectural models in the glare of spotlights positioned to simulate sunlight. The main purpose of Hitler's architecture was to overawe through excesses of scale and to give his regime the aura of power and permanence by reducing human beings to the scale of Lilliputians. Hitler made his views on the function of architecture quite clear when he remarked in 1941, 'Those who enter the Reich Chancellery should feel that they stand before the lords of the world.' He gave this a characteristically barbaric twist with regard to the surviving population of conquered Russia: '... once a year, a troop of Kirghiz will be led through the Reich capital in order that they may fill their minds with the power and the grandeur of its stone monuments.'

This need to overawe was accompanied with an obsession with scale which bordered on the infantile. Musing with Himmler in 1941, Hitler remarked:

Nothing will be too good for the beautification of Berlin One will arrive there along wide avenues containing the Triumphal Arch, the Pantheon of the Army, the Square of the People - things to take your breath away! It's only thus that we shall succeed in eclipsing our only rival in the world, Rome. Let it be built on such a scale that St Peter's and its Square will seem like toys in comparison!

Similar competitive gigantomania was evident in his plans for the redevelopment of Hamburg. These included plans for a massive suspension bridge across the Elbe, with pylons soaring to 180 metres. He explained the project to his army commanders as follows:

You will perhaps ask: Why don't you build a tunnel? I don't consider a tunnel useful. But even if I did, I would still have the largest bridge in the world erected in Hamburg, so that any German coming from abroad or who has the opportunity to compare Germany with other countries must say to himself: 'What is so extraordinary about America and its bridges? We can do the same.' That is why I am having skyscrapers built which will be just as 'impressive' as the American ones.

The skyscrapers included a new NSDAP Regional Headquarters, designed to relegate the Empire State Building in the league table of tallest buildings. (Some idea of the scale is conveyed by the fact that due to the poor sub-soil, the structure had to be reduced by 250 metres.) Modernity, megalomania and vulgarity were to be conjoined in a gigantic neon swastika on top of the building, which would guide vessels at night into the Elbe.

The largest buildings were inevitably reserved for Berlin, which in 1950, once building work was complete, would have been rechristened 'Germania'.6 0 The city was to be rebuilt around a vast axial grid, whose avenues would be over a hundred metres wide. Emerging from railway terminals larger than Grand Central Station, the visitor would be confronted by wide vistas and enormous marble-clad buildings. A triumphal arch, double the height and breadth of Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe, would be inscribed with the names of the fallen, while defunct enemy weaponry would be displayed on plinths erected for the purpose. Passing the new 'Führer Palace', equipped with a dining hall for thousands and a private theatre, the visitor would arrive at the great Hall, billed as the largest assembly hall in the world. With a capacity of a quarter of a million, the light in the cupola could alone encircle the dome of the Pantheon, the condensation thus raising the problem of interior rainfalls. Above, some 290 metres from the ground, a lantern supported an eagle perched at first upon a swastika, and then in the revised version, upon the globe.61 These buildings, and the parade grounds that went with them, were to be the stage for the choreography of millions, marching, singing, acclaiming seas of people, beneath the glacial shafts of a hundred searchlights. And they were intended to last. As Hitler once remarked: 'Granite will ensure that our monuments will last for ever. In ten thousand years they'll be still standing, just as they are, unless meanwhile the sea has again covered our plains.' The materials were to come from a new generation of concentration camps, established by the SS in the vicinity of stone quarries.

Beyond Germany, architectural planning became a matter of Wilhelm Kreis's monuments to the dead which were to punctuate the landscape from Africa to the plains of Russia. More importantly, the regime planned major changes to Europe's infrastructure. Canals would bring the grain and petroleum of Russia along the Danube, and three-lane motorways would enable German tourists to speed along in their Volkswagens from Calais to Warsaw or Klagenfurt to Trondheim. In early 1942, Hitler and his chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began plans for a four-metre-gauge railway, which would convey double-decker trains at 190 kilometres an hour to the Caspian Sea and the Urals. Some time after the defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, Hitler was still designing saloon and dining cars to take ethnic German settlers to and fro in Russia.

Of course, historians who stress the chaotic and ultimately self-destructive character of the Third Reich would have us believe that all such plans were mere fantasy: the Third Reich was preprogrammed to collapse in 1945. What remains unclear, however, is how far their assumptions of an inevitable Nazi defeat are based on a realistic assessment of what could have happened - and how far on mere wishful and teleological thinking. Certainly, many aspects of Nazi planning appear so bizarre to us that it is hard to imagine their ever having been realised. But not all. While Himmler planned his ethnic revolution and Hitler built his architectural models, other agencies were mapping out futures for ordinary Germans which were far from unrealistic in their conception. Robert Ley's mammoth German Labour Front apparatus (DAF) was the socially 'progressive' arm of a regime better known for repression and terror. Through its subordinate 'Beauty of Labour' and 'Strength through Joy' organisations it endeavoured to bring improved conditions, cheap holidays, sport and a greater sense of worth to the 'German worker', and hence to boost his or her productivity while breaking down traditional class solidarities. Even the exiled SPD leadership was forced to acknowledge the efficacy of these policies, lamenting the 'petit bourgeois inclinations' evinced by sections of its erstwhile constituency. During the first years of the war, the DAF's Scientific Labour Institute made detailed plans for the provision of comprehensive health, insurance and pension coverage, thus simultaneously generating and responding to expectations of a postwar reward for present deprivation. Interpreting a specific mandate to improve public housing - a field hitherto neglected in favour of monumental building - as a general commission for welfare reform, Ley and his staff made proposals which bear some superficial similarities to the Beveridge Report. For example, there was to be a new national pensions scheme whereby the over sixty-fives would receive 60 per cent of their average earnings over the last decade of employment. These plans were augmented with a child benefit scheme and measures to reform health provision.

Only a closer examination of these schemes reveals that the benefits were contingent upon past 'performance', and that whole categories of people were to be excluded from any provision whatsoever on the grounds of race or 'asocial' behaviour. The projected health-care reforms, including the provision of public clinics, factory physicians and affordable spas and sanatoria, also concealed a collectivist and mechanical view of human beings as epitomised in the chilling slogan 'Your health does not belong to you', or in the objective of 'periodically overhauling' the German population in the same way as 'one services an engine'. This would have been a welfare state only for those Germans who were not imprisoned, sterilised or murdered as 'ballast existences', 'asocials' or racial 'aliens'. Perhaps it is this aspect of the counterfactual of a German victory which is most chilling of all - precisely because in its superficial 'modernity' it is so easy to imagine it coming true.

'Turn Left at Gestapo Headquarters'

2009-05-04T17:42:00.003+08:00

By Juan Moreno in Munich

Foreign tourists flock to the Third Reich walking tours in Munich. Even now, 64 years after World War II ended, visitors from abroad still only seem to associate Germany with two things -- beer and Hitler. The country's image seems to be changing far more slowly than it would prefer.

Three tour guides are standing next to each other on Munich's central Marienplatz square, and one could almost feel sorry for two of them: the man with the spectacles and the Spanish woman. But Jeff Cox, the third, is doing very well.

It's Easter, the sun is shining on the neo-Gothic façade of Munich's town hall, and the city is full of tourists. Ideal conditions. Cox and the other two have been waiting for customers. Each of them is offering a different tour.

These days, city tours are tailor-made for certain target groups. The Spanish guide has a sign that says "El centro en espanol!". The man with the spectacles has a board offering a "Walk Around the Old Town." The tourists walk past them. Not a single customer shows any interest in them.

Jeff Cox doesn't have a sign. Just a blue folder containing photos. He doesn't even have to hold the folder up. You have to step up close to read what Cox is offering. "Third Reich Tour. Munich Walk Tours in English."
The Third Reich in Munich. That means Hitler, Göring, the Gestapo, the SS. Hitler in the city where everything started. The "Capital of the Movement." Cox is pleased. He's got 18 tourists standing in front of him. British, American, an Indian family. Each one of them has paid €12 ($15.50). When it comes to city tours, Hitler is a surefire bet. Nazis always sell.

Cox speaks beautifully clear English. He would have made a good history teacher. He's an affable Londoner who tries to get his listeners interested rather than boring them with dry lectures. He's been a city guide for 10 years.
He's just been talking about Hitler's time in the Austrian town of Linz, then his time in Vienna. Later on he'll take the group to the legendary Hofbräuhaus beer hall where Hitler held several speeches. Then to the corner of Brienner and Türkenstrasse. That's where the Gestapo headquarters was. The tour ends on Königsplatz square, where the Nazi party staged its early rallies.

"Who knows what Adolf Hitler was almost called?" says Cox. "Schicklgruber; his father was called Alois Schicklgruber but changed his name."

Alan Stark has read seven biographies of Adolf Hitler. He listens attentively to Cox, even though he knows most of it. Stark has blond hair and lives in California, he likes to wear running shoes in his free time, and he's interested in German history. When Stark says German history, he really means Adolf Hitler.

Stark is in Germany for six days. It's really only four days if you subtract the travel time. So he and his wife have to focus on what's essential.

Day one: Nuremberg, the site of the Nazi party rallies. Day two: Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg, the site of Hitler's mountain retreat. Day three: Munich, Third Reich tour. Day four: the highlight point, Bayreuth. "Parsifal," five hours of Wagner.

"I'm really no Nazi," says Stark. "I'm just interested in Germany."

Stark would make a lot of Germans sad. But tourists who come to Munich, Berlin or Heidelberg have a pretty preconceived notion of this country: Beer and Hitler.

If Germans think the world now sees them differently, they may well be suffering from a misconception. Despite 60 years of the Federal Republic, despite the Soccer World Cup in 2006,when Germans wore wigs in their national colors of black, red and gold and played host to the whole world.

The Nazi story is over, and a colourful, easygoing patriotism has dawned. Or so they thought.

Adolf Hitler Beer Tables
Cox has led the group into the Hofbräuhaus. Some waiters are standing between the large wooden tables of the vaulted hall. They know the score. The Hitler tours are here every day. "There on the right, that's where Adolf Hitler stood," says Cox. The group takes photos of a beer table.

"This is where Hitler presented the Nazi party's first party manifesto." Stark walks along the rows of tables and takes pictures. He'll be taking a lot of beer table images back to San Francisco.

The Starks will show their friends a Germany that is alien to most Germans. The world is changing: An African American is the most powerful man in the world, a white man is the best rapper, and Britain has the world's most famous chef. But Germany remains the land of Adolf Hitler beer tables.

"In Britain schools virtually only teach German history from 1933 to 1945," says Cox. He tries to change that image of Germany in his tours, he says. Germany is changing, Cox tells his listeners. He also talks about the resistance of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose and how some people in Munich refused to say "Heil Hitler" instead of "Grüß Gott," the standard phrase used to greet someone.

But his group is clearly more interested in his descriptions of where the SS was founded and where Hitler drank his beer. After all, the tourists want to hear about the Nazis, and not about the new Germany.

The tour is over a little after noon. Three American women walk up to Cox and ask him to recommend a good café. Cox tells them to try the district of Schwabing.

"Where is Schwabing?"

"That's easy," says Cox. "You walk straight on up to the traffic lights. Then turn left at Gestapo headquarters."

H-NET BOOK REVIEW: WELTANSCHAULICHE ERZIEHUNG IN ORDENSBURGEN DES NATIONALSOZIALISMUS: ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUKUNFT DER ORDENSBURG VOGELSANG

2009-03-21T11:20:00.000+09:00

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January, 2009)

Paul Ciupke, Franz-Josef Jelich, eds. _Weltanschauliche Erziehung in Ordensburgen des Nationalsozialismus: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der Ordensburg Vogelsang_. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 190 pp. EUR 19.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-713-0.

Reviewed for H-German by Mark A. Bullock, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago

Vogelsang: A Castle Made of Sand

In 2006, _Ordensburg_ Vogelsang, in Germany's Eifel National Park, was opened to the public for the first time since the end of the Second World War. This opening sparked a debate among scholars, concerned citizens'associations, and local and regional government agencies about how this former training ground for a Nazi elite should be utilized and remembered.

This "castle," unbeknownst to many of its recent visitors, was part of an ambitious Nazi project, initiated by Robert Ley, to educate and train a corps of young Germans to lead the Third Reich into its thousand years of glory. The editors of this collection, Paul Ciupke and Franz-Josef Jelich, after introducing Vogelsang's past, ponder its future, asking if such places of "evil" should be ignored and allowed to fall into ruins. Or, should Vogelsang be retained as a special place for learning about and remembering Germany's past? As scholars, they only consider the second answer to their rhetorical question, arguing that Vogelsang provides new insights about how National Socialism sought to sustain itself.

The story of Vogelsang remained obscure because there was no general access to the area, which was used as a training ground for British and Belgian soldiers until 2005. Built to blend into the surrounding landscape overlooking a valley, Vogelsang is one of the largest remaining examples of National Socialist architecture. It also represents yet another case of an ideology-fueled Nazi project that fizzled out. Constructed after 1934 to train "_Ordensjunker_," Vogelsang was one of four planned _Ordensburgen_.

These institutions were a part of the rather inchoate state and party apparatus that sought to provide further ideological education to young Germans both during and after primary school. Vogelsang competed with the Labor Service, Hitler Youth, and various Reich- and district (_Gau_) schools for recruits and influence over education. From 1936 until the end of the war, Vogelsang was used to teach young Germans Nazi ideology; first to the _Ordensjunker_, and later as an Adolf Hitler School (a type of boarding school for boys aged twelve to eighteen frequently described as a "prep school" for the _Ordensburgen_, founded in 1937 by Ley in cooperation with Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth). Unlike other Nazi sites of commemoration, no obvious atrocities were planned or committed at Vogelsang.

Instead, it was a place of socialization and instrument of domination, where the Nazi state engendered acceptance and support from young Germans. The history of Vogelsang tells us more about Nazi fantasies than anything else, for it never fulfilled its primary mission, having never graduated a single class of "cadets."

Although opening Vogelsang to the public entails some risk, it also presents an opportunity for discussing how the Third Reich sought to wed its ideology to pedagogic theory to indoctrinate a faithful corps of young adherents. The editors grapple with the problem of deciding which elements of Vogelsang's history are useful for furthering the understanding and discussion of the Nazi past. The contributors to this book approach Vogelsang from a variety of academic disciplines. Their essays span the disciplines of history, architecture, history of education, and cultural studies.

One complex of essays in the volume treats the theme of education, its content, and its audiences. Lutz Raphael's essay recapitulates the components of Nazi ideology, pointing out that Nazis targeted males under thirty more intensively than all other groups. But, of the some 500 young men who began the elite school in 1937, only 17 percent finished the first year. Vogelsang was similar to other types of Nazi schooling in that it emphasized military order, discipline, and hardness, as well as submission of individualism to the community. Kiran Klaus Patel discusses extracurricular National Socialist pedagogy in the so-called "camp" system.

Patel notes the generally low academic standards maintained in the "camp" schools, which focused on drilling ideology. Vogelsang, despite its designation as an "elite" school, had much in common with the low academic achievements of the camp system. Even worse, according to the author, Vogelsang included no practical training for running party and state organizations. Patel claims that this emphasis on ideology over praxis is typical of Ley's contribution to the Nazi educational system.

Vogelsang did little beyond conveying superficial propaganda, a fundamental problem that largely explains why the _Ordensburg_ failed to attract or retain a sufficient number of candidates. Gisela Miller-Kipp's contribution focuses on the concept of "elite" education in the Third Reich. Based on an analysis of the Adolf Hitler Schools (AHS) and oral histories of former students, she argues that elite schooling for the best male students is really a postwar concept and that the AHS did not, in fact, differ significantly from other, non-elite schools under the Nazis. While former students might remember themselves as part of an elite, historians should not describe this institution as successfully producing a corps of superior young Germans. Instead, Miller-Kipp contends that the AHS engendered an "elite consciousness" among its students by filling them with a sense of awe at the massive, monumental scale of Vogelsang. They came to see the greatness of the Third Reich and internalized a sense of power based on their close proximity to the state.

Physical education in AHS is the subject of Harald Scholtz's contribution, which discusses how Hitler's "inversion" of traditional, humanist educational theories was put into practice by his paladins. One such contrast was the predominant role of physical education. Entrance "exams" for the AHS focused primarily on the child's physical and mental hardness.

Upon entry, Hitler's "elite" students were subjected to a mostly improvised course of instruction, since school leaders failed to draft lessons plans for most subjects before 1944. AHS students, who graduated with the _Abitur_, did not attend regular classes for more than four years. Alfons Kenkmann's contribution clarifies the identity of the _Ordensjunker_.

Candidates to the _Ordensburgen_ were between twenty-three and thirty years of age, and those over twenty-six had to be married. In addition, they had to be party members, or at least demonstrate proof of participation in Nazi organizations, and be physically healthy and racially "pure." Successful candidates were admitted to a four-year course of study, each year at a different _Ordensburg_. The first class was admitted in 1937, but no cohort ever completed the full four years, as the war interrupted the program in 1939.

A second group of essays documents Vogelsang's institutional and architectural contexts. Gerhard Klein recounts the history of Vogelsang's sister _Ordensburg_, Sonthofen, in Bavaria. Constructed in 1934, Sonthofen, like Vogelsang, played a marginal role in training _Ordensjunker_. Klein notes that Sonthofen could claim a number of world-class athletes among its student recruits.

Sonthofen's alpine location afforded the athletes optimal training conditions, while the state provided financial support. But Sonthofen's most important function in the Third Reich was as an AHS after 1937. Monika Herzog's essay on the construction history of Vogelsang notes that, other than its monumental scale, no one feature defined Nazi architecture. Most buildings constructed during the Third Reich were admixtures of old and modern styles, for Hitler did not want to merely copy the great structures of the past, but believed that his Germany should create its own style.

Vogelsang's designer, Clemens Klotz, adhered to neither the old nor new schools, but he still effectively combined the two styles in his plans for the _Ordensburg_. Relying on wood and stone, Klotz designed a building complex that placed a new, National Socialist spin on an object representing Germany's crusading past--the castles of the Teutonic Knights, which were both temples of worship and staging areas for military conquest. Klotz intentionally incorporated these concepts in Vogelsang's design, creating a totalizing aesthetic concept to house and train a corps of young men to spread their quasi-religious racial beliefs as they expanded Germany's power.

A third group of essays addresses the structure's postwar history. In his first essay, Michael Schröders gives a brief history of Vogelsang after its capture by American troops in early 1945 and subsequent use as a barracks and training area for British and then Belgian soldiers. The Belgians took pains to preserve the historical substance. In addition to repairing structures damaged during bombing, the Belgians even restored some of the Nazi reliefs, despite their overt fascist symbolism. In a second essay, Schröders describes the fate of Vogelsang's significant library in the years following the war. In an effort to protect the collection, its head librarian dispersed it across several local schools. Presumably half of these items were never recovered, and records were poorly maintained after the war. The universities of Bonn and Cologne, whose libraries were damaged in the war, ended up with some 20,000 volumes. Aside from small holdings of Nazi literature, the bulk of which was in the form of party journals and magazines, Vogelsang's library was indistinguishable from any academic library containing standard collections on history, theology, law, political science, art, and literature.

The volume closes with several pieces on the current significance of the structure. Fortunately, Vogelsang will not suffer abandonment or destruction, as its unique surroundings led to the formation of the Eifel National Park in 2004. Moreover, several foundations and local, regional, and state governments have banded together to determine how to best transform Vogelsang into a documentation center, as well as a multi-use tourist destination. Efforts are already underway to create an on-site museum that places the castle's history within the context of the Nazi quest to build a racially pure nation. The elite schools stood alongside the Nazi euthanasia and forced sterilization programs in Hitler's plan for a "new" Germany. Yet Vogelsang's future also includes a museum for nature and environment, as well as an administrative and visitor center for the national park. Volker Dahm argues that allowing the site to fall into ruin, or barring public access, will establish a counterproductive "aura of secretiveness" about the location.

The program for the site's rehabilitation can only be understood in the context of similar activities elsewhere. In separate essays, Manfred Struck and Bernd Faulenbach describe how former Nazi sites are selected for preservation and how public access is controlled. They enumerate recent trends in how Nazi sites are preserved and utilized for future generations, pointing in particular to sites like Vogelsang, where none were tortured or murdered. While much consideration is given to the recently opened displays at Obersalzberg and Nuremberg, the articles by Struck and Faulenbach ignore other innovative efforts to preserve, or at least find new uses for, structures from the Nazi past. Mostly local groups have enthusiastically sought to preserve and document the massive flak towers and air-raid bunkers that still exist, most notably in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen and Hamburg. For example, Berliner Unterwelten, e.V. provides chilling tours of the bunker complex and flak tower in Humbolthain Park. Hamburg's flak tower now contains recording and radio studios. The omission of these imposing remnants of Nazism seems like a missed opportunity to widen the scope of these articles, for these flak towers and bunkers have been preserved and simultaneously found new uses, including as economically sustainable educational centers.

The final essay, by Rainer Stommer, considers the modern fate of another monumental project by Vogelsang's architect: Prora, formerly known as KdF-Seebad Rügen, which lies incomplete on the Baltic coast, encompassing an area nearly the size of the Nuremberg party rally site. Intended as a seaside resort, the project's massive scale prevented its completion before the outbreak of war. From 1952 until German reunification, the resort served as a barracks for East Germany's army. Stommer mainly details the German federal government's efforts to find new uses for this massive complex, much of which lies in ruins. A central block of the development now holds museums, both private and state-owned, but many buildings remain unoccupied.

Success in attempts to attract buyers to convert the functional structures into hotel, retail, and residential spaces has been mixed, as refurbishment costs are prohibitive. Stommer laments this troubling state of affairs and argues that purely economic considerations should not determine the fate of Prora. To allow it to fall apart would be to lose not only the chance to document and teach about the Third Reich, but also an opportunity to support an economically depressed region through sponsoring tourism.

Vogelsang is an exceptionally complex space due to its combination of landscape, architecture, and former political function. While not a place to memorialize the victims of a criminal regime, Vogelsang nonetheless reminds of the Nazi past. It was, as the volume's editors write, "a place of educational power, of selection, and indoctrination" (p. 11). This collection casts light on an interesting and little-understood component of the National Socialist education system. The largest criticism I have to offer lies in the organization of the volume; often vital information that would be helpful to understanding material at the beginning of the volume is not discussed until later essays; both Kenkmann's and Klein's essays cover material that really belonged in the editors' introduction. Although some articles lack enough context and frequently overlap in terms of material covered, they nonetheless offer an insightful and cross-discipline analysis of Vogelsang. They provide a glimpse into the deliberations behind the project of preserving and documenting historical structures bound to the Nazi past. But their primary contribution comes in the field of educational history. Several authors debunk the myth of "elite" schooling in the Third Reich through their close analyses of the _Ordensjunker_ program and the AHS housed in Vogelsang.

The Nazi Party and Berlin

2009-03-14T03:04:00.002+09:00

In 1929, the Nazi Party won seats in the parliament of Berlin. Almost half a million people were unemployed in Germany at this time. That same year Otto Braun's Prussian government was ousted by a military coup, and the republic was approaching its collapse. Hitler became chancellor, after pushing out the Social Democratic Party in 1933. The Nazi movement originated in Bavaria, but Berlin eventually became the capital of the Third Reich. In 1933, the Parliament building was set on fire. This was a turning point in the establishment of Nazi Germany, because Hitler used this occurrence as an excuse to abolish the constitution.

In the summer of 1936, Berlin hosted the Olympic Games, which were used as a showcase for the new Nazi regime. Another one was the fact of persecuting German Jews from the very beginning. Their community was almost wiped out during the Third Reich. Thousands of Jews in Berlin were held captive after Crystal Night, a mass riot in 1938. Jewish shops and homes were ransacked throughout the country and in Vienna. Windows were broken and the streets were covered with so much shattered glass that it glowed brightly in the moonlight, a phenomenon that inspired the poetic term - Crystal Night. Over a thousand synagogues and many Jewish cemeteries were destroyed. There were still 75,000 Jews in Berlin in 1939, the year World War II broke out. Most were transported to death camps like Auschwitz. Around 1,200 Jews survived by hiding in Berlin.

Hitler welcomed the Allied air raids over Berlin, as they were a cheap way of demolishing the city that he considered to be the ugliest in the world. The Nazis developed elaborate plans for postwar Berlin. Together with his architect, Albert Speer, Hitler planned the Great Hall, the Avenue of Victory, a huge Arch of triumph and other projects of this magnitude. Speer planned to erect the Great Hall next to the Reichstag. It was to be seven times higher than the Basilica of St Peter in Rome, rising a full 250 metres, topped by a giant copper dome. It was originally planned to host170,000 people. There would have been a new train station at the other end of the Avenue of Victory, adjacent to Tempelhof Airport. As for the arch, it would be built in honour of those who perished in World War I and World War II. The project was due to be completed in 1950. That year Hitler planned to rename Berlin 'Germania'.

As one can see, had Hitler won the war, the city would have looked totally different today. Several buildings remain as monuments to these ambitious plans, such as the National Ministry of Aviation, the Tempelhof, and the Olympic Stadium. Soviet occupation forces destroyed the Reich Chancellery, and the red marble from the building was used to restore the adjacent underground station. The residual rubble was used to build the Soviet War Memorial in the Treptower Park.

BOOK REVIEW: SELLING BERLIN: IMAGEBILDUNG UND STADTMARKETING VON DER PREUßISCHEN RESIDENZ BIS ZUR BUNDESHAUPTSTADT

2009-03-10T23:23:00.002+09:00

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (March, 2009)

Thomas Biskup, Marc Schalenberg, eds. _Selling Berlin: Imagebildung und Stadtmarketing von der preußischen Residenz bis zur Bundeshauptstadt_. Beiträge zur Stadtgeschichte und Urbanisierungsforschung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. 356 pp. ISBN 978-3-515-08952-4; $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08952-4.

Reviewed for H-German by Emily Pugh, Art History Program, Bard College

A Long History of "New" Identities

Most of us think of the marketing of cities as more or less a modern trend, concomitant with the rise of economic globalization and the technological advances that have made international travel relatively easy and economically accessible. However, as Thomas Biskup and Marc Schalenberg point out in their introduction to this essay collection, the effort to craft cities' public images--to "brand" cities"--is anything but a modern innovation. In fact, as Biskup and Schalenberg argue, municipal political and economic leaders have long been concerned with how their cities are regarded both on a regional and international scale, and have moreover recognized that such identities, however informally formed or held, have measurable political, economic, and social impacts. The collection represents an important contribution to the history of the city in part because it covers a large historical arc.

The essays, originally presented as part of a February 2005 conference, attempt to explore not only the roots of city branding or marketing but how these practices have developed over time in the specific context of the city of Berlin.[1] Berlin is, in fact, a particularly appropriate city for the subject of such an investigation. A major focus of city branding efforts is, after all, the creation of a distinct identity both for the city in question, and this effort takes on a particular national significance in a capital city, which is charged with communicating national values and identities via its own. Berlin's designation as the German capital has been repeatedly questioned, and its relationship to any sense of unified "Germanness" has been an uneasy one. Indeed, historian Andreas Daum argued recently that Berlin's importance as a city that represents German culture and identity has been to some extent a myth rather than a reality.[2] He is by no means the first to state this claim. At the same time, Berlin's relative youth in comparison with other European urban centers has, at times, resulted in a kind of heightened tension in efforts to establish a definitive identity and historical lineage for the city, an effort complicated by the city's association with several different regimes and its Cold War division. In light of such ambiguity, Berlin's identity is often explained through Karl Scheffler's famous 1910 declaration: "Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be."[3] How Berlin's leaders and citizens have, from the eighteenth century to the present, attempted to both understand and represent their city is thus a question of considerable richness and complexity.

To answer it, the contributing authors of _Selling Berlin_ present a series of case studies of specific examples of image-construction and marketing in Berlin. The essays are divided into four sections, arranged more or less chronologically: "Ambitionen in der Residenzstadt," covering the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries; "Repräsentation und Eigensinn in der Metropole," which examines the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; "Profilierungen in der geteilten Stadt," which deals with the period of the city's Cold War division; and "Visionen und Erinnerungen," which takes on the legacies of division and efforts to (re)create post-1990 Berlin. As Biskup and Schalenberg explain in the introduction, these essays together explore attempts to "sell" Berlin, by asking the questions, "'who is selling?', 'what [are they selling]? (that is, which Berlin-image)' and 'to whom?'" (p. 15). Or, more specifically, who gets to define what is "Berlintypisch" both locally and for "outside"audiences? (p. 15).

To do this, Biskup and Schalenberg focus less on "actual urban practice," choosing instead to emphasize both formal and informal "negotiations of the city-image" (pp. 12, 15). Their analysis is furthermore understood in terms of three subject areas: the "official," political level of city-branding or image-making; the efforts of citizens' groups and/or economic interests to create a positive image for their city; and the critiques of these institutionally defined city images by opposition groups. Indeed, many of the essays fit neatly into one of these three categories. For example, essays by Melanie Mertens ("'Unsern hiesigen Residentzien ... in mehreren Flor und Ansehen zu bringen': Zur späten Bau- und Kunstpolitik von König Friedrich Wilhelm I"), Daniel Schoenpflug ("Hymenaeus und Fama: Dynastische und stadtbürgerliche Repräsentation in den Hohenzollernhochzeiten des 18. Jahrhunderts"), Robert Graf ("Die Inszenierung der 'Reichshauptstadt Berlin' im Nationalsozialismus"), and Alexander Sedlmaier ("Berlin als doppeltes 'Schaufenster' im Kalten Krieg") all deal with various attempts by political leaders of various eras and regimes to fashion a Berlin that corresponded with their own ideals and aspirations. Mertens, an architectural historian, describes how Friedrich Wilhelm I, despite his reputation as a parsimonious "soldier king," attempted to re-shape Berlin's identity in the late period of his reign, away from its reputation as the "largest barracks in the world" through the use of architecture and the arts (p. 44). Schoenpflug describes how Berlin became a "stage set" for the public expression of the dynasty's political power in the context of Hohenzollern weddings, but also how such occasions became an opportunity for citizens' self-representation; that is, a way to situate themselves in relation to the political identity and leadership of Berlin (p. 45). Similarly, Graf, a historian and theater scholar, focuses on Berlin's configuration as a theatrical set, this time to advance and impose the ideals of the Nazi regime. Dealing with the Cold War era, Sedlmaier considers how the governments of both East and West Berlin, as well as the United States and Soviet Union, used images of affluences and prosperity to make arguments about their own political legitimacy vis-à-vis Berlin.

So-called "boosterism" on the part of civic and economic groups to is the subject of essays like Tilmann von Stockhausen's "Markenpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Berliner Museumsinsel als Public-Relation-Idee," Daniel Kiecol's "Berlin und sein Fremdenverkehr: Imageproduktion in der 1920er Jahren," and Hendrik Tieben's "'Hauptstadt der DDR', 'Zukünftige Bundeshauptstadt', 'Europäische Stadt', 'Stadt der Avantgarde'--Berlinbilder im Umfeld des 750-jährigen Stadtjubiläums 1987." Von Stockhausen, art historian and marketing director for the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, explains how the museum island was fashioned as a cultural and historical but also "branded" center in Berlin from the early nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth.

The creation of "new identity" for Berlin is the focus of Kiecol's discussion of Weimar-era marketing efforts, which attempted to define the city as a center of "urbanity, internationality and modernity" (p. 161). A similar attempt to create "new" East versus West identities is discussed in Tieben's essay on marketing in East and West Berlin around the 1987 celebration of the city's anniversary.

Also included are critical responses to such efforts at creating a positive public image for Berlin. "Die Doppelbödigkeit des biedermeierlichen Stadtbildes: Heinrich Heines Briefe aus Berlin," by Esther Kilchmann, explains how Heine's account of his experiences wandering the streets of Berlin reveals the contradictions inherent in the governments' attempt to define their city. In her essay on representations of East Berlin, "Bild-Störungen: 'Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR' als Ort Staatlicher Repräsentation und Kritischer Gegenbilder," political scientist Angela Borgwardt considers not only officially sanctioned images of the "Hauptstadt der DDR," but critical "Gegenbilder" originating from the city's population of dissidents and underground groups.

On their own, these three ways of understanding efforts to define and market Berlin are indeed illuminating, but the collection is most compelling when these discussions are in direct or indirect discourse with one another. For example, reading Kilchmann's essay on Heine's _Briefe aus Berlin_ is particularly interesting in the context of the preceding two essays by Biskup and Schalenberg: "Auf Sand gebaut? Die 'Boomstadt' Berlin in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit um 1800" and "Berlin auf allen Kanälen: Zur Außendarstellung einer Residenz- und Bürgerstadt im Vormärz." After reading these essays, which describe efforts on the part of Berlin's municipal political and cultural authorities to define Berlin's public image, Kilchmann's contribution provides an interesting counterpoint by offering a critique of the institutionally defined images of Berlin that Biskup and Schalenberg outline. Likewise, the essays by Sybille Frank and Thomas Albrecht are presented as two alternative understandings of the complex of buildings constructed on Potsdamer Platz from the late 1990s to early 2000s.

In "Mythenmaschine Potsdamer Platz: Die Wort- und Bildgewaltige Entwicklung Des 'Neuen Potsdamer Platzes' 1989-98," Frank, an urban sociologist, offers a critical view of the development of Potsdamer Platz, suggesting that the focus this area of the city was fueled by a semi-fictionalized myth of the area's pre-World War II importance. In contrast, Thomas, in "Die Neugestaltung Berlins zwischen Planungsprozess und Städtebaulicher Vision," presents a more positive view of the development informed by his role as an architect and urban planner involved with its execution.

The long span of time covered in the book allows the reader to see individual developments in a broader context, allowing for connections between historical eras and even regimes with seemingly nothing in common.

One thing that becomes clear in reading the essays is how many times Berlin's civic and political leaders have attempted to create a "new"identity for the city in the past one to two hundred years. The book not only extends our knowledge of Berlin history, it provides new ways of practicing urban history more generally. It does this by engaging in the important work of bringing image together with reality; that is understanding representations of the city--whether visual or less tangible, whether informal or formal--as more than "mere" images. These essays help to illuminate the connections between popular notions of a particular city and how such notions are actively formed or capitalized on by institutions. The book's interdisciplinarity is part of how it achieves this. Different fields and points of views are offered, resulting in a wide scope of perspectives on the issue of city branding. Though the essays work best together as a whole, individual essays do provide valuable insight into particular time periods. In particular, the essays on the Cold War era by Sedlmaier, Tieben, and Stephanie Warnke ("Mit dem Bädecker nach Ost-Berlin? Baustellen-Tourismus im Kalten Krieg [1945-1970]"), take the welcome approach of comparing and contrasting East with West Berlin, rather than dealing with one or the other in isolation. I would recommend this volume of essays for any scholar of Berlin.

Notes

[1]. All but two of the essays are in German, though English abstracts are provided for all of the essays.

[2]. Andreas W. Daum, "Capitals in Modern History: Inventing Urban Spaces for the Nation," in _Berlin-Washington, 1800-2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities_, ed. Andreas W. Daum and Christof Mauch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-4, 14.

[3]. Karl Scheffler, _Berlin, ein Stadtschicksal_ (Fannei & Walz: Berlin, 1989), 219.

BOOK REVIEW: DREI GESCHICHTEN, EINE STADT: DIE BERLINER STADTJUBILÄEN VON 1937 UND 1987

2009-03-10T23:23:00.001+09:00

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (March, 2009)

Krijn Thijs. _Drei Geschichten, eine Stadt: die Berliner Stadtjubiläen von 1937 und 1987_. Cologne: Böhlau, 2008. 378 pp. ISBN 978-3-412-14406-7; EUR 44.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-412-14406-7.

Reviewed by Brian Ladd, Department of History, University at Albany

The Politics of History in Berlin

Most of us have forgotten that, at the time, 1987 was supposed to be a particularly significant year in Berlin's history, as two entrenched regimes commemorated its 750th birthday by staking rival claims to the city's past.

Long after the events of 1989 buried that rivalry, it may also be difficult to imagine why anyone would write (or read) a book about those nearly forgotten celebrations. Yet Krijn Thijs's book is anything but an antiquarian exercise. He takes advantage of our historical distance from 1987, and from the previous anniversary in 1937, to offer a judicious analysis of the politics and rhetoric of historical writing. Since 1989, events, sites, and scholar-activists in Berlin have to a great extent set the agenda (certainly in Germany, and even beyond) for efforts to reconcile scholarship on local history with politically charged claims to local places and local stories. Thijs reminds us that many of these attempts to fashion post-fascist, post-nationalist, and post-communist local histories began before the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Thijs has found a rich lode of material in the behind-the-scenes wrangling that accompanied official interpretations of the city's history by three of Berlin's regimes. The book examines various forms of commemoration offered in 1937 and 1987--parades, for example: because the National Socialists had held one, West Berlin decided it could not, whereas the GDR had no such _Berührungsängste_. However, the bulk of the book is devoted to an analysis of the official written histories that accompanied each commemoration, comparing the final products to ideas and projects that were discarded along the way.

The briefest of the three cases studies is the first, reflecting the relative insignificance of Berlin's earliest birthday celebration. Berlin had not previously celebrated its anniversary, since the story of its birth was shrouded in darkness. By the early twentieth century, local historians concluded that the city had been founded around 1230, prompting some to propose a 700th anniversary celebration to be held in 1930. That plan came to nothing, in part because the oldest known document mentioning the city dated only to 1237. This date suggested the possibility of a commemoration in 1937, by which time the city was in Nazi hands. The celebration became the pet project of Berlin's Nazi mayor, Julius Lippert, a figure of no great significance in the Third Reich. For all their obsessions with German national history, more powerful Nazis cared little about Berlin's local history, and in fact Hitler did not bother to show his face at the official ceremonies, while Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels barely put in an appearance.

Lippert, however, presided over a minor spectacle that propounded a history calling attention to Berlin's putative role as a medieval bridgehead for the Germanization of central and eastern Europe, a story that not only suited Nazi purposes but also was largely compatible with the views of most experts in local history. The focus on early Berlin also reflected a growing nostalgia for an imagined Old Berlin that was being swamped by the tide of modernity.

Half a century later, in a West Berlin struggling with the hereditary taint of Nazism, plans for a new celebration were automatically suspect in view of the fact that the Nazis had at least arguably been responsible for enshrining 1237 as the year of Berlin's foundation. Doubters were, however, reassured by evidence that plans for the 700th anniversary predated the Nazis and, more dubiously, by the claim that the whole idea had been the brainchild of the city archivist, Ernst Kaeber. Thijn argues that the liberal Kaeber was given too much posthumous credit because he had been the one prominent local historian least tainted by the Nazis: although he lost his job, most other local historians found that their conservative and nationalist interpretations of the past were largely acceptable in the Third Reich.

West Berlin's plans for 1987 were shaped in part by the Federal Republic's broad but politically charged revival of history, which focused on Berlin, as was apparent in a major exhibition on Prussian history in 1981 and in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's plans for a new German history museum in Berlin.

Thijs shows how the West Berlin Senate steered a careful path between conservative nationalists and the various leftists and radicals who were enacting a new "history from below." The official plans called for a pluralistic celebration, with many events offering a variety of perspectives. There was, however, an official line of sorts, one that culminated in a central historical exhibition held in the restored museum called the Gropius-Bau. Its celebration of Berlin as the metropolis of modernity parted ways with the conservative Berlin-Brandenburg tradition embodied in the Historische Kommission zu Berlin, which was largely left by the wayside, while, on the other side, the leftist Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt also received modest funding for its research and exhibitions calling attention to the industrial working class and the dark side of modernity. An incidental but important product of this official pluralism was the exhibition "Topographie des Terrors," opened in 1987 on the desolate site of Gestapo and SS headquarters, which happened to adjoin the Gropius-Bau. The Senate quietly tolerated this effort to (literally) uncover an unpleasant Nazi history; the exhibition was such a success that it was permitted to continue its somewhat awkward existence for years (and arguably it still remains an unhappy stepchild of official Berlin).

Meanwhile, the GDR, too, had rediscovered local history and its leaders were determined not to let the West trump their claim to the heritage of "Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic," as they officially and invariably called East Berlin. Here, unlike in either Nazi Germany or West Berlin, the city's birthday became a celebration of the state--and, Thijs argues, a measure of the state's sclerosis. Attempts to produce an official Marxist-Leninist commemorative history became mired in crisis. Since the crisis played out behind closed doors, this section of the book reflects prodigious archival research and a fresh exposition of GDR history writing.

The decade preceding the anniversary had seen a renaissance of local history, as the GDR embraced its "heritage and tradition." It proved relatively easy to produce serious work on earlier periods without running afoul of party ideologues, but histories of the twentieth century, and especially of the GDR period, turned into minefields, and in the end the promised official accounts were not completed. To produce a history that unquestionably legitimated its claim to power, the Politburo had to make the proletariat vanish into the communist party, and then the city shrink to its eastern half, tasks that demanded hopeless contortions of the historical record--or hollow affirmations of party orthodoxy.

An introduction and a lengthy concluding section (a quarter of the book--perhaps more than necessary) are devoted to an analysis of the "discursive practices" that produced these "master narratives" of Berlin history. Here Thijs tries to make the case that these competing histories of Berlin offer general lessons about the writing of history in the twentieth century. Leaving aside the bureaucratic tussles and historical contingencies that shaped the official histories, Thijs analyzes texts that were in fact produced under official auspices in 1937 and 1987. Drawing on Northrop Frye and Hayden White, he analyzes their rhetorical and plot elements. He classifies their "narrative structures" as romance for the Nazis, comedy for East Berlin, and satire for West Berlin, and he describes their "horizontal" and "vertical" intertextuality--that is, their shared themes and the connections between local and national narratives. Each commemorative history, he observes, offered its own Golden Age: myth-shrouded "Old Berlin," for the Nazis; the bustling metropolis, for West Berlin; and the GDR itself, for East Berlin.

Some of us who spent 1987 in Berlin might be tempted to comb through the book in search of errors in tone or nuance. However, Thijs's careful assessment of personalities and conflicts rings true--with one exception. He intimates that the GDR's absurd quarrels over historiography foretold the imminent demise of the Marxist regime. In hindsight, his argument seems plausible, but at the time, for all the absurdities apparent to any observer in East or West, hardly anyone thought the regime was in its death throes.

Although it would be nice to think that every state faces limits to the scholarly contortions it can demand of its historians, it is far from clear how much the intellectual bankruptcy of 1987 tells us about the political bankruptcy of 1989. Nevertheless, if we think that attempts to shape official history reveal something about the narrative underpinnings of political power, Thijs's book has a good deal to teach us.

TEMPELHOF

2009-03-05T09:18:00.006+09:00

Tempelhof is designed as a semi-oval with 14 towers. The roof was originally intended to be used as a viewing platform for the audience at big Nazi events, such as Hitler's birthday. The airport was only completed during World War II and was used as a giant aircraft factory.

The airport is notable both for its role in the Berlin Airlift and as an example of Hitler's architectural ambitions. There are still a few remnants of the grandiose plans for Hitler's favorite airport. The present building, designed by the architect Ernst Sagebiel, was to impress visitors to Germania, the planned capital of the victorious Reich.

Despite the latest clean-up plans, the long-term future of the Tegel Airport -- historic Cold War facility -- remains unclear. Berlin's air traffic is scheduled to relocate to a large new Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport (BBI) in 2011.

Featured Website: Download Nazi architecture 3D models

2009-03-04T11:16:00.002+09:00

by Generalfeldmarschall (OKL)

Nazi planned and built structures.
LINK

Germania: Hitler's Big Plans for Berlin

2009-03-04T11:10:00.001+09:00

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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Hitlertown

2009-03-04T11:07:00.002+09:00

In German art, a battle of death and life is raging,” Eric von Vessen quotes Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who was director of the Weimar art academy in the 1930s and coined the maxim ‘Art must be created from blood and soil.’ Von Vessen has a high forehead, fine, sand colored hair and thin mustache. He is good-looking in a ruggedly intellectual way. He’d be able to blend in on a construction site as well as at a conference on European architecture, which he both does regularly.

Born in 1948, von Vessen, after a career as architect with Eber and Carp in South Florida, where he developed shopping plazas and residential areas, found himself “longing for a challenge.” He’d made a fortune in his profession, his wife Elise inherited her father’s pharmacy empire, and his life at age fifty could not have been more comfortable. “It was deadening,” he exclaims, “absolutely deadening.”

He confesses that the approaching new millennium made him review his work of twenty-five years. He concluded that everything he’d built had been built “for today, and therefore was already crumbling. It was as if I had planned and built ruins. Dozens of the malls I designed have been torn down, the developments have turned into slums.” Von Vessen had to build for the future if he wanted to be remembered. He dreamed of an architecture that was large, well-crafted and everlasting, imagined monuments of pride.

Von Vessen, who had acquainted himself with Hitler’s favorite architect Albert Speer’s work during college, found that Speer had answers for his questions.

“I understood,” he says and laughs, “that Speer was maybe the last architect who had the imagination and the power to transform an entire country. What he didn’t have,” von Vessen adds wistfully, “was time.”

In 1999, the architect sold his stakes in Eber and Carp and bought the estate of John Erring, “a vast piece of nothingness,” in Southeast Nevada. “It was ideal,” von Vessen notes. Speer, if the Nazis had stayed in power, would have had to tear down large parts of Berlin to create what he and Hitler envisioned for the German capital. “Tear down the old, erect the new. For us, it was much easier. We were able to start from scratch.”

Just in time to celebrate the new millennium, von Vessen and his crew of 640 started work on Germania, the city Hitler and Speer could not finish. “Oh yes,” the architect says, “we had plenty of champagne ready for the occasion.”

During research for what von Vessen simply calls “his life,” he had a lucky strike of monumental proportions. “Speer built a model of Germania, 1:50, back in the 1930s. There were photos, of course, but the model was thought to have been lost during air raids on Berlin in ’45.” One day back in the spring of ’99, von Vessen received a call from New England. “This guy, Albert Leary, he had heard of my plans for building Germania through the press. We had tried to keep a low profile, but a project of that scale...He had an old barn, he said on the phone, but refused to tell me what he kept in there. He just said I’d be a fool if I wouldn’t make the trip.” Von Vessen, after receiving a second call, decided to give it a shot. In May of that same year, he arrived in Entport, New Hampshire.

“So we go to his barn, and this guy is behaving like an insane magician. We have to pull away tons of straw and wood, and I’m starting to curse my curiosity when we finally pull out this gigantic wooden crate.” Von Vessen stretches his arms like an angler to indicate how big his find was. “We have to work half an hour to open the front of the crate: more straw – I was going crazy.” But he stayed and after another hour, “there, in the middle of this red New England barn, stood the Great Hall, Albert Speer’s model of Germania’s centerpiece.”

Leary’s father, a major in the U.S. army, had shipped his souvenir to America after ’45, in a transaction that, von Vessen claims, “took guts and a good deal of bribery.”

The architect bought Speer’s Kuppelhalle, and today, weeks after his own Great Hall has been opened to the public, it occupies a special place in Germania’s Reichskanzlei. “The model helped me through all the tough times, it was a source of inspiration, it kept up my faith.”

Some of the hard times arrived when outraged citizens organized a protest tour and arrived in Nevada with banners demanding ‘Down with the Nazis,’ and ‘Stop Facism.’

“They smeared buildings and monuments, left their garbage everywhere, and threatened to hurt workers. The police wouldn’t do a thing,” von Vessen remembers, and after the first wave of angry opponents, he brought in security. “I didn’t imagine Germania with watchmen and fences. It was a city I wanted to give to my people, to all citizens of this country. But policing Germania was the only way to protect my vision.”

His vision has been called ‘neo-fascist,’ a ‘Triumph of the Ill Will,’ and a “monument to Hitler and his genocidal politics.” But von Vessen won’t have any of that. He claims that condemning Speer’s architecture is an act that confuses politics and aesthetics. “His ideas are judged by Hitler’s killings.” This view, von Vessen claims, doesn’t do justice to the architecture realized in 1930s Germany. “We look at Speer’s buildings and think, Ooh, how shocking, these buildings breathe Nazism, breath murder and death, when really, all over Europe, you see the same style of neo-classicism, and think nothing of it. The evil people associate with Germania is a false interpretation. Hitler also built the autobahn, and people use highways without thinking, Oh my God, this asphalt is absolutely terrifying.”

Yet so far, he hasn’t convinced the growing lobby of people who want Germania to be shut down. The state of Nevada has tried to stop work on Hitlertown, as Germania is widely known in the region. After an unfavorable court decision, von Vessen had to let construction rest for several weeks, but the architect won the appeal. And although his case still awaits hearing in front of the Supreme Court, in the meantime, “Germania is growing, definitely.”

The new Great Hall seats 234,000, is 250 meters wide, and 290 high. Stone was imported from all over the Americas, Italy, and Germany. “We ran into problems early on,” von Vessen admits. “More than 200,000 people breathing and perspirating under a dome – it seemed impossible to avoid fog rendering the interior invisible.” But the installation of an intricate ventilation system – each of the green plush seats is vented and can be cooled or heated – was a giant step in the right direction. “It shrank seating capacity, but something had to give.” In the end, the problem was solved by breaking with Speer’s original plans. “We made the dome retractable.” Von Vessen says, and adds with a smirk, “Who knows? We may be awarded an NFL expansion team one day.”

Yet, as of today, Germania’s population is a meager 5,823, half of them construction workers and security guards. The rest are small entrepreneurs who supply the town with food and other daily necessities. When Hitler made plans to build his new Reichshauptstadt, Berlin was a thriving metropolis. Life would have been altered and redirected by vast reconstruction projects – the Spree River was to be re-routed to accommodate the ambitious North South axis -- but four million people were ready to make Germania their own.

Who will walk and drive along the 38.5 kilometer-long Paradestrasse, the North South axis Hitler was dreaming of? Who will promenade under the 117 meter high, 170 meter wide, and 119 meter deep Triumphbogen? Paris’ Arc de Triomphe could be placed within von Vessen’s monument. As of yet, only workers and security guards in their black and blue uniforms are regulars on Germania’s streets.

“We take our clues from Vegas,” Elise von Vessen says in front of the Great Hall. She is ten years younger than her husband, tanned and in good shape. She’s wearing a light Armani suit and likes to show new visitors around. She’s also in charge of a national advertising campaign that tries to bring new businesses and hotel chains to Germania. “You build it, they come. It’s not as easy as in the movies, but we will achieve our goals. It’s a matter of imagination and daring.” In 2001, more than 50,000 Americans and tourists from overseas flocked to Germania. Elise von Vessen plans to quadruple the numbers each year. “The city is growing, and we will keep the public interested in our wonderful buildings,” she promises. “People are already coming. Now we have to convince them to stay.”

Her husband of twenty years can only shake his head at questions about his city’s future. One day in his office at the Reichskanzlei, comfortably dressed in a blue sweat suit – he is an avid jogger and ran with both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- he tries to answer them nevertheless. “However much I hated doing malls, the knowledge I gained comes in handy. You don’t build where the infrastructure is too weak to support you. The time of our forefathers who built settlements in the desert and hoped the railroad might lay tracks through their town are over.” Work on a highway connecting Germania with Interstate 80 has been underway since the previous year and is close to completion. An airport reminiscent of Berlin Tempelhof will open soon.

Also planned for the immediate future is the Soldatenhalle, a gargantuan building that, in Hitler’s plans, was supposed to house a Hall of Honor with sarcophagi holding the remains of high ranking military officers. Now it will house a casino with more than 600 first class rooms. The Reichskanzlei too will invite visitors to gamble. The extravagant marble moasaics and tapestries were once said to document the fascists’ drive toward power. Now the offices Hitler imagined will be turned into five-star restaurants and about 300 high-end luxury suites.

Without investors, even a rich man such as von Vessen would not have been able to erect “a single wall of the Kuppelhalle.” But support has been steady and is growing nation and worldwide. “Our sources won’t dry up any time soon.” As proof, developments, townhouses, and several signature high-rises are going up in Germania. “Our workers; they need modern housing, they need stores. Trailers will be outlawed soon around here. We have created 2,500 jobs, long-term, more will be created each year.” Certain sections of Germania, starting with the area close to the Triumphbogen, will see luxury mansions. “It will be as desirable as Beverly Hills, Paris and Venice taken together. We have a unique opportunity here, and we won’t let it slip away.”

Others seem to share von Vessen’s optimism. “You see,” Ernest B., a construction worker putting the finishing touches on a row of pseudo-Gründerzeit apartment houses, says, “we’re developing the West all over again.” Isn’t he concerned about the public’s often hostile reaction to Germania? Don’t the security guards scare off tourists? “No,” he says. “When the people come, the guards will be gone. This is just the kind of project that thrives in this country. Yeah, you might have some rough stretches, but the sky’s the limit for your imagination.”

Many of the newly built apartments are still empty. Does that worry him? “They’re real nice. Wait till the casino and the girls come. We have jobs here. I mean, there’ll be jobs for the next fifty, sixty years. And it doesn’t matter where you find a job, not even what job it is. It’s important you have one.” He points to the slogan on his dirty-white T-shirt, ‘Germania – I’ve seen the future.’ “We’re in the right place at the right time.”

A state official who speaks on the condition of anonymity explains, “In Idaho or Montana – this guy would have fallen on his face, but this is Nevada. Once the court gives him green light, there’ll be nothing to stop him. Casinos and prostitution – Hitlertown is well equipped for the challenge. This is a place to die for. It will be a hip place to live, party, and spend lots of money.”

But von Vessen wants more than a fun place. “This project is bigger than myself, my money, influence. It’s bigger than anyone can imagine right now. Yes, the city has to grow, take its time, but however long that will take, the Great Hall will be here when it’s needed. Hitler was the last visionary leader, a leader who was willing to form a country after his ideas.” Von Vessen keeps a photo of the Führer in his desk. “Totalitarian, yes, cruel, yes again, but visionary nonetheless. Take Napoleon or Caesar. They were despots, yet were – and still are – revered. We still go to Europe to look at the remains of what they created. With Germania, I give people the chance to experience what Hitler intended them to see. His vision was once cut short, but is now here to stay.”

Hitler's Favorite Sculptor Stirs Debate, Antipathy

2009-03-04T11:03:00.002+09:00

Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker, the creator of monumental statues glorifying the Third Reich, is stirring debate with the first retrospective of his work in a German public museum since World War II.

It's perhaps not surprising that his art -- or what survives -- has mainly been stashed away in museum vaults. Described by Hitler as ``the best sculptor of our time,'' Breker modeled Ubermensch heroes incorporating Aryan ideals and made busts of Nazi leaders including Hitler and Goebbels. He designed outsized sculptures for ``Germania,'' Hitler's megalomaniac vision of a vast new Berlin to be built by Albert Speer. Like Germania, most of the statues never made it into stone.

The Schleswig-Holstein-Haus in Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, is exhibiting about 70 works owned by Breker's widow. Rudolf Conrades, the curator, says his goal was to provoke a discussion about Breker, who died in 1991, and break the taboo surrounding his art.

Featured Website: Albert Speer's Berlin

2009-03-04T10:07:00.002+09:00

Welcome to Albert Speer's Berlin

In 1937, Speer was appointed “Generalbauinspektor for the Reich's Capital” by Adolf Hitler. In this capacity he had the responsibility to rebuild the city of Berlin into a modern metropolis of power for the German Reich – Germania. For this series Speer’s work has been recreatedin detail, from his first commission for the Nazi Party in 1932, to the “Hall of the Nation” that Hitler wished him to complete before 1950. Thus it is now possible to draw a direct comparison between the historic architecture of the old Berlin, and the buildings that were constructed and planned by the Nazi’s. Some of these buildings, that were originally erected under Albert Speer, still dominate the cityscape of modern Berlin, although their origin is largely unknown today.

Germania calling

2009-03-04T09:53:00.001+09:00

Theatre byDavid Jays

Holocaust denial will only grow more plausible with the ageing of survivors and the dismal erasure of time. Facts will be disputed, and even a film as well-meaning as Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful implicitly massages the horrors of genocide into poignancy. Esther Vilar's play Speer examines a figure who, in trying to assess his own tainted past, subjected it to inevitable, equivocating metamorphosis. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, armaments minister and eventually second-in-command, was the only leading Nazi to accept guilt at the Nuremberg trials. He spent the rest of his life fencing in the half-light of denial, the possibility of repentance and explication.

Klaus Maria Brandauer, who also directs, is excellently cast as Speer. In his most celebrated film roles (Mephisto, Colonel Redl ), the actor dances cheek-to-cheek with opportunism, reputation and connivance. Vilar imagines Speer invited to East Berlin for a lecture in 1980, the year before his death. Bauer (Sven Eric Bechtolf), a state official, returns him to the workroom where he designed the reconstruction of Berlin as the towering city of Germania. Amid a dereliction of planks and unshaded light bulbs, Speer's host presents a model of the gargantuan domed assembly hall that would have dominated his new city. Glaring white, in- humanly pristine and so large that people seem superfluous, it exemplifies the architect's icy disregard. Germania was to be built on a scale ludicrous in a single state, but tailored to global domination. "For the capital of the world," Speer explains, "one needs the world."

Speer looks beyond architecture. While dogs of retribution yap at the doors, the men play cat-and-mouse. What lies behind Bauer's needling questions and professional deference? And what is the tightly poised Speer, still standing to attention, guarding now? His own rebuilt reputation, perhaps? The plot provides a denouement of cheap reversals, and Speer makes better discussion than drama. Though details chime with Gitta Sereny's study of Speer's battle with truth (and her own battle with his charm), Vilar takes a harsher line. Her Speer will acknowledge any number of faults so long as he can shuck the big one, complicity in genocide, but neither his ignorance nor subsequent public repentance seem to convince her as they did Sereny.

Brandauer makes an elegant Speer, his narrow eyes embedded in plush flesh. Expression seeps guardedly over his face, he sits with hands folded perfectly, and even the actor's subdued inflections contribute to the character's unreadability. This Speer is all containment, though occas-ionally something more sneaks out, as in a gradual smile when sipping champagne, the slyly sensuous finger tracing his lips. He comes to life only when recreating his projected metropolis with planks and sacks, hands busy, cheeks bulging with pleasure.

Challenged about the Jews, the amiable mask crumbles, then closes down. When he bellows, hoarsely, "I was not an anti-Semite!", Brandauer's hand marks the beat of his denial, as if conducting his own exculpation. During the play, Speer variously describes himself as Hitler's manager, the functional equivalent of a taxi driver, while as architect, he insists, "I was his toymaker". "This is where you both came to play," Bauer proposes. It is significant that Vilar imagines Speer lecturing on architecture, for she shows his grotesque revisioning of Berlin replaced with the painstaking reconstruction of his own reputation.

She also suggests parallels between the totalitarian Germanies, Nazi and communist, until it becomes almost credible that Honecker's bankrupt GDR might implore the inspired pragmatist to pull them from the mire, and Brandauer grows sleek in expectation. But eliding these grandiose, contemptuous ideologies proves too much for the play's shaky structure, and Speer is most incisive when returning to the protagonist's bleached evasions.

Germania: Visions of Grandeur

2009-03-03T15:48:00.002+09:00

Speer's "Great Hall" would have dwarfed the Brandenburg Gate

Had Hitler won the war, his plan was to transform Berlin into Germania -- the city he planned with architect Albert Speer. A film, a tour and the twists of time have conspired to create new interest in his evil vision.

The rest is all ideas -- miniature models, sketches, blueprints. Germania, with its imposing concrete monstrosities, its monuments to a victory that never came, was swallowed in the rubble and ash that covered Berlin in 1945.

There are only a few examples of Nazi architecture left standing today to give visitors a sense of what Hitler's ideology of hate and domination looked like when rendered in concrete and stone.

Berlin's Finance Ministry

One of them is the building currently housing the Ministry of Finance (photo). It's no accident then, that this is the starting point for a new city walk entitled "Capital of the Reich, Germania -- Destructive Visions" offered by tour operator Stattreisen Berlin.

Guide Hartmut Kappel immediately addresses one of the questions foremost in the minds of the 20 people who gathered on a Sunday afternoon in search of Germania: How do you conduct a tour where you can't really show people anything?

The walk led the group through central Berlin, along the axis where Hitler planned to build his mammoth new "Chancellery of the Reich," as well as a huge victory arch designed to dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and Germania's crowning glory, the Große Halle, or "Great Hall." The structure was intended to accommodate a million people, and was capped with an impractically large dome that would have been over 200 meters (700 feet) high and 250 meters (800 feet) in diameter.

As if to underscore the insanity of the plans, Kappel took the tour participants past an unassuming parking lot in front of a late-GDR era apartment complex. The area beneath the parking lot, he explained, was the site Hitler's bunker -- the place where his vainglorious imaginings of the Thousand Year Reich and the new "World Capital Germania" took their final, undignified end.

Hartmut Kappel leads the Germania tour past the site of Hitler's bunker

"I don't sensationalize this aspect of the tour," said Kappel. "It's a conscious decision, because the personal tragedies that unfolded don't have to do with the topic, which is: Why did the Third Reich exist, and how was it possible?"

Film caused new interest

Still, Kappel acknowledged that there is a persistent fascination about all things connected with the Third Reich, and of late, a resurgent interest in the relationship between Hitler and Germania's architect, Albert Speer.

The interest can partly be explained by the showing on German public broadcaster ARD of a new three-part movie, "Speer and He," examining that relationship. Kappel said that Stattreisen planned its Germania tour to coincide with the media coverage of the film.

Tobias Moretti as Adolf Hitler (l) und Sebastian Koch as Albert Speer in "Speer und Er"

"Speer and He" takes a critical look at Speer's role in the darkest chapter of German history. How much did he know about Hitler's plans to rid Europe of Jews, and to what extent did he manipulate his legacy after the war?

Though he expressed remorse during the Nuremberg trials, Speer always maintained that he knew nothing about the Nazis' crimes against the Jews. He was one of a handful of leading Nazis (including Rudolf Hess) to escape execution following the trials, serving a 20-year prison sentence instead.

The director of "Speer and He," Heinrich Breloer, makes it clear that Speer was more deeply implicated than he claimed. The film concentrates on Speer's plans to evict thousands of Jews from their Berlin homes to clear building space needed to realize Germania.

"He was more than just a cog in the works," said Breloer. "He was not only entangled in the works, he was the terror itself."

Academy of Art comes back home

Part of Speer's defense was that he cooperated with the Nazis in order to fulfil his dream of becoming a great architect. He pursued this dream in the building that, until 1937, housed Berlin's Academy of Art. Speer and his staff took over the space on Pariser Platz that was once the heart of Germany's intellectual, artistic community, and it was there that he developed and exhibited the models for Germania.

The view through Hitler's planned victory arch would have centered on the "Great Hall."

On this same location this past weekend, German dignitaries gathered to set right a mistake of the past, officially opening the new Academy of Art as a place where artists can be as political as they like without fearing the kind of censure the Nazis routinely imposed on "dissidents."

Deanne Corbett, DW-WORLD.DE

The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 - Video Widget

2009-03-02T18:26:00.003+09:00

1936 Olympics

2009-03-02T18:18:00.003+09:00

The success of the Olympic games of 1936 was one of the Nazis’ greatest propaganda victories. The staging of the games, awarded to Germany in 1931, was threatened by Hitler’s seizure of power. The Nazis, it was well known, disliked internationalism and the participation of Jews and blacks in “healthy” sporting competition. But Hitler placed the anticipated diplomatic benefits and propaganda display above ideology. The German people would see how the world accepted and admired Nazi government. In June 1933 he informed the International Olympic Committee that Germany would adhere to its rules, and Jews would be allowed to compete. The threat of boycott increased after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, especially in the United States, but was headed off by the International Olympic Committee and Avery Brundage, chairman of the U.S. National Olympic Committee.

In the event, the weeks of the Olympics provided a brief respite for Germany’s Jews. Signs forbidding access to Jews were removed from Olympic areas and sites likely to be visited by tourists. But the games were used as a pretext for the rounding up of hundreds of Gypsies in Berlin and their transfer to a de facto concentration camp at Marzahn. The American liberal periodical The Nation (1 August 1936) reported that one “sees no Jewish heads being chopped off, or even roundly cudgeled. . . . The people smile, are polite and sing with gusto in beer gardens. Board and lodging are good, cheap, and abundant, and no-one is swindled by grasping hotel and shop proprietors.Everything is terrifyingly clean and the visitor likes it all.” But behind the scenes the Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann was excluded from the German team on a technical pretext, along with the part-Jewish fencing champion Helene Mayer. Only one Jew, the ice hockey player Rudi Ball, was allowed to compete for Germany.

The Winter Games were held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen from 6 to 16 February, with 756 competitors from twenty-eight countries; the Summer Games in Berlin from 1 to 16 August with 4,069 competitors from forty-nine countries. This represented the largest number of participants up to then, and the Winter Games broke all attendance records. The huge Olympic Stadium was completed in the nick of time, and Olympic rituals now considered “traditional,” such as the lighting of the flame and the carrying of the torch from Greece to the host city, were invented in keeping with the Nazis’ sense of pageantry.

German athletes were more successful than expected, winning more medals than either the United States or Italy. Hitler appeared almost daily as the patron of the games, rejoicing at German victories but ostentatiously ignoring black American winners, most famously Jesse Owens. Otherwise quite rational observers thought that whenever Hitler appeared, Germany won: the London Sunday Times reported on 9 August 1936 that “it is uncanny how often Adolf Hitler’s entrance coincides with a German win” (Welch 1983a, p. 118). For all the superficiality of the Nazis’ tolerant pose, the propaganda risk paid off, and Leni Riefenstahl’s visually adventurous film of the Olympiad provided a notable expression of Nazi ideals.

Suggestions for further reading:

Graham, Cooper C. 1986. Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Hart-Davis, Duff. 1986. Hitler’s Games: The 1936 Olympics. London: Century.

Mandell, Richard D. 1987. The Nazi Olympics. Urbana: University of Chicago Press.

Welch, David. 1983a. Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

NAZI Architecture

2009-03-02T18:15:00.001+09:00

Hitler always claimed that as a youth his overwhelming desire was to be an architect. However, his failure to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts to study painting may have had much to do with this. He later wrote that he first went to Munich with the aim of one day becoming a famous architect, but his conflicting accounts of the steps he took to get training and work seem to indicate that, in reality, he drifted as indolently and aimlessly as he had in Vienna. Only the coming of World War I was to reveal Hitler’s true vocation. Yet architecture was to remain an obsession with Hitler, and one that as Führer of the Third Reich he could indulge on a megalomaniac scale, in theory if less in practice. He would cut short important meetings to pore over architectural models and plans with Albert Speer and up to the end in his bunker would chatter enthusiastically about his plans for Berlin and Linz.

Hitler’s tastes in building were predictably conservative, confined mostly to the neobaroque and neoclassical. He admired the neoclassical facades and wide boulevards of Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse and the similarly monumental constructions of the Munich of the Wittelsbach kings and, according to Speer, also rhapsodized about Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House. The avant-garde and all forms of modernism, as in every other branch of the arts, completely passed him by. Under the aegis of the young and ambitious Speer and in full accord with Hitler’s ideas, a crude and grandiose neoclassicism became the dominant style for the public buildings of the Third Reich. Above all it was scale that appealed to Hitler: the constructions of the Reich were to be monumental, conveying an impression of solidity, power, and permanence. The viewer or visitor was to be overwhelmed rather than merely impressed. Hitler’s and Speer’s plans for “Germania,” the new Berlin, were meant to put the Paris of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the shade.

Supporters of modernism in architecture had initially hoped that Hitler’s Reich, like Mussolini’s Italy, would seek to present a dynamic and progressive image and encourage innovation, at least up to a point. But they were rapidly disillusioned. Hitler personally ordered the removal of modernist elements from the stadium designed by Speer for the 1936 Olympics. Functionalist architecture in Hitler’s Germany was largely reserved for industrial buildings, such as power stations or the Heinkel aircraft factory at Oranienburg, whereas for popular housing, schools, Hitler Youth hostels, and other “vernacular” projects the regime adopted a “Blood and Soil” regionalism. But the “regional” elements were largely decorative, grafted on to a standardized design. The docile inhabitants of the fantasy world of Hitler, the failed architect, were meant to dwell happily in a world of kitsch, leaving their quaint and caricatured versions of Bavarian or Tyrolean farmhouses for work in their techno-functionalist factories and gaping in awe at the herculean constructions of the state, the party, and the Führer’s ego.

Suggestions for further reading:

Art and Power. 1995. Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–45. London: Hayward Gallery.

Scobie, Alex. 1990. Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Speer, Albert. 1970. Inside the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan.

Hitler and Berlin

2009-03-02T18:05:00.001+09:00

Remnant of Nazi design - a Speer street-lamp

Before coming to power Hitler had mixed feelings about Germany’s capital. On leave there in 1916 he had been shocked by the gloomy “unpatriotic” atmosphere, and as an adopted Münchener he shared some of the traditional Bavarian resentment toward Berlin. After 1918 the nationalist Right attacked “Red Berlin” as the cradle of the November Revolution and the Spartacus uprising, the source of the supposed moral and cultural “decadence” of the Weimar Republic, and the home of one-third of Germany’s Jews. However, postwar claims that Hitler always disliked Berlin are unconvincing. “I have always been fond of Berlin,” he claimed. “If I’m vexed by the fact that some of the things in it are not beautiful, it’s precisely because I’m so attached to the city” (Richie 1998, p. 962).

It was Josef Goebbels who was responsible for creating Hitler’s new affection for the “truly Germanic” city of Frederick the Great and Bismarck. As Gauleiter of Berlin Goebbels created and built up the Nazi organization, which had less than 200 members when he took over, into a dominant force in the city, confronting the Communists and Socialists on the streets and in the meeting halls, penetrating the huge working-class districts as well as middle-class areas. He brought Hitler to speak in Berlin for the first time on 16 November 1928, before 16,000 people in the Sportspalast, the first of many such rallies in years to come. Nevertheless, the Nazi vote in free elections was always lower in Berlin than in Germany as a whole. At the height of their electoral success in 1933, when the Nazis gained 43.9 percent of the national vote, the figure for Berlin was 34.6 percent.

In the early years of the Third Reich Berlin continued its decadent ways as “an island of modernity in a world of Nazi provincialism” (Richie 1998, p. 442). Its opulent hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs provided a suitable setting for the hypocritical corruption of the Nazi elite, in stark contrast to the peasant fantasies they were peddling to the people. Here the elite and rich could dance to “decadent Negro” jazz music, theoretically banned in the Reich, and consume the finest food and wines. But the vibrant avant-garde culture of the Weimar period was destroyed and hundreds of artists imprisoned or driven into exile, while the persecution of the Jews destroyed a community that had lived, prospered, and made an enormous contribution to the life of Berlin for centuries. Hitler had his own plans for the capital of the Reich.

Hitler reportedly told Albert Speer in 1936: “Berlin is a big city, but not a real metropolis. Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Or even Vienna. Those are cities with grand style. Berlin is nothing but an unregulated accumulation of buildings. We must surpass Paris and Vienna” (Speer 1971, p. 122). Hence his megalomaniac plans for rebuilding the city. Berlin would become “Germania,” the leading city of Europe, filled with monstrous neoclassical buildings and monuments. “His motivating idea,” Alexandra Richie writes, “was that everything had to be longer, bigger, wider, taller and more massive than the buildings in any other capital” (Richie 1998, p. 471). The centerpiece, a 3-mile north-south avenue, would stretch from the new central railway station, under a gigantic Triumphal Arch bearing the names of all the Germans who died in World War I, and culminate in the domed Volkshalle, the largest building in the world, seven times greater than the dome of St Peter’s in Rome.

Comparatively little was actually built, and few of Hitler’s buildings survive today. Berliners, Germans, and the world were meant to be overawed and intimidated by Hitler’s new Reich Chancellery, 150 times the size of Bismarck’s residence, Hermann Goering’s gargantuan Air Ministry, and Goebbels’s suitably overpowering Propaganda Ministry. Hitler delighted in scrutinizing the models built by Speer, even down to the last days in the bunker. His real legacy to Berlin, however, was the almost complete destruction of the city by Allied bombing and the final horrendous battle against the Red Army. The broad and grand “East-West Axis,” along which the Wehrmacht had marched proudly on Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939, became a guiding path for bombers bent on the destruction of Berlin. The capital of the new Reich ended as a divided city, the beleaguered center of Cold War conflict. The Wall separating East and West Berlin, the symbol of Hitler’s legacy of Cold War division, was finally demolished by crowds from both sides on 12 November 1989.

Suggestions for further reading:

Richie, Alexandra. 1998. Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. London: HarperCollins.

Schäche, Wolfgang. 1995. “From Berlin to ‘Germania,’” in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–45. London: Hayward Gallery, pp. 326–329.

FATHERLAND (NOVEL) - ROBERT HARRIS

2009-03-01T08:30:00.002+09:00

Written by Phillip Winn
Published June 02, 2003

Our hero, Xavier March, is an SS agent in Nazi Germany, but we still root for him. That's storytelling. It helps that the book is set in a world in which Germany won their part of Word War II, and nobody knows exactly what happened to all the Jews.

In Fatherland, author Robert Harris creates a world where America beat the Japanese, but Germany won in Europe. It is now 1964, twenty years after Nazi Germany's victory, and the country is preparing for the Führer's seventy-fifth birthday and a peacemaking summit that will likely bring détente with President Kennedy. March is a police detective in Berlin, and all police have been made part of the Kriminalpolizei, also known as the SS. In a black uniform that strikes fear into most people who see him, he begins to investigate what seems like a routine murder. The victim turns out to be a senior Nazi commander and suddenly the Gestapo orders March off the case, an order he ignores. Solving this case might mean the end of Third Reich, but it might also mean the end of Sturmbannführer March.

Though the premise may make this sound like science fiction, the novel is a relatively straightforward police procedural that escalates into an international thriller. Tightly plotted and based more than a little bit on historical identities and facts, this book is hard to put down.

As gripping as the plot is, the characters are even more engaging. Zavi March is a hero in bad circumstances and he teams up with Charlotte Maguire, an American reporter stuck in Berlin to cover the summit. She ends up personally involved in the story, but it promises to be the biggest story out of Germany since the war ended.

He pulled out his wallet, took out the photograph. It looked incongruous amid the plushness of the restaurant — a relic from someone's attic, rubbish from a flea market stall.

He gave it to her. She studied it. A strand of hair fell over her face and she brushed it away. "Who are they?"

"When I moved into my apartement after Klara and I split up, it hadn't been decorated for years. I found that tucked behind the wallpaper in the bedroom. I tell you, I took that place to pieces, but that was all there was. Their surname was Weiss. But who are they? Where are they now? What happened to them?"

He took the photograph, folded it into quarters, put it back into his wallet.

"What do you do," he said, "if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everybody tells you not to worry, you can't do anything about it, it was a long time ago?"

She was looking at him in a different way. "I suppose you go crazy."

"Or worse. Sane."

The Jewish Question is at the root of the problems in Germany, though it takes some time and effort to piece that much together. Many names are familiar, or could be, and some are new. The story and the characters make this a book worth reading.

Amazingly, I find that this book has been filmed with Rutger Hauer as Sturmbannführer Xavier March. It's only available on VHS, but for $7.95 I'll make an exception and check it out.

Fatherland - Robert Harris
Genre: Thriller
Readability: Short sentences and an easy style make this one difficult to put down. Though the book assumes you can put yourself into the mindset of a victorious Germany, I found the transition easy, and I suspect you will, too.
Philosophy: Like most books set in Nazi Germany, this one is very direct in converying moral judgement, and rightly so. Still, by showing us at least one sympathetic character within the SS, it might challenge some people.
Suitability: Since this book deal with the "Final Solution" to "The Jewish Question," that probably limits the audience somewhat. In addition, there is rough language and sexual immorality, as well as tense family situations involving the protagonists ex-wife and son.
Overall: 4.5/5

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
An eerie, detailed alternate history serves as the backdrop for this otherwise conventional crime thriller. The setting is Berlin, 1964, some 20 years after the Third Reich's victory in WW II. Germany and the U.S., the world's two superpowers, find themselves in a cold war resulting from a nuclear stalemate; but U.S. President Joseph P. Kennedy is soon to visit Berlin for an historic summit meeting with Hitler, clearing the way for detente. Meanwhile, cynical police detective Xavier March investigates the drowning of Josef Buhler, former state secretary in the General Government. When the Gestapo takes over the case--ruling it suicide--March continues his investigation at the risk of his life, uncovering a deadly conspiracy at the highest levels of the Reich. With the help of American reporter Charlotte Maguire, he finds hard evidence of the wartime extermination of Europe's Jews, a secret that Buhler and his colleagues have been murdered to protect. Of course March and Maguire fall in love along the way. Harris ( Selling Hitler ) generates little suspense in this tale beyond his piecemeal rendering of the novel's unusual historical setting. The characters are flat and the plot largely predictable. And readers may well question the taste of using the Holocaust as the point of departure for a rather insubstantial, derivative thriller. 75,000 first printing; BOMC selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
The year is 1964. The setting is Berlin. JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, is president. Edward VIII is king, Wallis his queen. Adolf Hitler is about to celebrate his 75th birthday. In this thriller with a twist, the stalemate which ended World War II has evolved into a cold war, not between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between the Third Reich and America. Police investigator Xavier March handles a case involving the death of a prominent Nazi, an apparent suicide. The trail leads to other suicides, accidental deaths, a numbered vault in Zurich, and a beautiful American reporter. March discovers the pattern behind the deaths and locates incriminating papers exposing the Holocaust, which, because Germany didn't lose the war, has been kept secret for 20 years. Harris, author of the nonfiction title Selling Hitler ( LJ 5/15/86), is clearly well versed in the operations and machinations of the Nazi regime. He uses this knowledge to create a realistic and frightening world in which we all could be living. Recommended. BOMC selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/92.
- C. Christopher Pavek, National Economic Research Assocs. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

SCHWERBELASTUNGSKÖRPER

2009-02-26T22:38:00.002+09:00

The Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy weight compound) in Berlin near Dudenstraße (General-Pape-Straße/Loewenhardtdamm)

The Schwerbelastungskörper (German: "heavy loading body") is a large cylinder made of concrete in Berlin, Germany. It was built in 1941 to study the feasibility of constructing large buildings on the sandy ground in the area, in preparation for the planned construction nearby of a massive Triumphal Arch. It is 18 m high and has a mass of 12,650 metric tons. Because of nearby apartment buildings, it was not possible to demolish it with explosives at the end of World War II, so it remained; since 1995 it has been protected as a historic monument.

The structure is located at the intersection of Dudenstraße, General-Pape-Straße, and Loewenhardtdamm in the northwestern part of the borough of Tempelhof.

If the structure was to sink 2.5 inches or less, the soil would be sound enough to build Hitler's planned massive structures of Germania. It sank 7 inches in three years, but Hitler disregarded the findings.

LINK

GERMANIA BOOKS

2009-02-26T13:35:00.001+09:00

Von Berlin nach Germania: Uber die Zerstorungen der "Reichshauptstadt" durch Albert Speers Neugestaltungsplanungen (German Edition) (Hardcover)

by Hans Joachim Reichhardt (Author)

Gigantische Visionen: Architektur und Hochtechnologie im Nationalsozialismus (Gebundene Ausgabe)

von Michael Ellenbogen (Autor)

Böse Orte. Stätten nationalsozialistischer Selbstdarstellung - heute [Restexemplar] (Gebundene Ausgabe)

von Stephan Porombka (Autor), Hilmar Schmundt (Autor)

Architektur in Berlin 1933-1945. Ein Stadtführer (Gebundene Ausgabe)

von Matthias Donath (Autor)

Mythos Germania (Broschiert)

von Berliner Unterwelten e.V. (Herausgeber)

Berlin 1933-1945. PastFinder - Stadtführer zu den Spuren der Vergangenheit (Taschenbuch)

von Maik Kopleck (Autor)

Bunker, Banken, Reichskanzlei - Architekturführer Berlin 1933-1945 (Taschenbuch)

von Matthias Donath (Autor)

Neue Reichskanzlei und Führerbunker. Legenden und Wirklichkeit (Gebundene Ausgabe)

von Dietmar Arnold (Autor)

Hitlers Neue Reichskanzlei: Haus des großdeutschen Reiches 1938-1945 (Gebundene Ausgabe)

Nazi's Biggest Building Reborn as Concert Venue

2009-02-25T19:00:00.002+09:00

Part of the huge Congress Hall in Nuremberg is reopening as a concert venue. - 03/06/2008

Part of the largest building the Nazis ever began is to reopen as a concert hall. Nuremberg is set to inaugurate the rebirth of the Congress Hall with a klezmer concert on Friday.

It was the biggest construction project ever begun by the Nazis, but it was never completed. Now, six decades after the end of World War II, part of Nuremberg's Congress Hall is reopening -- as a concert venue.

The new 515-seat venue will be inaugurated Friday with a concert by clarinetist Giora Feidman, who specializes in Jewish klezmer music. The concert hall, which cost €2.5 million ($3.8 million) to renovate and develop, will be used by the city's symphony orchestra in the future.

The huge oval-shaped building, designed in the typical Nazi neo-Classicist style, was modeled on Rome's Colosseum and designed to seat 50,000 people. The foundation stone was laid in 1935 but the building was never finished. After the end of the war, the city of Nuremberg kept the ruins as a reminder of the dangers of fascism.

The structure is part of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds where Hitler held massive military parades during the 1930s. The parades were memorialized in Leni Riefenstahl's controversial film "Triumph of the Will." Today, the grounds are home to a documentation center that chronicles Nazi crimes.

Pole transforms Nazis' giant Berlin bunker into a gallery of modern art

2009-02-25T18:49:00.006+09:00

The five-storey bunker in the centre of Berlin was built by Nazi architect Albert Speer.

Hitler's architect built it to enable thousands to survive for Nazi Germany's "final victory" – but now the last massive and virtually indestructible air-raid shelter still standing in the centre of Berlin has been reborn as a private art gallery that will be open to the public.

The grey fortress-like building on Berlin's Reinhardtstrasse is still pockmarked with bullet holes from the Second World War. It was designed and built by the Nazi architect Albert Speer in 1942 and used to shelter more than 2,000 people each night from Allied bombing raids.

After being left vacant for years, the five-storey, 120-room complex was this week reopened as a private gallery containing 80 contemporary works by 57 artists, including Damien Hirst, Wolfgang Tilmans, Anselm Reyle, Elizabeth Payton and Olafur Eliasson.

The project is the brainchild of Christian Boros, a wealthy Polish-born advert-ising agent who claims to collect art that he does not understand. He bought the derelict bunker in 2002 declaring it was "love at first sight" and built a James Bond-style penthouse for himself and his wife Karen on its roof. During the next five years he transformed the interior.

Mr Boros, 44, said: "Others might have turned the place into a wine cellar. But that would have been wrong in my view. Our approach has been to fill a Third Reich monument with the highest form of intellectual freedom – art. For me, it is a very meaningful process."

This is one gallery where art connoisseurs need not be distracted by the annoying trill of a mobile phone – the bunker's walls see to that. At almost three metres thick, the concrete and steel sides ensure that even the hardiest mobile loses its signal inside.

Many of the exhibits in the collection are housed in windowless rooms. The Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's 1995 Berlin Colour Sphere is a suspended giant ball of mirrors that casts rainbow coloured geometric patterns across an entire chamber.

Another work by Santiago Sierras is comprised of eight, giant tar-coated steel girders that punch horizontally through one of the interior walls.

To create enough space for the collection three architects were employed to remove 40 of the bunker's original 120 rooms. The artists were invited to design their own individual bunker showrooms for each work and every one has a different shape, with some nearly 40 ft high.

From the beginning of June the collection will be open to the public, but those interested in viewing it will have to make an appointment via the Boros collection website. "It is a private collection, not a museum," Mr Boros said.

By Tony Paterson - Saturday, 26 April 2008

Website Feature - Reich Chancellery

2009-02-25T18:28:00.002+09:00

In 1945-46, the Russians obtained the marble for their Berlin war memorial from the ruins of Hitler's New Reich Chancellery, on the corner of Wilhelmstraße and Voßstraße, which Albert Speer designed and finished in 1939.

Hitler had airily told Speer that the Old Reich Chancellery was “fit for a soap company.” Located at Wilhelmstraße 77, the old chancellery had been built 1736-1739 as a palace for Count von Schulenburg. Otto von Bismarck remodeled the building as his chancellery.

"DIE NEUE REICHSKANZLEI"

2009-02-25T18:02:00.005+09:00

The New Reich's Chancellery was the only building Albert Speer designed for Germania that was ever completed. In this documentary it is demonstrated how the building history of the Reich's Chancellery influenced and determined its final design. All the facades of the building in its various stages have been recreated, from the first extention commisioned by Hitler in 1934 to the final structure of the New Reich's Chancellery which spanned over 400m, and which served as the stage from which Hitler directed his aggressive policies.

www.albert-speers-berlin.de

YOUTUBE FILM

LINK

Book Recommendation: The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy

2009-02-25T16:49:00.005+09:00

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Mentioned in a publication of "The Architectural Review, ."
June 2001

An important contribution shedding light upon the manifold interrelations between politics, architecture and the economy of the camp system. - Planning Perspectives, 17 February 2002

An invaluable understanding of the politics of architecture, one that complements and enhances those investigations to Nazi architectures expression, ideological function with which we are already familiar. - Oxford Art Journal

It does cast a significant new light on attempts to strip Nazi architecture of its political and moral associations. - Building Design, April 20, 2000

Jaskots attention to actions rather than motives, and to quarries rather than aesthetics, gives precision and weight to his argument about the importance placed upon monumental architecture in Nazi Germany, - Harvard Design Magazine

Paul Jaskots book is a welcome injection of life into what had become a stale debate. - Building Design, April 20, 2000

The Architecture of Oppression could become a prime reference for the issues of art, architecture, and urban design, and the role of politics in general and the Nazis in particular. - Town Planning Review

This book is the result of painstaking research ... Jaskot has put another nail in the coffin of Leon Kriers extraordinary attempt to exonerate the Nazi monuments by removing them from their political context. - The Architectural Review

Mentioned in a publication of The Architectural Review,.
June 2001

Product Description
Exploring the reasons why the SS chose to focus so many of its forced-labor concerns around the production of building materials, The Architecture of Oppression argues that the architectural history of Nazi Germany is inextricably linked to its most punitive institutions. Through an analysis of such major Nazi building projects as the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and the rebuilding of Berlin, Paul Jaskot ties together the development of the German building economy, state architectural goals and the rise of the SS as a political and economic force.

**The Architecture of Oppression has all the hallmarks of Jaskot's articles: brilliant writing, impeccable scholarship and surprising wit. It is likely to become the standard work in the field, and would also make an excellent primer on fascist architecture for the general reader.**

Paul Jaskot teaches courses in modern art and architecture (Europe and North America), the history of architecture, art historical methodology, and specific courses on the relationship between politics and art. His research focuses on modern German art and architecture. His book, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy was published by Routledge (2000). He is the founder of the Radical Art/Art History Caucus, an official affiliated society of the College Art Association.

Germania - Youtube

2009-02-23T12:33:00.002+09:00

3D Virtual recreation of the Germania Project, designed by Albert Speer. A reconstruction of Berlin if the Third Reich had won the war.

3RD GUARDS TANK ARMY TO BERLIN!

2009-02-20T21:46:00.000+09:00

Marshal Zhukov recorded that, on that afternoon of 20 April, ‘the long-range artillery of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army opened fire on Berlin’. But in fact few people in the city were aware of the fact. Zhukov seemed to have no idea that it was Hitler’s birthday. He was desperate for something to show that he had attacked Berlin before Konev. The guns were firing at extreme range and only the north-eastern suburbs were affected.

When Zhukov heard for certain of Konev’s tank army advancing on Berlin from the south, he sent on that evening an urgent order to Katukov and Bogdanov, the commanders of the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies. He gave them ‘a historic task: to break into Berlin first and to raise the banner of victory’. They were to send the best brigade from each corps to break through to an outskirt of Berlin by 4 a.m. the next day, and to report at once so that Stalin could be informed immediately and it could be announced in the press. In fact, the first of his tank brigades did not reach the outskirts until the evening of 21 April.

South-east of Berlin, meanwhile, Marshal Konev was whipping on his two tank armies across the Spreewald. His main interest was with the 3rd Guards Tank Army targeted at the southern flank of Berlin. Rybalko’s leading tank corps attempted at midday to rush the town of Baruth, just twenty kilometres south of Zossen, but failed at the first attempt. ‘Comrade Rybalko,’ Konev signalled, ‘you are again moving like a hose. One brigade is fighting while the whole army is stuck. I order you to cross the line Baruth-Luckenwalde via a swamp using several routes in an extended battle order. Inform me on fulfilment.’ The town was taken within two hours.

Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army, further to the south and west, was heading in a roughly parallel line for Juterbog and then Potsdam. Stalin was still concerned that the Americans might suddenly advance again. The Stavka that day warned Zhukov, Konev and Marshal Rokossovsky of the possibility of encountering the Western Allies and passed on recognition signals. But what neither Konev nor the Stavka seems to have appreciated fully was that his 1st Ukrainian Front advancing from the south-east would run into Busse’s Ninth Army trying to withdraw round the southern side of Berlin. Konev, like Zhukov, had become obsessed with Berlin. That night he dispatched signals to his two tank army commanders: ‘Personal to Comrades Rybalko and Lelyushenko. Order you categorically to break into Berlin tonight. Report execution. Konev.’

Reconnaissance detachments of the 3rd Guards Tank Army had reached Kdnigswusterhausen the evening before. It represented an advance from the Neisse of 174 kilometres in less than six days. They were separated from Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on the north bank of the Muggelsee by a network of lakes and waterways in between. The two Soviet armies and this barrier effectively meant that Busse’s remaining portion of the Ninth Army was now encircled.

Marshal Konev, warned by air reconnaissance of the mass of enemy troops in the Spreewald on his right, speeded up the 28th Army’s move forward in trucks. These divisions were intended to seal the gap between Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army, finishing off the German forces round Cottbus, and the 3rd Guards Tank Army, pushing on to Berlin. Konev decided to reinforce Rybalko’s tank army with an artillery breakthrough corps -’a powerful hammer’ - and an anti-aircraft division.

By the evening of 22 April all three of Rybalko’s corps had reached the Teltow Canal, the southern rim of Berlin’s perimeter defence line. The German defenders were ‘completely surprised to find themselves face to face with Russian tanks’. A 3rd Guards Tank Army report, in an unusually poetic phrase, described their arrival as unexpected ‘as snow in the middle of summer’.

German communications were so bad that even Army Group Vistula headquarters knew nothing of this advance. And ‘no steps were taken to remove the supplies’ from a large Wehrmacht ration store on the south side of the canal. ‘On the contrary, even when the first Russian tank was only a few hundred metres away, the administrator refused to let rations be distributed to the Volkssturm troops on the north bank of the canal because a regulation issue certificate had not been filled out.’ He set fire to the provisions instead.

The 9th Mechanized Corps had charged through Lichtenrade, the 6th Guards Tank Corps had captured Teltow and, just to its left, the 7th Guards Tank Corps had taken Stahnsdorf. Further to the west, part of Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army was ten kilometres short of Potsdam. Further out, two more of his corps were snaking round the western end of Berlin and were less than forty kilometres away from Zhukov’s 47th Army coming from the north.

French prisoners in Stalag 111, close to the Teltow Canal, were enjoying a moment of spring warmth when there was a rush to the barbed-wire perimeter. ‘At about five in the afternoon,’ one of them recorded, ‘the first Russian soldier appeared. He was walking jauntily, quite erect, sub-machine gun at his waist, ready to fire. He was walking along the ditch beside the road. He did not even bother to look at our camp.’ A little later, however, Soviet officers entered the camp. The Russian prisoners there were ordered to fall in. They were handed a rifle or sub-machine gun and expected to go straight into action.

Stalin was still keeping the pressure on his two marshals by stimulating their rivalry. From dawn on 23 April, the boundary between Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front was extended from Lubben, but now it turned northwards to the centre of Berlin. Konev’s right-hand boundary ran all the way up to the Anhalter Bahnhof. Rybalko’s tank corps at Mariendorf, on the Teltow Canal, was exactly five kilometres south of it. Zhukov had no idea that Rybalko’s army had reached Berlin until late on 23 April, when a liaison officer from Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army, approaching from the east, made contact. Zhukov was appalled.

Since reaching the Teltow Canal on the evening of 22 April, Rybalko’s three corps had been given a day to prepare for an all-out assault across it. The concrete banks of the canal and the defended warehouses on the northern side appeared a formidable barrier. And although the Volkssturm detachments opposite were hardly worthy opponents for the 3rd Guards Tank Army, they had been ‘corset-stiffened’ with the 18th and 10th Panzergrenadier Divisions. The breakthrough artillery formations had been ordered forward two days before, but there was such a jam of vehicles on the Zossen road, including horse-drawn supply carts, that progress was slow. If the Luftwaffe had still had any serviceable aircraft, the route would have presented a perfect target. Luchinsky’s 48th Guards Rifle Division arrived in time to prepare to seize bridgeheads across the canal, and the artillery was hurried into place. This was no easy matter. Nearly 3,000 guns and heavy mortars needed to be positioned on the evening of 23 April. This was a concentration of 650 pieces per kilometre of front, including 152mm and 203mm howitzers.

At 6.20 a.m. on 24 April, the bombardment started on the Teltow Canal. It was an even more massive concentration of fire than on the Neisse or the Vistula crossings. Konev arrived at Rybalko’s command post when it had almost finished. From the flat roof of an eight-storey office block, a clutch of 1st Ukrainian Front commanders watched the heavy artillery demolishing the buildings across the canal and wave after wave of bombers from their supporting aviation army. The infantry began to cross in collapsible assault craft and wooden rowing boats. By 7 a.m. the first rifle battalions were across, establishing a bridgehead. Soon after midday the first pontoon bridges were in place and tanks began to go over.

ZOSSEN, GERMANY WWII

2009-02-20T21:43:00.000+09:00

Located 25 miles south of Berlin, the Zossen underground complex of bunkers and tunnels served as the protected communications nerve center first for the German armies under Adolph Hitler’s command and later for the Russian forces occupying East Germany.

Originally cleared as a firing range and infantry school, by 1914, the 60,000-acre area had become Europe’s largest military base, dotted with handsome buildings, some of which survive to this day. Bunker complexes called “Maybach” (a command center) and “Zeppelin” (communications) were built beginning in 1934 by the Nazi regime. The initial communications links constructed in 1934–1935 involved considerable redundancy to better withstand air attack. The Zossen bunker complex was well connected with subterranean links to the military commands in central Berlin, and to a trunk cable ring buried around the city. Priority construction of the Zeppelin bunker in 1937– 1939 involved installation of dozens of massive telephone and telegraph switchboards. Most were operational by August 1939 in time for the German attack on Poland. Radio facilities were also added. Substantial battery backups guaranteed continued operation even with loss of the electric power grid due to air attack. The Allies never discovered the existence of these backups until after the war and bomb damage was largely superficial, indicating that the backups had not been targets.

Allied interrogators were aware of the Zossen compound as early as July 1944 by virtue of an interrogation of a Feldwebel who was captured in Italy. The Feldwebel had served at Zossen for some time and gave his interrogators considerable information about the facility, although the extent of the communications system does not appear to have been emphasized in this particular report.

Fast-moving Soviet forces occupied the virtually intact Zossen bunker facilities on 20 April 1945. Some German officers - with a view beyond Götterdämmerung - had the good sense to display large placards in Russian, in and around that telephone exchange saying This equipment is NOT to be destroyed or tampered with! A foresight that served postwar communications in the chaos very well. Most equipment was dismantled (often quickly and thus badly) and shipped back to the Soviet Union.

Description

Plans were drawn up prior to the Nazi period for a protected HQ for the High Command, Chief of Army Transport and the General QM. Zossen, south of Berlin, had been a military training camp since Imperial times and was chosen as the appropriate site.

The decision to begin work at Zossen as an underground military communications centre codenamed "Zeppelin" was taken in August 1936. Construction took from 1937 until just before the outbreak of war.

Anti-aircraft defence was 19 "sugar-loaf" type flak towers.

The telephone/telex bunker "Amt 500" covered 4881 sq.m on two levels. Walls were up to 3.2 metres thick, ceiling was 3 metres thick concrete with an outer 1-metre thick shell above it.

MAYBACH I consisted of twelve concrete structures disguised as residential houses, each 36.2 m x 16.39 m. There were two levels of fortified underground cellar, a single ground level floor and another level in the roof, all sub-divided into rooms. The houses were hermetically sealed against gas attack. Water was supplied from underground springs. All buildings were connected by an underground gallery. Maybach I was occupied by the Army General Staff on 26.8.1939 and it was from Zossen that the orders were issued, and retracted, for the attack on Poland scheduled for that day. The OKW command centre was transferred to Zossen from Berlin on 29.3.1943.

MAYBACH II was completed during the war as a Fuehrer-HQ: it consisted of 23 more buildings similar to those at MAYBACH I, seven of which were allocated for Hitler and his entourage. Hitler never occupied MAYBACH II mainly because he felt uncomfortable at being surrounded by Army personnel. The other buildings were occupied by Army Transport. Other branches joined later in the evacuation process from Berlin.

In the major US air raid on 15 March 1945, 675 heavy bombers inflicted damage amounting to the destruction of several wooden barrack huts and putting the main telephone cable out of use for two hours.

Zossen was evacuated before the Russian advance on 20 April 1945 and fell more or less intact into Soviet hands. Once the state-of-the-art telephone equipment had been carted off, the entire site was reported destroyed by explosives. However it later served as the HQ for Soviet Forces in Germany (GSTD), and passed to the Federal Republic in 1994.

Source: Seidel and Zeigert: The Fuehrer-HQs, Greenhill Books 2004. There is more information contained in this book relating mainly to the telephone/telex side.

Last Days at Zossen

Twenty kilometres south of Berlin in the huge underground headquarters at Zossen there was a mood of profound anxiety. The day before, when the threat of Soviet tanks coming up from the south had arisen, General Krebs had sent off the OKH's small defence detachment in reconnaissance vehicles to investigate. At 6 a.m. on 21 April, Krebs's second aide, Captain Boldt, was woken by a telephone call. Senior Lieutenant Krankel, commanding the defence detachment, had just seen forty Soviet tanks coming up the Baruth road towards Zossen. He was about to engage them. Boldt knew that Krankel's light armoured vehicles stood no chance against T-34s. He informed Krebs, who rang the Reich Chancellery to ask permission to relocate the headquarters. Hitler refused. Shortly before the 11 a.m. situation conference, tank guns could be heard clearly in the distance. One staff officer observed that the Russians could reach Zossen in half an hour. Another message arrived from Krankel. His attack had failed with heavy losses. There was nothing left to stop the enemy tanks.

General Krebs appeared from his office. `If you're ready, gentlemen,' he said, and thus began the very last conference of German general staff officers. It was hard to keep their minds off their imminent capture by Soviet armoured forces and the prison camps which awaited them in Russia. But there was no more shooting. The tanks had halted north of Baruth because they were out of diesel. And finally, at 1 p.m., General Burgdorf rang from the Reich Chancellery. The OKH was to move its headquarters to a Luftwaffe base at Eiche near Potsdam. Their companions in the adjoining OKW bunker system were to move to the nearby tank base at Krampnitz. The decision was taken only just in time.

A larger convoy of vehicles and non-essential personnel left Zossen on a hazardous journey to the south-west and then on down to Bavaria. They knew nothing of Lelyushenko's tank brigades crossing their path ahead, but instead they were hit by one of the last Luftwaffe sorties. The German pilots misidentified their vehicles. The smaller party, meanwhile, headed for Potsdam, on a parallel route to Lelyushenko's tanks.

Late that afternoon, Soviet soldiers entered the concealed camp at Zossen with caution and amazement. The two complexes, known as Maybach I and Maybach II, lay side by side, hidden under trees and camouflage nets. It was not the mass of papers blowing about inside the low, zigzag-painted concrete buildings which surprised them, but the resident caretaker's guided tour. He led them down into a maze of galleried underground bunkers, with generators, plotting maps, banks of telephones and teleprinters. Its chief wonder was the telephone exchange, which had linked the two supreme headquarters with Wehrmacht units in the days when the Third Reich had stretched from the Volga to the Pyrenees and from the North Cape to the Sahara. Apart from the caretaker, the only defenders left were four soldiers. Three of them had surrendered immediately. The fourth could not because he was dead drunk.

A telephone suddenly rang. One of the Russian soldiers answered it. The caller was evidently a senior German officer asking what was happening. 'Ivan is here,' the soldier replied in Russian, and told him to go to hell.

The two Maybach bunkers were destroyed by 1946, but the Zeppelin communications center was retained, albeit empty of equipment. In the 1950s, new construction reactivated the surviving Zossen bunkers and by 1960 fear of a missile-based European war led to re-equipping of the Zeppelin bunker area as a communications center. It could be totally self-sufficient (including air circulation) for up to a month. At the height of the Cold War between 30,000 and 70,000 Russian soldiers and their dependents were based there in an extensive surface community. All of this was manned for more than three decades, ending only when Russian troops pulled out in 1994.

The long-time military zone was opened for civilian development after the Cold War, and scores of old barrack buildings have since been reconditioned into apartments. Tours are given in some of the surviving bunker sites, some of which retain their Soviet-era equipment.

Sources

Fischer, Jan Otakar. 2000. “Beating Swords into Suburbs in East Germany’s Bunker Capital.” New York Times, March 16, D1, D4.

Kampe, Hans-George. 1996. The Underground Military Command Bunkers of Zossen, Germany: History of Their Construction and Use by the Wehrmacht and Soviet Army, 1937–1994. Atglen, PA: Schiffer.

LINK

WOLFSSCHANZE BUNKER COMPLEX

2009-02-20T21:40:00.000+09:00

In 1940 the German Army started with a huge bunker complex, Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), in the dark woods, east of Rastenburg (now Ketrzyn). Finally the whole complex measured 2.5 km from West to East and 1.5 km from North to South, which makes for a surface of about 3.5 square km, or in other words a complex of 350 ha.

We have projected the plan of this complex on a 1 : 25 000 map from 1938. The squares on the map are 1 x 1 km. The biggest bunker was the bunker where Hitler spent most of his time from September 1941 till November 20, 1944.

In one of the smaller buildings Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler with a time-triggered bomb on July 20, 1944. Hitler survived and Colonel von Stauffenberg and accomplices were executed that same day in Berlin.

During the German retreat in January 1945, they attempted to blow up the bunkers, however the concrete was so strong that even today there is still a lot to be seen on the site.

The remains of the complex are located in Poland at the hamlet of Gierłoż (German: Forst Görlitz) nearKętrzyn (German: Rastenburg), although at the time of operation this area was part of the German province of East Prussia, the southern part of which was assigned to the People's Republic of Poland after 1945. It consisted of a group of bunkers and fortified buildings in a thickly wooded area, surrounded by several rings of barbed wire and defensive positions. The complex was served by a nearby airfield. It was built for the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed 'Operation Barbarossa' (22 June 1941), and abandoned on 25 January 1945 as the Soviet army front line troops approached Wegorzewo (German: Angerburg) located only 15 km away. Hitler arrived on the night of 21 June 1941, and departed for the last time on 20 November 1944. He spent over 800 days there, off and on, during World War II.

The original bunker system was constructed by Organisation Todt, but the enlargement of Wolfsschanze was never finished; the expansion work was stopped only a few days before the Russian advance to Wegorzewo pressured German forces to blow up the entire Wolfsschanze bunker complex just prior to the Wehrmacht retreat westward.

The Wolfsschanze was the location of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler which was carried out byClaus von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944.

The whole complex was severely damaged by the demolitions carried out during the German retreat because Hitler thought it was too valuable to allow the Soviets to use. Clearance of the large minefields around the site set up by the Germans was carried out from 1945 to 1956 by the Polish Army. Today the complex is a museum, open all year long. Despite the damage, the site remains to this day a notable tourist attraction. A monument to the July 20 plotters can also be found on the site.

LINK

THE DOME

2009-02-20T11:30:00.001+09:00

In his post-war memoirs, Speer explains further the character of especially the dome.

This structure, the greatest assembly hall in the world ever conceived up to that time, consisted of one vast hall that could hold between one hundred fifty and one hundred eighty thousand persons standing. In spite of Hitler’s negative attitude toward Himmler’s and Rosenberg’s mystical notions, the hall was essentially a place of worship. The idea was that over the course of centuries, by tradition and venerability, it would acquire an importance similar to that St Peter’s in Rome has for Catholic Christendom. Without some such essentially pseudoreligious background the expenditure for Hitler’s central building would have been pointless and incomprehensible.

The round interior was to have the almost inconceivable diameter of eight hundred and twenty-five feet. The huge dome was to begin its slightly parabolic curve at a height of three hundred and twenty-three feet and rise to a height of seven hundred twenty-six feet.

In a sense the Pantheon in Rome had served as our model. The Berlin dome was also to contain a round opening for light, but this opening alone would be one hundred and fifty-two feet in diameter, larger than the entire dome of the Pantheon (142 feet) and of St Peter’s (145 feet). The interior would contain sixteen times the volume of St Peter’s.

The interior appointments were to be as simple as possible. Circling an area four hundred and sixty-two feet in diameter, a three-tier gallery rose to a height of one hundred feet. A circle of one hundred rectangular marble pillars – still almost on a human scale, for they were only eighty feet high – was broken by a recess opposite the entrance. This recess was one hundred and sixty-five feet high and ninety-two feet wide, and was to be clad at the rear in gold mosaic. In front of it, on a marble pedestal forty-six feet in height, perched the hall’s single sculptural feature: a gilded German eagle with a swastika in its claws. This symbol of sovereignty might be said to be the very fountainhead of Hitler’s grand boulevard. Beneath this symbol would be the podium for the Leader of the nation; from this spot he would deliver his messages to the peoples of his future empire. I tried to give this spot suitable emphasis, but here the fatal flaw of architecture that has lost all sense of proportion was revealed. Under that vast dome Hitler dwindled to an optical zero.

From the outside the dome would have loomed against the sky like some green copper mountain, for it was to be roofed with patinated plates of copper. At its peak we planned a skylight turret one hundred and thirty-two feet high, of the lightest possible metal construction. The turret would be crowned by an eagle with a swastika.

Optically, the mass of the dome was to have been set off by a series of pillars sixty-six feet high. I thought this effect would bring things back to scale – undoubtedly a vain hope. The mountainous dome rested upon a granite edifice two hundred and forty-four feet high with sides ten hundred and forty feet long. A delicate frieze, four clustered, fluted pillars on each of the four corners, and a colonnade along the front facing the square were to dramatize the size of the enormous cube. Hitler had already decided on the subjects of these sculptures when we were preparing our first sketches of the building. One would represent Atlas bearing the vault of the heavens, the other Tellus supporting the globe of the world. The spheres representing sky and earth were to be enamel coated with constellations and continents traced in gold.

The volume of this structure amounted to almost 27.5 million cubic yards; the Capitol in Washington would have been contained many times in such a mass. These were dimensions of an inflationary sort.

Yet the hall was by no means an insane project which could in fact never be executed. . . . As early as 1939 many old buildings in the vicinity of the Reichstag were razed to make room for our Great Hall and the other buildings that were to surround the future Adolf Hitler Platz. The character of the underlying soil was studied. Detail drawings were prepared and models built. Millions of marks were spent on granite for the exterior. Nor were the purchases confined to Germany. Despite the shortage of foreign exchange, Hitler had orders placed with quarries in southern Sweden and Finland. Like all the other edifices on Hitler’s long grand boulevard, the great hall was also scheduled to be completed in eleven years, by 1950. Since the hall would take longer to build than all the rest, the ceremonial cornerstone laying was set for 1940.

Technically, there was no special problem in constructing a dome over eight hundred feet in diameter.

Source: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1971, pp. 222–4

The project underlines an adolescent feature of Hitler’s approach to architecture: whatever he designed had to be gigantic. His boulevard had to be wider than its counterpart in Paris. In Linz he wanted to extend a stone frieze to make it the longest in Europe. The same city’s redesigned bridge had to rise 270 ft above the Danube – making it unrivalled in the world (Fest, 1973, p. 526). The Reich Chancellery was to have a corridor running from the main entrance to his study over a quarter of a mile long. Hitler wanted a visitor to feel he was ‘visiting the master of the world’ (Trevor-Roper, 1961, pp. 103–4). Even in his mountain retreat, the Berghof, he had to incorporate the largest lowerable window in existence. According to one commentator, this emphasis on scale covered up amateurish and unsatisfactory characteristics in the conception which stood behind many of the undertakings (Fest, 1973, p. 531). But what would it have been like to arrive in a capital city planned according to this way of thinking?

MODEL CITIES

2009-02-20T11:29:00.002+09:00

Hitler’s favourite project was our model city, which was set up in the former exhibition rooms of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In order to reach it undisturbed, he had doors installed in the walls between the Chancellery and our building and a communicating path laid out. Sometimes he invited the supper guests to our studio. We would set out armed with flashlights and keys. In the empty halls spotlights illuminated the models. There was no need for me to do the talking, for Hitler, with flashing eyes, explained every single detail to his companions.

There was keen excitement when a new model was set up and illuminated by brilliant spots from the direction in which the sun would fall on the actual buildings. Most of these models were made on a scale of 1:50; cabinetmakers reproduced every small detail, and the wood was painted to simulate the materials that would actually be used. In this way whole sections of the grand new avenue were gradually put together, and we could have a three-dimensional impression of the building intended to be a reality in a decade. The model street went on for about a hundred feet through the former exhibition rooms of the Academy of Arts.

Hitler was particularly excited over a large model of the grand boulevard on a scale of 1:1000. He loved to ‘enter his avenue’ at various points and take measure of the future effect. For example, he assumed the point of view of a traveler emerging from the south station or admired the great hall as it looked from the heart of the avenue. To do so, he bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the fight perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed, whereas I myself, often tired and even after years never free of a trace of respectful constraint, usually remained taciturn. One of my close associates summed up the character of this remarkable relationship: ‘Do you know what you are? You are Hitler’s unrequited love!’

These rooms were kept under careful guard and no one was allowed to inspect the grand plan for the rebuilding of Berlin without Hitler’s express permission.

Source: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1971, pp. 195–7

HITLER THE ARCHITECT

2009-02-20T11:25:00.003+09:00

A model of the triumphal arch

Vienna captivated Hitler, and soon he was planning to redevelop this city, just as he had done Linz. He spent hours in the public library working on street patterns. His travails were haphazard. Dozens of plans were begun, but none ever finished. After drafting out ideas for one project, he would divert his attention to the next. Most of his time went on designs for monumental buildings (Smith, 1979, pp. 118–19). Despite all his shortcomings, he brought a strange kind of dedication to his task. On one occasion he decided to redevelop whole working class areas of the capital. He told Kubizek he would be away for three days, and was. It seems he left the city, just to walk back to its centre to gain an idea of the way its land was used. Then he planned out simple workers’ flats (including space for baths – an innovation at the time) and drew pictures of low-rise, light and airy homes which would be surrounded by trees and gardens, and hold between four and sixteen families. They would be served by an extensive railway network and replace the dingy tenements of the time (Kubizek, 1955, pp. 168–70).

Hitler regarded architecture as the highest form of art; through stone monuments he believed a nation could express its most essential values. Imposing buildings, triumphal arches, impressive housing projects – they all displayed the splendour and power of the state. In this quest for lasting glory, ‘Hitler the child’ was truly ‘father to the man’. What is more, there was distinct continuity between his conceptions and their achievement. The case of Linz has already been mentioned, but other ideas Hitler coined, especially during the 1920s, also became reality during the 1930s. Drawings completed in the mid-1920s, were handed to the chief architect of the Third Reich, Albert Speer, a decade later as the basis for monumental public buildings for Berlin, Linz and Nuremberg (Speer, 1971, pp. 120–4). In 1927 Hitler sketched out a plan for the complete redevelopment of central Munich (Strasser, 1969, p. 72). Ten years later this became atask of state. In 1929 he declared his same intent for Berlin (Thies, 1976, p. 38). In January 1937 he appointed Speer ‘General Building Inspector for the Transformation of the Capital of the Reich’. In 1929 Hitler declared Germany needed community focal points to last millennia and that his victories would require eternal memorials (Thies, 1976, p. 38). In the 1930s he initiated their planning and construction. This continuity of ideas needs to be integral to our understanding of Hitler’s life.

Hitler had dealings with architects like Paul Ludwig Troost (whom he commissioned to renovate the Brown House and design the ‘House of German Art’), Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler (Weissmann, 1997, p. 183). He showed himself constitutionally well-equipped for the task. He had the imagination necessary to grasp sketches quickly and could turn plans into three-dimensional conceptions (Speer, 1971, p. 128). In fact, he loved studying Speer’s architectural drawings and would do so until two or three o’clock in the morning. Once serious plans were begun for the reconstruction of Berlin and Linz, scale models had to be made. These included a thirteen-foot-high model of a victory arch for the capital which in reality was to be 400 ft. high (Speer, 1971, p. 218). As late as April 1945, with the Russians at the ‘city gates’, he still took visitors to inspect the models (Zoller, 1949, p. 57). They simply transfixed Hitler, as Albert Speer relates in memoirs written after the war.

An intimate relationship existed between Hitler’s architectural and political visions. Berlin was to be renamed ‘Germania’, expanded to accommodate 10 million people and become the capital of a German-dominated Europe stretching from Ireland to the Urals (Thies, 1976, p. 82; Taylor, 1974, p. 46). He said it was his ‘unalterable will and determination to provide Berlin with those streets, buildings and public squares which will make it appear for all time fit and worthy to be the capital of the German Reich’, a ‘millennial city’ (Taylor, 1974, p. 46). It was to become a Mecca, a centre of pilgrimage for the Aryan race (Teut, 1967, p. 7). It was to rival the capital of ancient empires; as Hitler put it, ‘without the city of Rome, there would never have been a Roman empire’ (Lane, 1985, p. 189; Domarus, 1992, pp. 984–5). With Speer appointed head of the redevelopment project, in 1938 ground began to be bought up, demolition programmes were begun and barracks were constructed to house the tens of thousands of workers required by the massive work on the capital (Thies, 1976, p. 96). The timescale foresaw work continuing until 1950 (Maser, 1974, p. 126). So determined was Hitler that his phenomenal plans should be realised that he banned Speer from costing any of the projects (Weissmann, 1997, p. 184). Money was no object.

How was the Reich capital expected to turn out? According to Speer writing in 1939, it was to be based on ideas which had existed in Hitler’s mind for ‘many years’. With Berlin the focus of 3,000 km of motorways spread around the empire, it was to be constructed around two axes able to accommodate traffic from ‘the four corners of the earth’. The axes were to run north–south and east–west, beginning and ending at a ring road, and would necessitate ‘a completely new layout in the heart of the city’. The north–south axis would be a totally new road measuring 38.5 km. Its central section would run between the two main railway stations and on it would be built ‘the largest and most representative buildings of the German Reich’. At the intersection of the axes would be ‘Berlin’s greatest construction’, namely ‘the Great Hall of the German People’ (Speer, 1939).

Speer’s post-war memoirs flesh out these impressions. In Summer 1936 Hitler handed him a set of architectural sketches with the words, ‘I made these drawings ten years ago. I’ve always saved them, because I never doubted that some day I would build these two edifices.’ At issue were a domed structure (the Great Hall) and a triumphal arch of massive proportions standing at opposite ends of an avenue which would be 70 ft wider than the Champs Elysées – i.e. some 400 ft in total width – and 3 miles long. More amazing still, the diameter of the dome in question was to be 825 ft, and it would be mounted on a hall able to hold 150,000 people. In all, the building would be 725 ft high (Maser, 1974, p. 120). The triumphal arch was to be 400 ft high, granite, and carved with the names of the 1,800,000 German casualties of the First World War. Quite rightly Speer remembered being staggered not just by the proportions of the projects, but also that Hitler had conceived them at a time when their completion was purely a ‘pipe dream’ (that is to say, the mid- 1920s). He had stuck to the fantasies obsessively (Speer, 1971, pp. 120–4).

The new buildings were to embody the principles of heavily omamented classical architecture. There would be plenty of domes, columns and colonnades decorated with porticoes, heavy cornices, stone window casings, enormous piers and recessed arches (Speer, 1976, p. 112).

BERLIN: THE CITY TARGET

2009-02-20T11:06:00.001+09:00

The Zoo Flak Tower’, by Horst Kesner, a sixteen-year-old Flakhilfer, describing the night of 22/23 November 1943.

There was a so-called Hüfszug Bayern, a column of lorries which brought food to the Bunker when a big raid was expected. It was named after the organization which had supplied the Nuremberg rallies and the May Day rallies of the Hitler Youth each year, hence the name, Hilfszug Bayern (Bavarian Relief Column). We soldiers had to unload the food; because it was so much better than our own rations, we naturally organized some of it for ourselves. The food was wonderful but, because so many people were so well fed, the toilet problem became terrible.

There was an Oberfähnrich who was in charge of keeping the passageways open to the toilets. He got a decoration for this, and for his other work of course, which included sorting people out with a megaphone when they were crowding in before a raid. But it was good for the people in the bunker; the good food satisfied them and the walls were so thick that they could not hear the bombs outside, only our guns on top, firing away.

The people were crammed in every room and in every section, right up to the fourth floor where the military section began. They crowded into the passages so that we had to step over them as they slept on the floor. I think we had up to 20,000 people on the worst night. In the morning, when the raid was over, it took hours to get everyone out.

The ‘Battles’ of Bomber Command were not fought out between two sets of formed adversaries as in conventional combat. It is true that the Luftwaffe tried to engage the bombers and wear down their strength, but more than nine out of every ten bombers usually reached the target area unscathed, and it was here that the true battle was fought, between the tonnage of bombs dropped and the target city itself. The true German ’side’ in the Battle of Berlin were the city’s air-raid organization and civil administration, the resilience of its public services and of its industrial and commercial firms and, above all, the spirit and will-power of the civilian population.

There is no need to devote much space to a description of Berlin as it stood awaiting the bombers in August 1943. It was huge, being not only the capital and largest city in Germany, but the third largest city in the world, with an area covering nearly 900 square miles and a pre-war population of more than four million of the tough stock of local inhabitants. Now, in 1943, it was the administrative centre not only of Germany but of the new empire that had been carved out of Europe by conquest. Those massive government departments alone would have been a sufficient attraction for the R.A.F. interest, but Berlin’s war factories and its rail and canal communications, standing halfway between the Western and Eastern Fronts, made it both a major arsenal and the hub of Germany’s interior lines of communication. The ‘big five’ in war industry terms were the Alkett factory at Spandau, which produced large numbers of self-propelled guns and half of the Wehrmacht’s field artillery; the Borsigwerke, making locomotives, rolling stock and heavy artillery; the D.W.M. and D.I.W. combines, both producing large quantities of small arms, mortars and ammunition; and Siemens, the huge electrical firm not only located in its self-contained ‘Siemensstadt’, a huge area packed with various factories, but with other plants all over Berlin. A selection of some of the other well known names of firms with premises in Berlin confirms the obvious importance of the city to Germany’s war effort: at least ten A.E.G. factories, the Arguswerke where V-1 engines were built, a B.M.W. and two Daimler-Benz motor factories, two Henschel and one Dornier aircraft factories, a Mauser weapons factory, three Rheinmetall and three Telefunken factories, V.K.F. ball-bearings, Zeiss cameras. Most of this had been hardly touched by the war so far. When Britain rearmed in the mid-1930s a bomber force was planned with the range to reach Berlin. But the first attack was delayed for nearly a year, initially by the general bombing restraint which held until the German offensive in the West in May 1940, and then by the R.A.F.’s preoccupation with the Battle of France and the home invasion threat. The first raid was carried out by about fifty Wellingtons and Hampdens on the night of 25/26 August 1940, in retaliation for a raid on London the previous night. It was a disappointing raid. Strong head winds, thick cloud and the navigation problems which were to hamper the bomber crews for much of the war resulted in only a handful of aircraft reaching the Berlin area to drop a few bombs in the countryside south of the city. But Bomber Command persisted for more than a year. The records for that period do not make it clear exactly how many sorties were dispatched to Berlin, but possibly a thousand aircraft attempted to bomb the city between August 1940 and November 1941. At least sixty-two bombers were lost in these operations. The climax came on the night of 7/8 November 1941, when 169 aircraft were dispatched to Berlin, despite a poor weather forecast. Twenty-one of these did not return. It was the culmination of a disappointing period and the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, departed.

When Sir Arthur Harris took over early in 1942, he ignored Berlin for the whole of that year, preferring to build up the strength of his force carefully and to experiment with new tactics against easier targets. Then, in early 1943, came a series of five raids, with 1,415 four-engined aircraft sorties being sent to Berlin. These raids produced moderate results; various residential areas were damaged and about 650 Berliners were killed. By no more than chance, all of these raids hit only the southern districts of Berlin; the administrative centre and the industrial areas which were mainly in the north were hardly touched. Now, in August 1943, after the shorter nights of summer, Harris was ready to start with his main effort against the German capital. The tonnage of bombs he would be able to deliver to Berlin in the coming winter would be more than fifteen times greater than the tonnage dropped in all of the preceding years of the war.

German historians stress how the slow expansion of the British bomber effort over the early years of the war enabled the German authorities to develop both the armed defences of their cities and the local air-raid services without ever being overwhelmed — at least, not until the recent disaster at Hamburg. Berlin, with its gradual introduction to the experience of being bombed and with the priorities afforded to a capital city, was particularly well prepared to meet the coming test.

The preparations received an urgent boost from the experiences of Hamburg three weeks earlier. Evacuation of children before then had been a voluntary matter; the result had not been effective, and many of the children sent away in the early days later returned. But after Hamburg, Goebbels, who besides being Minister of Propaganda was also Gauleiter of Berlin, ordered that all children and young mothers were to leave the city. Entire schools, children and teachers together, went off to the east, out of range of the British bombers. The school buildings thus emptied would become valuable emergency hospitals and collecting centres for the people bombed out of their homes in the coming raids. Because of the pressure on the railways, this mass evacuation was not complete by the time the first R.A.F. raids came, but it continued with even more urgency after the first series of raids and would be complete before the Battle of Berlin was resumed in November. A total of 790,000 women and children left, an exodus which saved many lives and reduced the pressure on Berlin’s services during the main battle. This was in direct contrast to the recent Hamburg experience, when the children of that city had figured prominently in the huge death toll.

Berlin was and still is a city of flats (apartments to Americans), vast numbers of four-, five- or six-storeyed blocks filling street after street, and it would be in these flats and in their basements and courtyards that the outcome of the battle would be decided. The life of Hamburg had been temporarily stopped because its housing had been destroyed by fire. In those August days, the people of Berlin worked hard to learn the lessons of Hamburg and make their homes as fireproof as possible. Each family in a block had a partitioned section of the building’s attic; now, all belongings had to be removed from these, and the Todt Organisation then came and ripped down the partitioned walls of the attics to enable incendiary bombs to be reached. Fresh supplies were added to the sand and water which every family was obliged to have in their flat and corridor. Berlin was particularly well equipped with air-raid shelters. As in London, the underground railway stations- in Berlin the U-Bahn - provided deep and safe shelter for thousands of people. But the Berliners had an advantage over the people of London; every block of flats had a large basement area and these became sturdy air-raid shelters for the families upstairs. No German city dweller of the war years will forget the countless hours spent with their neighbours in those basement shelters. To avoid being trapped in a shelter by rubble-blocked exits, holes were knocked through the walls separating each basement. These holes were then re-covered, to preserve the privacy of each shelter, but only with a thin layer of easily removable bricks. In this way, the people in a threatened shelter could move from one basement to another, the whole length of a street if necessary, to find an unblocked exit.

Again, comparison can be made with both London and Hamburg. Berlin was a more modern city, the streets of its residential districts were wider, with more room for an incendiary-bomb attack to waste itself and less chance of the rubble blocking the streets to fire-engines or of fire leaping from one side of the street to the other. There were more open spaces. There were no streets of the flimsy terraced houses which had suffered so badly from high explosive bombs in the London ‘Blitz’, and the Berlin blocks of flats were acknowledged to be of sounder construction than those in Hamburg which had burnt so fiercely in the Firestorm.

Then there were the Flak and the searchlights - the armed defence of the city. Berlin was known to all Bomber Command men as ‘the Big City’ because of the extent of that defence. Flying Officer R. E. Luke, of 426 Squadron, was a bomb aimer who had to fly over Berlin.

[The ranks and squadrons of R.A.F. contributors are those of the Battle of Berlin period.]

The murmur which swept through the briefing room when the target map of Berlin was revealed paid tribute to the severity of the defences, which, particularly on a cloudless night, struck fear into the hearts of those crews ordered to attack it. It seemed to us that only the best German personnel were posted to defend the city. An enormous cone of searchlights ringed the city, which could be seen a long way off, and it did not seem possible to breach them. In all our thirty-three operations we encountered no target more heavily defended than Berlin.

Flight Lieutenant R. B. Leigh was another bomb aimer, in 156 Squadron.

Lying in the nose of a Lancaster on a visual bomb run over Berlin was probably the most frightening experience of my lifetime. Approaching the target, the city appeared to be surrounded by rings of searchlights, and the Flak was always intense. The run-up seemed endless, the minutes of flying ’straight and level’ seemed like hours and every second I expected to be blown to pieces. I sweated with fear, and the perspiration seemed to freeze on my body.

A Bomber Command map of the period shows that the Flak area around Berlin measured forty miles across, and the searchlight belt around it was sixty miles wide! Certainly no other target in Germany was better defended than Berlin, though some Bomber Command men say that the Ruhr defences were of comparable strength.

Some aspects of the Berlin defences are of particular interest. The Flak defences had been installed early in the war, with an outer and an inner ring of guns. When the R.A.F. started to use a ‘bomber stream’ this system was no longer suitable, and the guns now operated under combined control and simply filled various ordered sections of the sky with a box barrage, although bombers which arrived early, stragglers or those caught in searchlights could still be engaged by aimed fire. The main feature of the old inner ring of guns was twenty-four massive 128-millimetre guns mounted in pairs on three Flak towers built in parks in the Zoo, Friedrichshain and Humboldthain districts. These guns had been developed by the local Borsigwerke factory. The eight guns on each tower could fire a salvo every ninety seconds, to a maximum ceiling of 45,000 feet (14,800 metres) and, when the eight shells exploded in the planned pattern, they had a lethal zone of 260 yards (240 metres) across. The gun platform crews on the towers were all trained German soldiers, unlike most German Flak batteries which had many pressed Russian prisoners and German schoolboys in their crews; the only Russians were down in the basement ammunition chambers, loading the shell hoists. Many of the gunners on the towers were from a Hamburg unit with much to avenge.

The construction of the towers themselves, by the Todt Organisation on plans by Speer, had commenced as early as 1940. Hitler wished to show the people of Berlin and of the world that the city was ‘Fortress Berlin’ which would survive the war and last forever. Hamburg and Vienna were the only other places to be blessed with such massive edifices. The Flak towers in Berlin were to be the first buildings of the proposed post-war remodelled city named Germania which would replace old Berlin. The towers had thick concrete walls, steel windows, air-conditioning and an independent Daimler-Benz generating plant six metres underground. All had a hospital floor, and the Zoo tower had one level in which the most valuable of Berlin’s art treasures were stored. The local residents were, at first, not happy to see their parks disfigured in this way but they were later to be well pleased when certain levels in the towers were thrown open to the public as air-raid shelters. The Humboldthain tower had passages leading to the nearby Gesundbrunnen Station, one of the deepest of the U-Bahn system. Up to 21,000 people at a time would take shelter in the combined tower and U-Bahn during the coming winter.

Another interesting aspect of Berlin’s anti-bomber defences is the extent of the decoy methods employed. Decoy fire sites were a feature of every German city, but Berlin is believed to have had fifteen such sites, including one particularly large one at Staaken, on the western approaches to the city, which was based on the sets of a prewar film studio. One wartime schoolboy Flakhilfer asked me about the wartime rumour that one night several bombers separated from the main stream and dropped some wooden bombs on the Staaken decoy site!

There was another, more serious ‘decoy’ story I was told in Berlin that I had not encountered before. The Germans realized that the lakes around Berlin were an important aid to the British H2S radar operators. Consideration was given during the summer of 1943 to covering over these lakes to prevent their distinctive radar reflections being used by the bombers. This was not possible because of the amount of material required, but the Germans did produce large numbers of timbered floats, each in a cruciform shape about five metres across, which were moored at about 300-yard intervals, certainly on the Tegeler See and probably on the Havel too. These two large lakes were on the westerly route into Berlin. The effectiveness of these floats — called Tripel- Spiegel— is not known, but they may have contributed to the difficulties encountered by the Pathfinders in establishing their positions on the marking runs into Berlin that winter.

So Berlin - with its tough population of mainly Prussian stock, its great war factories and government buildings, its stoutly constructed housing, its gradual introduction to the bombing war, its well established fire and air-raid services, its Flak towers and underground shelters, its powerful gun and searchlight defences, its range of decoy devices — Berlin awaited the arrival of the bombers.

By MARTIN MIDDLEBROOK

NAZI BERLIN

2009-02-19T13:53:00.001+09:00

Though grand planners, Berlin’s Nazis built little. Only bits survive—such as Ernst Sagebiel’s Aviation Ministry (1936–37) and Tempelhof Airport (1936–41). Hitler impacted modernism not through buildings but inadvertently through expellant “gifts” (mostly to the United States—Gropius, Mies, and ultimately Mendelsohn). Although architecture—the “Word in Stone”—was critical to Hitler’s ideological program, it proved too costly after his war machine’s ignition. Still, until the bitter end, Hitler crouched as amateur architect over vast models with his amanuensis, Albert Speer. How sad for the profession that the 20th-century leader most architecturally impassioned was a tasteless criminal. Hitler’s architectural proclivities were vivid—a reactionary parochialism intended to resist “Bolshevist” cosmopolitanism and a perdurable monumentality in keeping with world domination. As Nazi preferences hardened, the Dessau Bauhaus was chased to Berlin (during Mies’s directorate), where the Gestapo finally padlocked it. Nazi aesthetics mirrored—with opposing predilection—the Weimar Socialists’ belief that architectural style symbolized specific political views. However, the Nazis added a destructive, racist edge. The Nazi-fomented Kris tallnacht (Night of Broken Glass, 1938) saw 9 of 12 Berlin synagogues aflame, including Ehrenfried Hessel’s famed Fasanenstraße Temple (1912).

In 1943 the Western Allies launched the aerial Battle of Berlin. By 1945 incendiary phosphorous had consumed 70 percent of the city’s center and 1.5 million Berliners’ homes. Soviet shelling came next, then tanks and capitulation. Only outlying Mietskasernen and Siedlungen escaped unscathed. “Quadrasectioning” ensued; apportionments observed Berlin’s 20 districts—six falling American, four British, two French, and eight Soviet (including Mitte, the historical kernel containing Schinkel’s battered works). From Berlin’s ceremonial remnants, ideological sterilization claimed further shares. Between 1947 and 1951, the standing walls of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss and Hitler’s New Chancellery in the Soviet sector and the Gestapo’s headquarters at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais (once renovated by Schinkel) in the American were dynamited.

No Rescue, Yet, for Airport That Saved Berlin

2009-02-18T19:29:00.002+09:00

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN - May 20, 2008

Correction Appended

BERLIN — Sometimes you can read a city though a cultural landmark. Tempelhof Airport is Berlin’s open book.

On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the historic, American-led airlift to supply the besieged capital, the mayor is going ahead with plans to close the airport by year’s end. How sad. A last-minute campaign by his political opponents to save it through a citywide referendum late last month won a majority, but not enough Berliners turned out to make the vote official.

Now, talk about twists of fate, a big international air show opening here in a few days will celebrate the airlift’s anniversary — but not at Tempelhof. It will take place at Berlin-Schönefeld International Airport, in the former east Germany, whose pending expansion is the immediate cause of Tempelhof’s demise.

Once the site of a Prussian parade ground, where Orville Wright showed off his flying machines, “the mother of all airports,” as the architect Norman Foster has called Tempelhof, was one of the world’s first commercial airfields. During the 1930s, the architect Ernst Sagebiel expanded it for Adolf Hitler into what was then the largest building in Europe, a triumphal entryway into the new Germania, smack in the heart of Berlin.

And there it still is, a 15-minute taxi ride from the Brandenburg Gate, dozing in the spring sun, the finest work of Berlin architecture surviving from that era. A soaring, light-filled, surprisingly welcoming space, the main terminal now serves only a dozen or so short-haul commercial flights a day; it’s a glorious time capsule of mid-century, with towering windows, a 1950s neon sign for a defunct restaurant at one end, and a handful of somnolent employees slumped behind their desks, staring into the vastness or skimming the newspaper.

In the yawning silence, it was possible the other morning to hear the click-clack of a dog’s paws on the polished linoleum floor. An elderly resident of the neighborhood was taking his pet for a daily stroll through the empty terminal. Black-and-white snapshots, tacked to a wall, showed Gary Cooper and Errol Flynndebarking onto the tarmac, waving into flashbulbs. A rental-car clerk, with not a customer in sight, leaned back in his booth.

Most of the rest of the huge building, which stretches for blocks, is empty today. Tempelhof, in its limbo, is said to cost the city $15 million a year ($185 million in the last 10 years).

With America’s reputation currently in a nosedive here, the airport recalls better days. On June 26, 1948, in response to the Soviet blockade, C-47s began landing millions of tons of food, coal and other supplies in an operation centered at Tempelhof. At its peak, the airlift landed planes every 90 seconds in West Berlin, along the way dropping handkerchief parachutes of raisins and chocolate into the arms of children. Raisin bombers, they came to be called.

Over time, East Berlin and West Berlin developed their separate airports. Besides Tempelhof, Tegel grew in the former French sector. With reunification, it was decided to mothball both Tegel and Tempelhof and consolidate the city’s air traffic at a single site, Schönefeld. Tempelhof’s landmark building would be preserved for some use yet to be determined — a museum, offices (nothing was definite, in typical Berlin fashion). The goal was to attract more intercontinental flights and make Berlin more attractive to businesses. Both main political parties, the conservative Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, signed off on it.

Then delay followed delay in the way things do here. What a glorious city Berlin is, and what a mess. It is bankrupt and underpopulated. Big companies like Sony, Samsung and Mercedes, enticed after reunification by subsidies intended to boost business, took advantage of the offers then skipped town.

There’s no city plan worthy of a great capital, partly because of old, festering rivalries. Years ago it was decided to demolish the Palace of the Republic, a 1970s bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth at the center of the old East Berlin. West Berliners saw it as an eyesore that housed the loathed East German parliament.

East Berliners recalled it affectionately, because its clutch of theaters and bowling alleys and restaurants were where they could escape the drudgery of Communist life. It’s now to be replaced with a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern schloss formerly on that site, which was bombed, then razed by the Communists — a forthcoming Potemkin village and a sad excuse for a showpiece in a city that prides itself on its cultural sophistication. Fortunately, Berlin is now too broke to finish demolition, which has already taken longer and cost more than the building did to put up.

As for Tempelhof, the city’s popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit, led the push to shut it immediately and not wait for Schönefeld’s expansion. This partly explains why Conservative opponents in town changed course and vigorously campaigned to save it. They rallied nostalgic West Berliners. The conservative Springer newspapers joined in. So did Chancellor Angela Merkel. America, with its shaky standing, became a subtle undercurrent in the debate.

But, through it all, neither side offered anything approaching a concrete plan for what actually to do with Tempelhof, whether it’s kept open or closed. An offer by the American billionaire Ronald S. Lauder to invest $500 million to turn it into a big health center, with its airport to serve wealthy patients, was shot down, never mind that the city is desperate for outside investment.

In the event, referendum voters, splitting along the old cold war lines, endorsed keeping it open by a 3 to 2 ratio, but only 22 percent of eligible Berliners cast ballots in favor of doing so, shy of the 25 percent required. Mr. Wowereit may have kept turnout low by saying beforehand that he wouldn’t even abide by a yes vote, the referendum being nonbinding.

He and his allies had leaned on the argument that Tempelhof was bad for the environment and the neighborhood. Those living nearby turned out to cast the largest percentage of votes in favor of saving the airport. A Tempelhof resident appeared on German television, standing in her little public allotment garden beside the airfield’s barbed wire fence, straining to make herself heard over the roar of a Lear jet. “It is so comfortable here,” she said. She wasn’t being ironic.

Having seen that woman on television, the architecture writer Gerhard Matzig, in The Süddeutsche Zeitung explained that “there are residents of Tempelhof who can understandably imagine a life without aircraft noise and danger, but the much more interesting phenomenon is the string: aircraft — noise — barbed wire — coziness.”

Exactly. Certain places, like certain works of music and love affairs, inspire bonds of affection that transcend logic and can’t be expressed in profit and loss. It doesn’t matter whether they’re great cultural monuments or civic symbols. Tempelhof also happens to be those things. Mr. Matzig went on to point out that repurposing it, as a museum, or whatever, won’t really spare it. Such places tend to “lose their strength and magic,” he wrote.

Even with few flights, Tempelhof remains magical. Berlin’s a mess but glorious because, being bankrupt, it is more affordable than other major capitals, which makes it attractive to singles, artists, students, immigrants, people on the dole and dreamers. Its airports cater to this population of discount passengers. Tegel is the most efficient and wonderful airport in Europe; Tempelhof, the most beautiful. Even homely Schönefeld works. Quiet, efficient, cheap, humane and perfect for flying around the continent, they collectively improve Berlin in ways immeasurable by accountants and politicians.

By contrast, Berlin’s dated vision to construct, at Schönefeld, what is to be called Berlin-Brandenburg International — the city’s answer to Frankfurt, London, New York and Paris, where air travel is utterly appalling — betrays provincial megalomania. It’s one of Berlin’s notorious charms and weaknesses. In this case, it is leading the city toward its own version of the demolition of Penn Station. In the name of progress, a metropolis becomes less, not more, cosmopolitan.

A few days ago, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel published several broadsheet pages about the latest multimillion-dollar pipe dreams for Tempelhof: turning the runways into a “roller-skaters’ paradise”; making the airfield a park; devising an entertainment palace, a high-tech industrial center, apartments for 4,600 people, a flight museum, movie studios, a Formula 1 track.

The book of Berlin turns out to be “Don Quixote.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 23, 2008
The Abroad column on Tuesday, about the future of Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, misstated the percentage of Berliners who voted in a nonbinding referendum on whether to keep the airport open, and misstated a requirement for the proposal’s approval. About 36 percent of eligible voters took part, not 22 percent. Approval required a “yes” vote from at least 25 percent of eligible voters, not a turnout of 25 percent of eligible voters. (While a large majority of those taking part, as the column noted, voted to keep it open, those votes came from only about 22 percent of eligible voters, short of the requirement.)

The column also misidentified the site of another airport that serves Berlin, Schönefeld. While it is in the former East Germany, and its full name is Berlin-Schönefeld International Airport, it is just outside the Berlin city limits in Schönefeld, not in the former East Berlin.

Farewell to Berlin's Historic Tempelhof

2009-02-18T19:27:00.004+09:00

Berlin is now working to concentrate air traffic from its trio of air hubs into one, new international airport scheduled to open in October of 2011, Capital Airport BBI. The new airport will also mean the closing of Berlin’s current largest airport, Tegel. The New York Times offered a deep story and slide show from May, when the city was ensnared in debate about Tempelhof’s future. I highly recommend it. The Berlin airport site also has posted some beautiful photography to peruse showing the airport’s past, including the two images here. I have flown to and from Tegel, but I never had the opportunity to be a passenger or visitor at Tempelhof. I really wish I had.

Posted by: Justin Bachman on October 30 2008

With a tinge of sadness, 80 years of history will end on Oct. 31 with the formal closing of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, or Zentral Flughafen as it was long known. This airport – “the cradle of aviation” in the words of a press release issued by Berlin’s airport authority – was built in 1923 and remains one of the only surviving airports constructed before World War II. With Hitler-led renovations, Tempelhof became a representation of Nazi architecture – and later the aviation home of the famous airlift effort to oppose Soviet repression in 1948-49.

In the fall of 1909, Orville Wright took off from Tempelhof and made history as the first engine-powered flight to depart German soil. It is hard to overstate the airport’s role in history and commerce: It was once Europe’s largest hub and the home of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, now one of the world’s biggest carriers. The last commercial flight is scheduled to be German carrier Cirrus Airlines’ flight 1569 to Mannheim, late on Thursday. After that, two historic, restored airplanes will depart just before midnight for a flight over the city.

Reading, memories of father

2009-02-18T19:22:00.001+09:00

I’m reading one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. It’s Albert Speer’s “Spandau: The Secret Diaries.”

Speer (1905-1981) was Adolph Hitler’s architect and, from 1942 to 1945, the minister of armaments for the Nazi regime.

“Spandau” is a one-volume compendium drawn from the more than 20,000 pages of “diary notes, authorized letters and smuggled letters, written in the smallest script I could manage, on leaves of calendars, scraps of notepaper, cardboard lids, toilet paper” that Speer managed to send to his wife and children during his 20-year incarceration for war crimes.

Speer came to realize that he was, if there was such a being, Hitler’s closest friend. This haunted him, but it also gave him a strange and unsettling kind of satisfaction.

Speer did not really admire Hitler — or rather he admired him in a very selective way — but he found Hitler hypnotically compelling and there was a side of the Fuhrer he genuinely liked. He did not condone the atrocities. In essence, he made a Faustian bargain with a “great” terrible man.

Speer tacitly agreed to look the other way whenever possible, in exchange for which he would be given architectural and urban design opportunities never before enjoyed by a single individual. “I was 30 when he laid a world at my feet,” Speer wrote in his diary entry for Oct. 2, 1946.

Hard to resist that.

My father, who has been dead more than a dozen years now, was fascinated by World War II, particularly by Hitler. When I was 14, he urged me to read Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich,” which is essentially an autobiography. I read the book because I wanted that exclusive arena of closeness to my father.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as sharing the experience of a great book with someone whose response to that book you know you will prize. I’m not so fond of reading a book together (you read a page aloud, I read a page), but reading the same book at the same time is one of the supreme joys of life.

The life of a reader is essentially a lonely one. There have been hundreds of times when I have been reading a book when, with a sudden inrush, I have wanted to talk with someone about the book — indeed that passage in that book — and there is no one to call. Many, many times I have blurted to a friend, “You have to read this book!” but it almost never happens. Others have instructed me to read such and such a book — with equal futility.

Still, you have to read “Spandau: The Secret Diaries.”

Eager to please my cerebral father, I read Speer’s memoir in earliest adolescence, just at that moment when we are wrestling with the “fallenness” of the world and the gap between what people say and what they actually do, between the world as it is presented to us in civics texts and the world as it really does business.

It was a time of bewilderment to me. My boy’s brain that summer was wrestling with three men: Adolph Hitler, who is our culture’s embodiment of evil; Albert Speer, who exemplifies the problem of character and the problem of ambivalence; and my father, a small town banker with unusual intellectual fascinations.

In the most heartbreaking passage of the diaries, Oct. 14, 1946, Speer imagines the effect his life and now his incarceration will have on his children. They will “want to know how I could have participated in a regime that the entire world feared and despised? They will imply that they will always remain the children of a war criminal.”

Speer was the only major Nazi figure at the Nuremberg war trials to take responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. He insisted he knew nothing specific about the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, but at the same time he said he was in a position to know more than he chose to know.

He got a comparatively light sentence — 20 years. Many others received life sentences, and the principal surviving Nazi leaders were hanged in the same prison where Speer was beginning his long sentence. On the day of the executions, Oct. 16, 1946, Speer wrote, “Now the thought of that fills me with something akin to envy: It’s all over for them. I still have to face 20 years. Yesterday I tried to imagine myself leaving prison after two decades, an old man.”

The dangerous thing about Hitler is that he had an entrancing effect on people who knew better. He still does. I know a number of people who are fascinated with the swastika, the Nazi regime, the SS and the Gestapo, and — principally — Hitler, to the point that it feels a little icky. They swear that their interest is purely “academic,” but one senses that that is not quite true.

William Shirer, the author of the monumental “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” spent time in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, before the outbreak of the war. He attended several of the great party rallies at Nuremberg. Those rallies, by the way, were designed by Speer.

You’ve seen them in the old black and white films: the giant flags and banners, the monumental architecture, tens of thousands of young “Aryan” men goose stepping in perfect synchronization, the heroic columns of light. And, at the rostrum, the fiercely gesticulating Hitler modulating his voice up and down the scale of violence from calm “analysis” of the world situation to slavering diatribes against the “stab in the back,” America (“a mongrel race”), and of course international Jewry.

Shirer, who was born in Iowa, regarded Hitler as a fraud and a mountebank who somehow got control of one of the world’s most civilized nations. He dismissed “Mein Kampf,” which he read carefully, as a pathetic tissue of racism, illogic, jingoism, special pleading, self-love, ungrammatical writing and megalomania.

And yet, Shirer confessed, at the big Nuremberg rallies before the war, in spite of his capacity to see the vulgar gangster behind the theatrical hypnotist, he nevertheless found himself mesmerized by Hitler. This made Shirer extremely upset with himself.

Speer was another highly intelligent person who could not quite decide what to make of Hitler.

On Feb. 10, 1947, Speer wrote the following riveting and troubling paragraph. “People (Nazis in the prison) are increasingly representing Hitler as a dictator given to raging uncontrollably and biting the rug even on slight pretexts. This seems to me a false and dangerous course. If the human features are going to be missing from the portrait of Hitler, if his persuasiveness, his engaging characteristics, and even the Austrian charm he could trot out are left out of the reckoning, no faithful picture of him will be achieved.”

That’s the kind of passage I would like to sit down with my father to discuss.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck.)

A missing megalo-symbol: Hitler's globe

2009-02-18T19:14:00.002+09:00

Wolfram Pobanz, a cartographer, by a globe with a Russian bullet hole through Germany. He says it was not Hitler's.

By Michael Kimmelman

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

BERLIN: Hitler's globe is missing. Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it's not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.

Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute across town, which first caught Pobanz's eye 40-odd years ago when he was a student.

"We called it the Führer globe," he remembered. It planted the seed of his fascination with the Columbus Globe for State and Industry Leaders, as this enormous model was called - a far cry from the inflatable version that Charlie Chaplin bounced around in "The Great Dictator," which mocked Hitler's megalomania and created the indelible vision of a fascist tyrant doing a pas de deux with the planet.

Manufactured in two limited editions in Berlin during the mid-1930s (the second edition changed Abyssinia to Italian East Africa), the real Columbus globe was nearly the size of a Volkswagen and, at the time, more expensive. A standard wood base was designed to support it, but custom furniture stands were made for Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Pobanz has been methodically tracking them down.

White-haired, large, jowly and bespectacled, an unstoppable St. Bernard of enthusiasm for all things globe-related, he came the other day to the Deutsches Historisches Museum with a stack of books and photocopied evidence in his satchel, happy to lay it all out.

"He's a very serious man with a passion for this particular type of globe," said the museum's director, Hans Ottomeyer. Ottomeyer had mentioned Pobanz in passing during a conversation about Berliners with remarkable obsessions.

Pobanz's full story turns out to be a mystery. Besides the globes in Berlin, he said, there are two Columbus globes in public collections in Munich. Fellow globe hunters, put on the scent by word of his pursuit, have turned up several more in private hands and elsewhere, outside Germany. None, however, is from Hitler's office in the New Reich Chancellery, the globe that inspired Chaplin.

In Chaplin's satiric film the globe is a balloon, an emblem of megalomania, which suddenly bursts in the fictional tyrant's face. The image became a cinematic touchstone: art transformed into political symbol, shaping history.

Hitler, more than any modern tyrant, grasped the power of visual signs. He cooked up the Nazi Party uniform and the flag and hired Albert Speer to design the New Chancellery, where the giant Columbus globe, with a sharp-cornered, stepped wood base, was parked in Hitler's quarters. Newsreels and still photographs from the time the building opened, in 1939, show visitors trekking down marbled passageways more than four football fields long to reach the Führer.

It was Chaplin's genius, in 1940, to exploit the symbolism of the globe.

"It has been a trait of megalomaniacs throughout history to use the arts to control thought, gain respectability, bolster their power and memorialize themselves," Frederic Spotts, a historian of modern Germany, observes in his book "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics." But Hitler went "beyond the others," he writes, and "defined and legitimized his rule in cultural terms."

Chaplin's sight gag, you might say, gained weight precisely by playing off Hitler's use of visual symbols.

Funny thing is, "Hitler probably didn't think anything about the globe," Pobanz said. "There's no picture of Hitler beside the globe.

He controlled all photographs of himself. If the globe had actually meant anything special to Hitler, there would surely be a photograph.

"For me this is not about Hitler, it's about the correctness of the situation," he insisted. When a Berlin newspaper last year called the Deutsches Historisches Museum's globe "the Globe of the Mass Murderer," he simply felt, as a scholar, that the record should be set straight. Whether he would be going to the same lengths to uncover the pedigree of a globe attributed to Konrad Adenauer or John Foster Dulles, he didn't say.

Instead, he said, "I don't know how many of these globes were made because the Columbus factory was destroyed in 1943, along with its archives." Pobanz pulled out a photocopy of a drawing he had unearthed for a custom base, designed by the Munich studio of Paul Ludwig Troost. Troost was Hitler's favorite architect during the early 1930s. "This base was made for Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry," he said.

It was identical to the one for the globe at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. "So this globe could only have been made for Ribbentrop," he said.

He did not pause to contemplate if the provenance made much difference, morally speaking. "The globes designed for the New Reich Chancellery had a more angular base," he said, then unveiled a different photocopy.

About the two globes in Munich, he explained, one came from Hitler's offices there (also with a bullet hole in it, American). So that is a Hitler globe, but it's still not the model ordered by Speer for the New Reich Chancellery, which Chaplin immortalized. The second globe in Munich came from a Nazi administrative building. Both pedigrees are documented, Pobanz said.

He then leapt into a list of international globe organizations. Pobanz belongs, he explained, to the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes, through which "I've heard about a globe in Breslau, and another in Warsaw."

Meanwhile Globusfreund (Friend of the Globe) magazine, based in Vienna, he said, has been pressing him to publish his research. The unmistakable anxiety of a man contemplating a prospective deadline suddenly flashed across his face.

"I can't," he said. "I'm still collecting evidence."

First interested in maps and globes because of their artistry and technical complexity, as a boy he made field trips in Germany and long bicycle tours across Europe. "Maps contain the imagination of the world," he said. "You can't go to all the places, but you can travel in your mind."

He lives alone, he said. He has no family. Before tackling this Hitler globe mystery, he specialized in maps from the Soviet Union and former East Germany, tracking down errors planted to throw off enemies from military sites. The suggestion that he's a map detective seems to offend his sensibility.

He opened a blue folder of papers to a photocopy showing a group of Russian soldiers in the New Reich Chancellery in May 1945, crowded around Hitler's globe. "I don't know where it is," he said, studying the image for a second.

"Maybe it's in Moscow."

Hitler bunkers revealed - real and virtual

2009-02-18T19:06:00.000+09:00

· Speer's military academy buried under hill of rubble
· Underground complex reborn as visual tour

Kate Connolly in Berlin
The Guardian, Tuesday 19 June 2007

Part of the virtual tour of the Führerbunker.

Experts in Berlin's wartime bunkers have announced the discovery of a forgotten Nazi military school buried under a man-made hill on the western edge of the city.

The army academy, designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, is encased in the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), a 116-metre (380ft)-high mound in Berlin which was constructed from the 26m cubic metres of the capital's wartime rubble.

The unfinished building, for which Nazi leader Adolf Hitler laid the foundation stone in 1937, was meant to become part of Germania, the huge capital of the 1,000-Year Reich. But "war-specific" problems, according to an internal Nazi memorandum, caused building work to be stopped just three years later.

The British occupation forces planned to turn the building into their headquarters, until it proved too difficult to convert. It was also too sturdy to demolish. Instead, half of Berlin's rubble - equivalent to 400,000 buildings - was poured on top, along with grass-seed, and so the Teufelsberg was born.

It has been a favourite place for Berliners to ski and sled in winter and fly kites in summer. The existence of the military college had been virtually forgotten by all but a handful of enthusiasts, until the Association of Berlin Underworlds discovered documents pointing to the academy.

"Most of the faculty must still be intact, despite the attempts to blow it up," said Dietmar Arnold of Underworlds. The association, which has found 50 bunkers in its 10-year existence, is keen to dig down. "We know for sure that underneath there is also a massive multistorey bunker complex."

The plan is to penetrate 20 metres into the north-eastern face with a digger, until it hits concrete and brick and for enthusiasts to enter the mountain with caving equipment. Berlin's press has referred to the mission as an attempt to uncover "the last of the large and undiscovered secrets that underground Berlin has to offer".

Berliners' fascination with its bunkers and hidden wartime structures appears to know no bounds. The most famous, the underground complex from which a crazed Hitler tried to direct the end of the war, has just been "reconstructed" down to the last door handle and window frame in a computer-animated graphic.

Historians have praised the virtual tour of the fortress, which is based on state security records of the 1970s, as the truest existing impression of the bunker. The real bunker, close to Potsdamer Platz, was filled in, buried and built over.

The tour's creator, graphic artist Christoph Neugebauer, said that contrary to the general belief that Hitler spent his last days in a luxurious hi-tech hole in the ground, he was in fact "housed in a fairly run-of-the-mill government workers' bunker".

Featured Website: Third Reich in Ruins

2009-02-18T18:39:00.001+09:00

Geoff Walden

The Third Reich in Ruins ... This page presents photos of historical sites associated with Germany’s Third Reich (1933-1945), both as they appeared while in use, and as the remains appear today. These photos give a "then and now" perspective, in many cases, a virtual tour of the sites. I was originally inspired to write this page by a collection of photos taken by my father, U.S. Army Air Forces Lt. Delbert R. Walden, when he was stationed in Germany in 1945-46.