The Unbuilt Nazi Pantheon: Unpacking Albert Speer's "Volkshalle"

The Unbuilt Nazi Pantheon: Unpacking Albert Speer's "Volkshalle"

According to Albert Speer, Hitler's ambitious architect and all-too-capable Minister of Armaments and War Production, the final performance by the Berlin Philharmonic before this distinguished orchestra abandoned Berlin in May 1945 opened with Brünnhilde's last aria-the vengeful valkyrie sings of setting fire to Valhalla-and the finale from Wagner's Götterdämmerung.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Hitler’s Berlin’

HITLER'S BERLIN: ABUSED CITY
By Thomas Friedrich
Yale University Press, $40, 480 pages

Adolf Hitler had a love-hate relationship with Berlin.

He loved the city for what it represented -- the focal point of Prussian power, the dynamic capital of the kaiser's empire and the political and military nerve center of the Third Reich.

However, Hitler also hated Berlin. He despised its cosmopolitan makeup and what he felt was a pervasive Jewish cultural and commercial influence on the city as well as on the whole of Germany. The resentment was pathological. A few years later, it ushered in the Holocaust, the systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews.

The late German author Thomas Friedrich's book "Hitler's Berlin: Abused City," is a fascinating study of the politics, culture and architecture of Berlin. Berlin initially resisted Hitler's National Socialist Party. The city had a strong communist base, a powerful trade-union movement and liberal intellectuals.

Big business and the military rallied on behalf of Hitler's push for power because they thought he would revitalize the economy, enlarge the army and crush the communists and the unions. They also thought Hitler could be controlled. How terribly wrong they turned out to be.

Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 through constitutional means but not as a result of an election. He was appointed by the aging President Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I hero who disliked the Austrian-born politician who fought for Germany during the war as a corporal.

"I will employ my strength for the welfare of the German people, protect the Constitution and laws of the German people, conscientiously discharge the duties imposed on me, and conduct my affairs of office impartially and with justice to everyone," Hitler swore as he took the oath of office.
Not one of those pledges was kept.

Hindenburg, by then senile, died the following year at age 86. Hitler declared the office of president vacant, made himself the supreme leader, militarized Germany and abrogated the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919. He stepped up a campaign against Jews, communists, labor unions and his remaining political rivals.

He also sought to remake the city of Berlin to reflect the glory of a new Germany.
Hitler employed architect Albert Speer on Jan. 30, 1937, as general inspector of buildings in the country's capital. It is not insignificant that the appointment was announced exactly four years after Hitler become chancellor.

Friedrich notes that Hitler wished to create a grand city that would be a symbol of a Thousand Year Reich -- a city full of huge buildings, avenues and monuments, a capital that would dwarf Paris.
Hitler told the Reichstag, the German parliament, he needed Speer to ensure that "an overall vision be brought to the chaos of Berlin's architectural past, a vision that will do justice to the spirit of the National Socialist movement and to the character of the German capital."

Hitler never abandoned his dream of creating a grand Berlin until the closing months of World War II, perhaps because he considered himself an artist -- and politics a form of art. Historians often speculated what would have happened had Hitler been accepted to the art academy in Vienna. Some argued that he might not have entered German politics.

As for Berlin, Hitler's plan ended in the utter ruin of the city at the hands of the Soviet army. He committed suicide in Berlin during the closing days of the war.

"When Hitler took his own life in his Chancellery bunker on 30 April 1945, he took with him not only his plan for Germany's military domination of Europe but also his attempt to turn Berlin into the capital of the world, Germina -- the two plans were not only closely connected, each was a precondition and expression of the other," Friedrich writes. "Berlin continues to the present day to bear the burden of both these foolhardy schemes."

Today, Berlin is a vibrant, progressive, tolerant, multicultural capital of a reunified Germany.
Hitler would have hated the Berlin he inadvertently helped create.

Frank T. Csongos, former bureau chief of United Press International and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reported for UPI from Berlin in 1991 when it became the capital of a reunited Germany.

Greater Berlin 1933 to 1945

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.

Germania: Hitler's Big Plans for Berlin

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

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

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

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.

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"DIE NEUE REICHSKANZLEI"

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

BERLIN: THE CITY TARGET

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

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).

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.

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

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

 

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.

Featured Website: Third Reich in Ruins

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.