Neo-Classical Power Architecture

The Great German Art exhibition was housed in a purpose-built museum, designed in the style of an antique temple by the architect Paul Ludwig Troost. Its heavy, squared-off columns marching in front of a solid rectangular block of a building were a long way away from the delicate and subtle neo-Classical architecture that Troost sought to imitate. Like other Nazi buildings, it was first and foremost a statement of power. The House of German Art was only one of a large number of prestigious projects Hitler had begun as soon as he took power in 1933. Indeed, he had been thinking about them since the early 1920s. Hitler imagined himself an architect even more than he thought of himself as a painter, and paid more attention to architecture than to any other of the arts. ‘Every great era finds the concluding expression of its values in its buildings,’ he declared in 1938: ‘When peoples inwardly experience great times, they also give these times external expression. Their word is then more convincing than when it is spoken: it is the word in stone!’

The new public buildings of the Third Reich were all conceived in this massive, pseudo-Classical, monumental style. Like the public buildings Hitler had observed and drawn on Vienna’s Ringstrasse in his younger days, they were intended to project permanence and durability. All of them were influenced by Hitler’s own personal architectural and design plans. Hitler spent hours working with architects on refining their ideas, poring over models and discussing the finer points of style and decoration. Already in 1931-2 he had collaborated with Troost on redesigning the Königsplatz in Munich, and when he came to power, these plans were put into effect. The old Party headquarters at the Brown House were replaced by a gigantic Leader Building and a huge Administration Building, housing vast reception halls and decorated with swastikas and eagles on the façade. There was a balcony on each one from which Hitler could speak to the crowds who were expected to gather below. Despite their appearance, the new buildings incorporated advanced technology in their construction and equipment, including air-conditioning. Adjoining were two characteristic expressions of the Nazi cult of the dead: temples of honour dedicated to the Nazis who had been killed in the 1923 beer-hall putsch. In each of them, an atmosphere of reverent sacrality prevailed, with the bodies of the recently exhumed martyrs displayed in sarcophagi mounted on a dais, open to the elements, and flanked by twenty limestone pillars lit by flaming braziers. The huge grass arena of the Königsplatz itself was paved over with 24,000 square feet of granite slabs. ‘Something new has been created here,’ remarked a commentator, ‘the deepest meaning of which is a political one.’ Here the organized and disciplined masses would gather to swear allegiance to the new order. The whole ensemble was, he concluded, ‘ideology become stone’.

As in other fields, Nazi cultural managers took some time to impose their views. The Reich Chamber of Architects soon expelled Jewish practitioners from the profession, but despite Nazi hostility to ultramodern architecture, it was slower to move against the modernists, some of whom, such as Mies van der Rohe, remained in Germany for a while, though finding it increasingly difficult to practise. By 1935, however, the more experimental types of modernism had been effectively routed; Mies soon emigrated to New York. By the mid-1930s, constructions of the Weimar era such as modernist apartment blocks were no longer in fashion. Instead, the Nazi ideal of domestic architecture favoured a vernacular, pseudo-peasant style such as that practised by the leading proponent of racial theories of modern art, Paul Schultze-Naumburg. These were only showcases for the suburbs; necessity meant that blocks of flats still had to be constructed in the inner cities, where pitched roofs, however, were now preferred over flat roofs because they were believed to be more German. But it was into public buildings that Hitler put his real passion. In Munich, the foundations were laid for a gigantic new central railway station that was designed to be the largest steel-frame structure in the world, with a dome higher than the twin towers of Munich’s signature landmark, the Frauenkirche. Not only Munich, but other cities too were to be transformed into massive stone statements of the power and permanence of the Third Reich. Hamburg was to be graced with a new skyscraper for the Nazi Party’s regional headquarters higher than the Empire State Building in New York, crowned by an enormous neon swastika to act as a beacon for incoming ships. Down-river, the suburb of Othmarschen was to be demolished to make way for the ramps and piles of a gargantuan suspension bridge across the Elbe. The bridge was to be the largest in the world, larger by far than the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, on which it was modelled.

In Berlin, a huge new airport terminal was built at Tempelhof, with over 2,000 rooms. A grandiose new Ministry of Aviation incorporated lavish, marble-floored halls, swastikas and memorials to famous German aviators. A vast Olympic Stadium, costing 77 million Reichsmarks, held 100,000 spectators, attending not only sporting events, but also major Nazi rallies. Here too, in adjoining towers, there were memorials for the fallen, in this case German soldiers of the First World War. By 1938 Hitler had also commissioned a new Reich Chancellery, since he now found the existing one too modest. It was even bigger and more imposing than the Munich buildings. The main gallery was nearly 500 feet long; twice as long, as Hitler noted, as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Inaugurated in 1939, the new Reich Chancellery, one commentator recorded, advertised ‘the eminence and richness of a Reich which has become a super-power’. In fact, the gigantism of all these projects, planned for completion by the early 1950s - a remarkably short space of time - was intended to signify Germany’s arrival by that date not just as a super-power but as the dominant power in the world.

The new Reich Chancellery was designed not by Hitler’s favourite architect, Paul Troost, who had died in January 1934, but by a newcomer who was to play a central role in the Third Reich’s later years, Troost’s young collaborator Albert Speer. Born in Mannheim in 1905, Speer belonged to a generation of professionals whose ambitions were framed by the bitter and chaotic experiences of the First World War, the Revolution and the hyperinflation. The son of an architect, and thus a member of Germany’s educated upper middle class, Speer trained with the architect Heinrich Tessenow in Berlin, and formed close friendships with a number of Tessenow’s other pupils. Their teacher imbued them with an open approach to architecture, espousing neither modernism nor its antithesis, but emphasizing simplicity of form and the importance of rooting their style in the experience of the German people. As in every university in the mid-to-late 1920s, the atmosphere among the students was strongly right-wing, and despite his liberal background, Speer succumbed. In 1931, Hitler addressed Berlin’s students at a beer-hall meeting. Speer, in the audience, was, he later confessed, ‘carried away on the wave of the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence. It swept away any scepticism, any reservations.’

Overwhelmed, Speer joined the Nazi Party and threw himself into its work, volunteering for the National Socialist Drivers’ Corps and exploring, though not taking up, the possibility of joining the SS. By 1932 he was practising architecture independently, and began to use his Party contacts to get commissions. Goebbels asked him to help with the conversion and refurbishment of the Propaganda Ministry, a building by the great nineteenth-century architect Friedrich von Schinkel which Goebbels had vandalized with the help of a gang of brownshirts on moving in. Not surprisingly, Goebbels scorned Speer’s attempt to preserve what was left of Schinkel’s Classical interiors, and had the work redone in a more grandiose style a few months after Speer had completed his task. The young architect’s next project was more successful, however. Seeing the plans developed in the Propaganda Ministry for the celebration of the Day of National Labour on the Tempelhof Field in Berlin on 1 May 1933, Speer complained about their unimaginative quality and was commissioned to improve them. His successful innovations, including massive banners, swastikas and searchlights, led Goebbels to commission him to design the surround for the Nuremberg Rally later that year. It was Speer who, in 1934, created the ‘cathedral of light’ effect produced by upward-beamed searchlights that so impressed foreign visitors. Soon he was refurbishing Nazi Party offices and remodelling the interior of Goebbels’s new house on the Wannsee, just outside Berlin. Speer felt himself energized by the purposeful atmosphere surrounding the Nazi leaders. He worked extremely hard and got things done quickly. In no time at all, still only in his late twenties, he had made a name for himself amongst the Nazi leadership.

The death of Troost, whom Hitler had revered, catapulted Speer into the Leader’s personal entourage, as Hitler co-opted the young man as his personal architectural adviser, someone to whom he could talk about his favourite hobby without the deference he had felt was owed to Troost. Speer was overwhelmed by this attention, and moved his family and home to be near to Hitler’s Bavarian retreat above Berchtesgaden. A frequent guest at Hitler’s mountain lodge, Speer was carried along by the Leader’s desire to construct huge, monumental buildings in a style ultimately derived from Classical antiquity. Soon he was being entrusted with schemes of rapidly increasing ambition, many of them based on sketches Hitler had himself made in the early-to-mid 1920s. Speer was commissioned to rebuild and extend the Nuremberg Party Rally grounds in a series of imposing new buildings constructed at vast expense from the late 1930s, including a stadium that would hold 405,000 people, a Congress Hall seating 60,000 and two huge parade-grounds, the Zeppelin Field and the Mars Field, flanked by rows of columns and providing standing room for 250,000 and 500,000 people respectively. Meanwhile he designed and built the German Pavilion at the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, another huge, bombastic structure, the largest in the entire exhibition. It was dominated by a massive pseudo-Classical tower of ten fluted piers joined by a cornice at the top, towering over all the nearby structures, including the Soviet pavilion, and outdone only by the Eiffel Tower, which stood at the end of the avenue on which the pavilions were located. Red swastikas glowed at night from the spaces between the piers. Next to the tower, the long, rectangular, windowless main hall projected a monolithic sense of unity to the outside world. Its interior was compared by an exiled German art critic, Paul Westheim, in a macabre, prophetic image, to a crematorium, with the tower taking the place of the chimney.

Speer’s success as the architect of propaganda constructions such as these led to his appointment by Hitler on 30 January 1938 as the General Building Inspector for the National Capital, charged with putting into effect the Leader’s megalomaniac plans for the transformation of Berlin into a world capital, Germania, by 1950. A huge axis of wide boulevards designed for military parades was to be cut through Berlin. In the middle would stand a triumphal arch 400 feet high, more than twice as big as its counterpart in Paris, the Arc de Triomphe. The main avenue would lead up to a Great Hall, whose dome was to be 825 feet in diameter, the largest in the world. At the end of each of the four boulevards there would be an airport. Hitler himself had drawn up the plans many years before and discussed them with Speer many times since they had first met. Now, he decided, was the time to begin to put them into effect. They would last for all eternity, a monument to the Third Reich when Hitler had long since departed the scene. Evictions and the bulldozing of houses and apartment blocks levelled the ground for the new boulevards, and part of the scheme was eventually opened to traffic. Meanwhile, fresh buildings were added, including the new Reich Chancellery, and soon Speer had built a scale model which Hitler spent many hours in the following years poring over in his company, making adjustments, and bemoaning the fact that he himself had never become an architect.

By the mid-1930s, Speer was heading a large firm of architects and gaining managerial experience that would stand him in good stead when he was suddenly catapulted into a much larger and more important role during the war. Many of his most striking designs were not purely his own but were worked out in a team whose members, notably Hans Peter Klinke, a fellow student of Tessenow’s, played a role at least as creative as his own. Moreover, the firm’s designs were far from original or even particularly Nazi in style: the civic architecture of the era drew on Classical models in other countries too, and the idea of remodelling cities along geometrical lines, with broad boulevards and great public buildings, was hardly new either; in many ways, for instance, Speer’s plans for Berlin bore a striking resemblance to the centre of the Federal capital of the United States in Washington, D.C., with its wide central mall surrounded by large colonnaded neo-Classical structures all in gleaming white stone. What distinguished Nazi civic architecture and city planning was not the Classical derivation of its style but the maniacal gigantism of its scale. Everything might not be very different from civic structures elsewhere, but it certainly was going to be vastly bigger than anything the world had so far seen. This was already apparent in the models of Berlin that Speer spent so much time inspecting with his master. On one occasion, he showed them in a private session to his 75-year-old father, himself a retired architect. ‘You’ve all gone completely crazy,’ the old man said.

Germania: Hitler's Dream Capital

Albert Speer presents Hitler with a model of the German Pavilion designed for the World's Fair in Paris, 1937. Mary Evans Picture Library

By Roger Moorhouse | Published in History Today Volume: 62 Issue: 3

Albert Speer’s plan to transform Berlin into the capital of a 1,000-year Reich would have created a vast monument to misanthropy, as Roger Moorhouse explains.

In 1937 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer was given the task of transforming Berlin from the sprawling metropolis that it was into Germania, the gleaming new capital of a Greater German ‘World Empire’, the centrepiece of the civilised world.

It was a vast undertaking. Plans, swiftly drawn up by Speer’s office, were presented to the public on January 28th, 1938. The reaction within Germany was predictably enthusiastic, with newspapers carrying detailed explanations and commentaries. Der Angriff stated that the designs were ‘truly monumental … far exceeding all expectations’, while the Völkischer Beobachter proclaimed grandly that ‘from this desert of stone, shall emerge the capital of a thousand-year Reich’. The foreign press, though less effusive, nonetheless concurred. The New York Times, for instance, described the project as ‘perhaps the most ambitious planning scheme’ of the modern era.

The plans certainly did not want for ambition. In accordance with Hitler’s original sketches they centred on a grand boulevard, which was to run from north to south for around seven kilometres through the heart of the city, linking two proposed new rail termini. Given carte blanche in redesigning this vast swathe of the city centre, Speer and his minions had had a field day and their plans read like a catalogue of comparatives and superlatives. The vast Grand Hall, for instance, close to the Reichstag, would have been the largest enclosed space in the world, with a dome 16 times larger than that of St Peter’s in Rome. Designed to host 180,000 people, there were concerns among the planners that the exhaled breath of the audience might even produce ‘weather’ beneath the cavernous coffered ceiling. The 117-metre tall Arch of Triumph, meanwhile, was designed – on Hitler’s express instruction – to carry the names of Germany’s 1.8 million fallen of the First World War engraved upon its walls. Similarly massive, it would have comfortably accommodated its Parisian namesake beneath its arch. Linking these monuments along the new axis would be a plethora of new buildings, civic and commercial, flanking broad avenues, ornamental obelisks, an artificial lake and a vast ‘circus’ peppered with Nazi statuary.

The Mosaic Hall of the new Reich Chancellery, 1939. AKG Images.

The image that will be familiar to many is of Hitler inspecting the white scale-model of this main axis, which was presented to him on his 50th birthday in April 1939 and was erected in a side-room of the Reich Chancellery. Though Hitler’s interest in the project was restricted almost exclusively to the north-south axis – and he would often return to muse over the model – the plans were not limited to that one area. Speer had succeeded in incorporating those headline designs into a much more thoroughgoing reorganisation of the city’s infrastructure.

First of all, Berlin’s rail network was to be overhauled, with the two new stations replacing three old termini and with many miles of sidings being replaced by a new line that would circle the city centre. Roads, too, were to be redrawn. The two new boulevards – the proposed north-south axis and the east-west axis, completed in 1939 – were only the centrepiece of a radical redevelopment. In addition Speer foresaw the city’s formerly organic urban growth being rationalised by the addition of radial thoroughfares and four concentric ring roads, the outermost of which would provide a direct connect-ion to the German autobahn network.

Visions of Germania: How the city might have looked

Entire suburbs were to be constructed to provide modern housing stock, administrative buildings and new commercial developments, which, it was planned would accommodate over 200,000 Berliners, moved out of the slums of the city centre. New airports were foreseen, including one for seaplanes on the lake at Rangsdorf. Even the city’s parks would be revamped, with horticultural studies being commissioned to report on the species that were required to restore the 18th-century flora of the region. Such was the scale of the Germania plans that, when Speer’s father – himself an architect – saw them, he summed up the thoughts of many of his contemporaries, saying: ‘You’ve all gone completely crazy.’

Of course only a tiny fraction of these grandiose designs would ever be realised. The visitor to Berlin today will struggle to see much evidence of Speer’s Germania unless he or she knows where to look. Most obvious is the boulevard west of the Brandenburg Gate, which is the old east-west axis and which is still illuminated by some of Speer’s original – and rather elegant – street lamps. Meanwhile the Victory Column (inaugurated in 1873 following Prussia’s victories over Denmark, Austria and France in the 1860s and 1870s) was moved to its present location to make way for the projected north-south Axis. Most bizarrely, the southern suburb of Tempelhof still contains a huge circular concrete block weighing over 12,000 tonnes – the Schwerbelastungskörper, or ‘heavy load-bearing body’ – which was supposed to help Speer’s engineers gauge the ability of Berlin’s sandy soil to take the vast weight of the proposed Arch of Triumph. Too large and too solid to demolish, the block stands to this day as a silent monument to Nazi megalomania.

More than a pipedream

Given that so little of Germania was ever completed and that only a fraction of it remains, it is easy to underestimate its significance. Speer’s planned rebuilding of Berlin is too readily dismissed as a Nazi pipedream; a still-born manifestation of Hitler’s architectural fantasies thankfully confined to the drawing board. Yet, in spite of the fact that Germania never came into being it would be a mistake if we were to allow ourselves to view it merely as an abstract: a folly, or an architectural curiosity somehow divorced from the odious regime that spawned it. For, as we shall see, Germania was in many ways a rather perfect representation of Nazism.

First, the issue of its feasibility must be assessed. Despite its soaring ambition the plan to re-model Berlin was part of a veritable orgy of building that had gripped the later, peacetime years of the Third Reich. Much of that, certainly, was relatively small-scale – barracks, settlements, schools and so on – but a number of projects showed similarly monumental tendencies and were themselves considerable feats of planning and construction. Most famously, perhaps, there is the example of Hitler’s vast new Reich Chancellery, which stretched the entire 400-metre length of the Voss Strasse in Berlin and was completed in 1939 at a cost of over 90 million Reichsmarks. 

Other Berlin landmarks were similarly grandiose: the Olympic Stadium, opened in 1936, seated 100,000 spectators and was part of a much larger complex that was intended as much for political as for sporting ends. Göring’s Air Ministry, meanwhile, also completed in 1936, was once the largest office building in the world, offering 2,800 rooms across seven floors with 4,000 windows and nearly seven kilometres of corridors. Today it is home to the German finance ministry.

Elsewhere construction was no more modest. In Nuremberg Speer’s famed tribune on the Zeppelin Field was dwarfed by the nearby Congress Hall, modelled on the Colosseum in Rome, which was built to accommodate 50,000 of the Nazi faithful. Though it only reached a height of 39 metres – as opposed to the 70 metres that was planned – it is still the largest surviving building of the Nazi period; while at Prora, on the Baltic coast, a huge holiday resort was constructed, which, though unfinished at the outbreak of war in 1939, stretched for 4.5km along the seafront and would have housed over 20,000 holidaymakers. Even Hitler’s folly above Berchtesgaden – the Kehlsteinhaus, or ‘Eagle’s Nest’ – was an ambitious project. Completed in 1938, after little over a year in construction, it was sited atop an Alpine ridge at an altitude of over 6,000 feet and was accessed via a purpose-built seven-kilometre mountain road, which had to be blasted into the mountainside.

When considering Hitler’s plans for Berlin, therefore, one must bear in mind the wider context of Nazi construction and the astonishing track record that Hitler’s architects already had in successfully realising his visions. Germania was not mere Nazi ‘pie in the sky’. It was a part of a concerted programme to provide Germany with a portfolio of grand-scale, monumental architecture, which, Hitler believed, would be seen as the defining buildings of the age, rivals to Egypt, Babylon and Rome, inspiring future generations of Germans. It was certainly not merely a dictator’s architectural wish-list.

Quarries and camps

Given its central importance to the Nazi vision, the building frenzy – of which Germania was part – was thoroughly integrated into the Third Reich’s economy and terror networks. Indeed it is not widely understood just how close the relationship was between the building programme and the concentration camps. The vast expansion of the camp system from 1936 onwards had, in fact, been fuelled primarily by the demand for labour and materials from the burgeoning construction sector, with Albert Speer – and Germania – in the vanguard.

Consequently, many of the most infamous concentration camps of the Nazi era – Mauthausen, Gross Rosen and Buchenwald among them – were established close to quarries. The camp at Mauthausen, for instance, was set up in 1938 alongside the granite quarry that had supplied much of the stone used to pave the streets of Vienna, while the camp at Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, was close to what was intended to be one of the largest brickworks in the world. The camp-quarry at Flossenbürg in northern Bavaria, meanwhile, was the source of much of the white-flecked granite that was going to be used in Berlin, some of which is still stacked inside the Congress Hall in Nuremberg. Thus Germania was not only central to the Nazi aesthetic, it also played a vital role in the establishment and maintenance of the concentration camp network. Nazi architectural planning, it seems, had synchronised perfectly with the interests of the SS.

Germania’s financing was also not as utopian as one might imagine. Speer estimated the total cost of the project, perhaps optimistically, at six billion Reichsmarks, five per cent of Germany’s GDP in 1939. Yet such was the Byzantine nature of economic relationships in the Third Reich that only a fraction of that figure would have to be paid directly by the Reich government. For one thing, the vast majority of the building materials that were prepared for the project came from the concentration camps dotted across Nazi Germany, while the quarries and brickworks themselves were owned or leased by an SS-owned company, DEST (Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke). So Germania effectively got its materials for free, with the added bonus – in Nazi eyes – that their political opponents were being ‘re-educated by labour’ in the process.

In addition the construction and demolition costs were to be spread across the annual budgets of numerous ministries, organisations and Nazi fiefdoms. And there was no shortage of willing donors, with some, such as the Nazi Labour Front, being deliberately kept at arm’s length for fear that they might wield too great an influence. The city of Berlin was required to shoulder much of the financing, with various appeals for donations and contributions to make up any shortfall. It also would not have escaped Speer’s attention that his projected costs equated exactly with the total estimated value of Jewish property in Nazi Germany. By these measures, Speer recalled, the costs of the project could be divided (and effectively concealed), leaving central government directly liable only for the Great Hall and the Arch of Victory. Hitler, meanwhile, tended to wave away any complaints from his ministers by stressing the large numbers of wealthy tourists that – one day – would visit the new capital of the Greater German Reich.

So, although little of it was actually constructed, Germania was not merely theoretical, it was very real. And it would have felt all the more real to those concentration camp inmates at Mauthausen or Flossenbürg, who had to quarry the granite slabs for Berlin’s new Reich Chancellery or the Soldier’s Hall. Even sites that never saw the light of day were prepared for; stone was cut, bricks were fired and men died. It is reasonable to assume that, of the 100,000 or so concentration camp inmates who perished at Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen, a large proportion of them died preparing the stone for the rebuilding of Berlin.

Germania was also very real for ordinary Berliners. From 1939 to 1942 the areas of the city earmarked for the project were being cleared and existing properties demolished. Even the nocturnal visits of the RAF in 1940 were welcomed by Speer’s staff as providing ‘valuable preparatory work’ for the demolition programme. Preparations elsewhere were similarly thorough. The district of the Spree-bend to the west of the Brandenburg Gate, for instance, was criss-crossed with test trenches and foundations, while to the south, by the end of 1939 the project’s first building, the Foreign Travel Office, was already completed in its essentials. Beneath it all, meanwhile, the complex of underpasses that would take through-traffic away from the new centrepiece of the Reich, had already taken shape.

The human cost

In all this demolition and construction countless thousands of people were directly affected in the German capital. Foremost among them were prisoners of war and forced labourers, who were housed in often substandard conditions and made to work around the clock and in all weathers. Despite his later protestations of innocence, Speer was never shy of exploiting PoWs as labour. Indeed in November 1941, after the opening successes of the war against the Soviet Union, he petitioned Hitler with a request for some 30,000 Soviet PoWs specifically for use in the construction of the ‘new Berlin’. Hitler acceded to the request, thereby bringing the total workforce overseen by Speer’s staff and working directly on Germania to around 130,000.

Civilians, too, faced considerable disruption. Those ‘Aryans’ who found themselves living in the way of Speer’s plans were rehoused, either in modern, purpose-built accommodation in the suburbs or else, as was more usual, in properties from which Jewish owners had been evicted. Already in 1938 Speer had suggested that the capital’s Jewish community should be moved into smaller properties, thereby freeing up larger buildings for the use of those Aryan Berliners displaced by the ongoing demolition works. By 1940 this process was well under way and many thousands of Jewish properties were being vacated.

Those displaced Jews, however, often found themselves – perversely – being moved into the path of Speer’s bulldozers. As the housing crisis in the capital worsened, many of them were unable to rent property and were forced into so-called ‘Jew-houses’, which were often those substandard blocks, already slated for demolition, that stood along the route of the construction works. There, amid chronic overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions, with as many as 200 families inhabiting a single block, they were effectively stripped of their few remaining legal rights as tenants. They could have had little inkling that worse was to come, but in October 1941 many of them would be aboard the first transports that would leave Berlin, destined for the ghetto at Łódz.

In this way the Germania project, despite being largely stillborn, had profound consequences, becoming a catalyst not only for the evolution of the concentration camp system but also for the development of Nazi policy against the capital’s Jews.

Speer’s plans for Berlin are fascinating. In an architectural sense, they are – if nothing else – a potent display of the astonishing extremes that can be reached by sycophantic architects. Yet any assessment of the Germania plans must reach beyond the narrow sphere of architecture, even if only a fraction of those designs ever graduated from the drawing board. Speer’s plans cannot simply be viewed from the architectural perspective alone: in examining them one is morally bound to consider not only the designs themselves but also the brutal methods by which they were brought into being. 

Germania, though largely unrealised, nonetheless projected its malign influence into many other spheres of life – and death – in the Third Reich. Its contempt for mankind was demonstrated not only in the treatment meted out to those doomed to cut its stone in the concentration camps or those who found themselves living in its path; it also extended to those who might one day have walked those granite-clad boulevards. It is notable, for example, that in all the plans a human dimension is almost completely lacking. Hitler, it appears, had absolutely no interest in the social aspects of the planning that he oversaw; his passion was for the buildings themselves rather than for the human beings who might one day inhabit them. Indeed it has been plausibly suggested by Frederic Spotts that the plans for Berlin’s reconstruction were themselves simply a manifestation of Hitler’s desire to reduce cities and even individuals to the status of mere playthings. When one recalls the images of the Führer stooped like some malevolent deity over his architectural models in the Reich Chancellery this is an interpretation that becomes instantly and chillingly persuasive.

Just as Albert Speer was never just an architect, therefore, Germania was never merely an architectural programme. It was, in fact, a perfect reflection of the dark, misanthropic heart of Nazism.

Roger Moorhouse is the author of Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45 (Bodley Head, 2010).

Germania Redux

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.

Germania: Visions of Grandeur

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

Speer And Hitler: The Devil's Architect

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'

Speer and Hitler Planning Germania

The Nazi Party and Berlin

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.

TEMPELHOF

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: Albert Speer's Berlin

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

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.