Authors: Roger Moorhouse
intended to help Nazi scientists and architects to gauge the ability of the
sandy soil of Berlin to support massive buildings. Far from being an
obscure technical exercise, ‘the mushroom’ was an essential component
in one of the most ambitious building projects ever devised. It was to
serve as the test bed for a gargantuan remodelling of the German capital,
a project that was intended to transform Berlin into ‘Germania’.
The plans for ‘Germania’ had been of long gestation. Originally dating
back to a municipal redevelopment project from the early 1920s, they
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101
had been seized upon by Hitler, who was then a frustrated architect and
struggling politician. Finding the official proposals inadequate, Hitler had
made some sketches of his own, which he squirrelled away for a later date.
Hitler had also committed his thoughts on the subject to paper in
Mein Kampf
, in which he elaborated, at some length, on the need for new
architectural showpieces to define the ‘new’ Germany. He bemoaned
the lack of ‘cultural building’ in the nineteenth century, which, he said,
had reduced Germany’s cities to ‘mere human settlements’, which were
‘culturally insignificant’. Where Germany’s cities had once seen tower -
ing cathedrals, he noted, now they possessed nothing to dominate
the skyline, no buildings which ‘might somehow be regarded as the
symbols of the whole epoch . . . [and] reflect the greatness and wealth
of the community’. Hitler had nothing but contempt for the ‘pettiest
utilitarianism’ that characterised the architecture of his own era. ‘If the
fate of Rome should strike Berlin’, he concluded, ‘future generations
would someday admire the department stores of a few Jews as the might-
iest works of our era and the hotels of a few corporations as the
characteristic expression of the culture of our times.’2
Hitler argued that public buildings were necessary to define the new
Germany and to inspire what he called the ‘sense of heroism’ in the
German people. ‘We are the first since the time of the medieval cathe-
drals’, he told a confidante, ‘to provide the artist with important and
imposing tasks. Not homes and little private buildings, but the most
tremendous architecture that has been seen since the gigantic buildings
of Egypt and Babylon.’3 To this end, after 1933 large-scale building
projects would eventually be devised that spanned the entire country
– from the Prora holiday resort on the Baltic coast to the SS training
school at Sonthofen in the foothills of the Alps.4 As the capital of the
Greater German Reich, Berlin would always be of special significance,
however. Berlin was foreseen by the Nazis as the new Rome.5
The construction programme began soon after the Nazis seized power.
Göring’s new Air Ministry, for instance, was completed in 1936. Extending
more than 250 metres along Wilhelmstrasse, in the heart of Berlin’s
administrative district, its seven storeys, four thousand windows and seven
kilometres of corridors made it the largest office building in Europe. Its
vast scale was only matched in newsworthiness by the starkness of its
architecture, a curious amalgam of neo-classicism and art deco, which
came to be known as ‘Luftwaffe modern’.
102
berlin at war
Nineteen thirty-six saw two further notable additions to the Berlin
landscape. The Olympic Stadium was built as the centrepiece for the
Olympic Games of that year and was intended – like the Games them-
selves – to serve as a showpiece for Nazi Germany. It was hugely impres-
sive, with a dramatic sweep of unbroken terracing providing seats for
over 100,000 spectators. Besides the stadium itself, the site consisted of
a number of other structures and open spaces, whose form and func-
tion were undoubtedly influenced by Nazi design concepts. The largest
of them, the Maifeld, was an enormous field, with capacity for over
250,000 participants, and a stand for 60,000 spectators at one end.
Though it served as a venue for gymnastic displays and polo during the
Olympics, it was clearly conceived as a stage for political rallies. Beyond
that, lesser amphitheatres and more than 150 additional buildings offered
facilities for both sporting and political events. The entire area, over 300
acres in total, was adorned by a series of large, heroic sculptures by noted
Nazi sculptors. Quite obviously, the Olympic complex served a purpose
that far surpassed the mere sporting requirements of the XI Olympiad.
The second project, Tempelhof airport, was no less ambitious.
Designed by Ernst Sagebiel, the architect responsible for Göring’s Air
Ministry, it was equally immense. Begun in 1936, it consisted of a main
terminal building stretching in a 1.2-kilometre-long arc around the north-
western corner of the airfield. This opened into a large central hall,
whose clean lines and simplicity would not have failed to impress the
visitor. On the outside, meanwhile, the building’s grand, neo-classical
frontage of shell-limestone echoed the stark architectural styles that were
then so current in the German capital.
For all their monumental grandeur, however, all of these new archi-
tectural icons of Nazi Berlin would be dwarfed by the scale of the
Germania project. The plans were so massive in conception, indeed,
that they would challenge even the most hyperbole- and superlative-
prone of Nazi commentators. Hitler foresaw nothing less than a new
heart for the capital, centred on two intersecting, central axes, one
running north–south and another east–west. Along these thoroughfares,
over a hundred new public and ceremonial buildings would be located,
all of them conceived on a grand scale, including an ‘Arc de Triomphe’
to commemorate Germany’s dead of the Great War, and an enormous
domed hall for political events.
Initially, Hitler had considered that the plans could be carried out
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by Berlin’s existing city administration. However, he soon tired of
what he perceived as their incompetence, obstructionism and lack
of a grand vision. By way of encouragement, he suggested starting
from scratch, constructing a purpose-built capital away from Berlin,
reckoning that the threat would bring the city fathers to their senses.
He even claimed to have found a suitable site – on the Müritzsee, 100
miles north of the capital in rural Mecklenburg.6 In the end, however,
he decided to bypass the existing planning authorities altogether. The
reconstruction of Berlin, which Hitler considered ‘the greatest building
assignment of all’, would be handed to Albert Speer.7
Albert Speer remains one of the most fascinating and controversial figures
of the Third Reich. Born in Mannheim in 1905, he was educated, sophis-
ticated and urbane, in sharp contrast to many of the senior Nazi cadres
in whose circles he moved. His rise was swift. After attending a Nazi
rally in Berlin in 1930, Speer had joined the Party, and was soon being
rewarded with small architectural commissions. As his reputation grew,
so did the scale of the contracts he won. In the spring of 1933, only weeks
after the Nazis came to power, he was charged with renovating the
Leopold Palace, the home of the new Ministry of Propaganda. The
design for the Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg followed, and in 1937
he was asked to design the German pavilion for the Paris Exposition.
Speer was by no means the only architect favoured with commis-
sions from the leaders of the Third Reich; there were many others,
such as Paul Ludwig Troost, Hermann Giesler and Roderich Fick. But,
by the late 1930s, Speer had already emerged as Hitler’s architect of
choice. There has been much speculation about the relationship
between the two men. Hitler, for his part, was doubtless impressed by
Speer’s erudition and confidence, and possibly saw in the young archi-
tect an inkling of how his own destiny might have played out had he
been able to realise his artistic ambitions. Speer, meanwhile, was no
doubt intoxicated by his sudden proximity to the epicentre of power
in the new Reich, and believed in Hitler’s supposed ‘genius’ with all
the fervour and certainty of the acolyte.
Moreover, Speer seems to have known, almost instinctively, how best
to interpret and realise his master’s architectural desires. He persistently
played up to Hitler’s megalomaniacal desire for size. Knowing how Hitler
resented the fact that other architects and planners seemed intent on
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berlin at war
scaling his ideas down to more manageable proportions, Speer did the
opposite. If Hitler demanded a specified scale, he would be more likely
to exceed it. Gerdy Troost, the widow of Paul Ludwig Troost, reported
that if Hitler had told her husband to design a building of a hundred
metres, ‘he would have thought it over and replied that for structural
and aesthetic reasons it could be merely ninety-six metres. But if Hitler
had given a similar order to Speer, the latter’s reply would have been,
“My Führer, two hundred metres!”’8
Part of this was down to arrant sycophancy, but Speer also under-
stood what underpinned Hitler’s monumentalist taste. In the first instance,
he realised that it was motivated at least in part by petty jealousy and
one-upmanship. Hitler never tired of comparing Berlin to other European
capitals. ‘Berlin is a big city’, he once said to Speer, ‘but not a real metrop-
olis. Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Or even Vienna.
Those are cities with grand style. Berlin is nothing but an unregulated
accumulation of buildings. We must surpass Paris and Vienna.’9
Yet, there was also something more substantial, more philosophical,
feeding Hitler’s gigantism. Hitler saw himself not as building a city for his
own day, but for posterity; indeed, for generations to come. As he explained
in a speech in 1937, ‘these buildings of ours should not be conceived for
the year 1940, no, not for the year 2000, but like the cathedrals of our past,
they shall stretch into the millennia of the future’.10 Hitler was rebuilding
Berlin as the capital of Germandom and the Aryan race, the centrepiece
of the civilised world. Given the enormous historical importance of
such a task, he could not be expected to build according to the needs
and mores of the
current
generation of Germans. In designing
Germania, therefore, Hitler took little heed of the petty concerns of
the planners, or of trivial realities on the ground.
Speer took this vision to heart. Indeed, he appears to have run with it,
developing his own, related theory of ‘Ruin Value’, wherein each building
was to be constructed with one eye on its future aesthetics as a ruin. Even
in a state of decay, he reasoned, hundreds or even thousands of years into
the future, his buildings would mirror Roman and Greek models. To this
end, steel girders and ferro-concrete would be shunned in favour of sand-
stone and marble, and buildings would be constructed so that the walls
did not require a finished roof to brace them. (One might speculate in
this regard whether Speer was anticipating the Berlin of 1945, where there
was scarcely a roof left intact.)
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105
This was a potentially risky strategy. Though it certainly dovetailed
with Hitler’s key idea, it also seemed to equate Hitler’s grand plans with
the hubris and futility of Ozymandias. Yet, surprisingly perhaps, Speer’s
theory found favour with the Führer. ‘To illustrate my ideas’, he wrote,
I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand
on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, over-
grown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there,
but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler’s entourage, this
drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of
a period of decline for the newly-founded Reich destined to last a thou-
sand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler’s closest followers. But
he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders
that in future the important buildings of the Reich were to be erected
in keeping with the principles of this ‘law of ruins’.11
With such philosophical underpinning in place, Hitler began to plan
for the wholesale reorganisation and redevelopment of Berlin. Speer
had already been working on Hitler’s plans when, in January 1937, he
was appointed as the
Generalbauinspektor
(‘GBI’ or Inspector General
of Building) for the German capital. In theory, at least, Speer’s new
position was only of equivalent rank to a junior minister; in reality, it
was far more important. Responsible only to Hitler, Speer held the
right of veto over
all
building and planning projects in Berlin. He also had the power to expropriate
any
necessary properties and was en -
titled to subordinate
all
government departments and state offices in