Berlin at War (25 page)

the human dimension is almost completely absent. As Speer recalled,

Hitler 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.32 Indeed,

it has been plausibly suggested that the plans for Berlin’s reconstruction

betrayed Hitler’s megalomaniacal desire to reduce cities and even indi-

viduals to the status of mere playthings.33 When one recalls the images

of Hitler stooped like some malevolent deity over his architectural

models in the Reich Chancellery, this interpretation becomes instantly

and chillingly persuasive.

However, for all its overweening ambition, its megalomania and its

misanthropy, the rebuilding of Berlin was
not
a Nazi pipe dream. As

Speer recalled in his post-war diary:

brutality made stone

111

It seemed to all of us that with every passing month we were almost

effortlessly drawing nearer to the reason for the arches of triumph and

the avenues of glory. The Great Hall and the Berlin Palace of the Führer

suddenly acquired a real background: the victories in Poland and

Norway, the conquest of France. In the crypt of the Soldiers’ Hall innu-

merable places were reserved for the sarcophagi of the commanders

of these campaigns.34

From the perspective of 1941, Germania was very real indeed. Hitler

himself was obsessed with the project. When he learned that Stalin was

unveiling plans for remodelling Moscow, he was so outraged that it was

on his mind on the day his armies invaded the USSR in the summer of

1941. In spite of the fact that his soldiers had just embarked on the largest

military campaign in history, a struggle that would make or break the

Third Reich, Hitler, it seems, was musing once again on architecture.

‘This’, he said to Speer that day, ‘will be the end of
their
building for good and all.’35

Indeed, by 1941, the translation from theory to reality was already

well under way. The first part of the realisation was the demolition of

those buildings that, by dint of their insufficient grandeur or the acci-

dent of their location, were slated to be destroyed. This process had

begun in 1938, when labourers had started clearing the area of the Spree

bend – the projected location of the Great Hall – as well as the streets

surrounding the planned Circus near Potsdamer Platz and the proposed

South Railway Station in Tempelhof. Already by the end of that year,

some seven thousand properties had been demolished. A further 62,000

demolitions were considered necessary.36

Initially, the affected buildings were painstakingly dismantled, with

each one requiring an average of sixty days of intensive and often

specialised labour in order to preserve building materials that could be

used elsewhere and to protect remaining buildings in close proximity.37

After the outbreak of the war, however, Speer began to despair at the

slow progress. In May 1940, he advocated that dynamite should be used

so that prisoners of war and concentration camp labour could be more

effectively utilised in clearing the debris.38

Indeed, in time, the methods advocated – or tolerated – by Speer

and his staff would become more brutal still. A cartoon drawn by one

of Speer’s department chiefs showed the capital’s suburbs being blasted

112

berlin at war

away with an enormous cannon.39 It was not really a joke. On 26 April

1941, Rudolf Wolters, one of Speer’s lieutenants, wrote that the British

bombing raid of the previous night, which had hit the area around

Potsdamer Platz, close to the site of the proposed Circus, had ‘achieved

valuable preparatory work for the purposes of the rebuilding of

Berlin’.40 That same month an internal memo noted that over 53,000

properties had already been demolished in the capital – it amounted

to only 3.6 per cent of the total.41

Alongside the demolition, construction was also under way. Beneath

the Tiergarten, for instance, a network of road tunnels was built, which

were intended to ease traffic flow around the intersection of the two

main boulevards, just west of the Brandenburg Gate. Other sites were

rather more obvious. In the area of the planned Circus, the first new

block had already risen from the rubble. The
Haus des Fremdenverkehrs
,

or ‘Foreign Travel Office’, occupied the site where Hitler had laid the

first foundation stone for the reconstruction of Berlin in the summer

of 1938.42 Completed at least in its essentials by the outbreak of war,

it soon dominated the local landscape. Its one concave, arcaded frontage

faced the wasteland that was foreseen as the Circus, and was comple-

mented by two wings extending for around 100 metres along the side

roads. Imposing in both in design and execution, it was intended, quite

explicitly, to impress and intimidate foreign travellers arriving to register

in the German capital.

All of this came at a human cost. Thousands of POWs and forced

labourers were housed in often substandard conditions and made to

work in all weathers. Despite his later protestations of innocence,

Speer was never shy of using 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 over-

seen by Speer’s staff to around 130,000.43

In addition, most of the stone and bricks that were prepared for

the project came from the network of concentration camps dotted

about Nazi Germany. It is little appreciated that many of the most

infamous concentration camps of the Nazi era – Dachau, Gross Rosen

and Buchenwald among them – were established close to quarries.

The camp at Mauthausen, for instance, was set up alongside the granite

Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday parade, 20 April 1939:

‘It was a feast for the eyes and the applause never seemed to end.’

‘We have now been returning fire since 5.45 a.m.’: Hitler announces the invasion of Poland to the Reichstag inside the Kroll Opera House, 1 September 1939.

Whitewashing the kerbstones

in preparation for the blackout.

Another novelty from the early days

of the war: a sign directs Berliners to

a public air-raid shelter.

Camouflage netting close to the Brandenburg

Gate. ‘We absolutely must do more to keep

morale high’, Goebbels wrote in his diary.

‘The continual air-raid alerts are making the

people nervous. We must be careful.’