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.
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.
