The German State Library on Unter den Linden decked out for Berlin’s 700th anniversary celebration
Slouching towards Germania
The Nazi leaders’ distaste for Berlin as it stood in the mid-1930s was reflected in their determination to physically transform the city into a capital worthy of the role they expected it to play in coming generations. Berlin was not the only German city earmarked for extensive renovation under the Nazis, but the reconstruction planned for the capital was more far-reaching than anywhere else, even Munich. Of course, the aspiration to reinvent Berlin was nothing new—earlier national leaders had also sought to remake the city—but the Nazi concept was distinguished by a plan to replace the entire city center with a new political stage set of monumental proportions. Berlin would be reborn as “Germania”—the most grandiose capital in the world.
In addition to making Berlin grand, the Nazis saw their urban renewal of the capital as a means to combat their old enemies, the Socialists and Communists. They would “renew” the traditional Red neighborhoods by uprooting their inhabitants and scattering them to the margins of the city. As one party spokesman explained, this would effectively rid the inner city of “asocial and traitorous elements.”
Adolf Hitler, who had been fascinated with architecture since his days in Vienna, personally supervised the Nazi plan for Berlin’s urban renewal. On September 19, 1933, during a discussion of ways to improve communication between the northern and southern parts of the city, Hitler proposed a new north-south road to complement the east-west axis running through the Brandenburg Gate. He wanted to ensure that ongoing schemes for Berlin’s reconstruction were appropriate to “the creation of a capital city of hitherto undreamed-of display . . . [to the creation of] a sublime metropolis.”
The Nazis’ earliest buildings in Berlin, however, were designed as much for function as for display. Their first major project was an expansion of the Reichs-bank (National Bank), which yielded a complex whose long curved facade was rather austere save for the inevitable Nazi eagles. Among the architects who competed for this project were the Bauhaus veterans Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, which suggests that at this point there was no clear National Socialist architectural aesthetic. In 1935/36, when Germany reintroduced military conscription, a huge new building went up on the Wilhelmstrasse: the Reichsluftfahrtmin-isterium (Reich Air Ministry). Designed by Ernst Sagebiel, a pupil of Heinrich Tessenow, the structure was meant to provide much-needed space for a new ministry that was expanding along with the Nazis’ military ambitions. Master of this domain was Air Minister Hermann Göring, who ensured that the 400,000-square-foot complex had plenty of heroic reliefs on its facade and in its marbled hallways. Berliners joked that Göring’s new quarters reflected the minister’s motto: “Pure and simple, and hang the expense.” Berlin’s civilian airport, Tempelhof, underwent an extensive facelift and expansion in the mid-1930s. Now boasting the largest airport on the continent, Berlin billed itself as the “air hub of Europe.” The city’s claim to technological superiority was buttressed by a series of new industrial exhibition halls at the Funkturm (Radio Tower), and by an all-purpose building called the Deutschlandhalle, which gave Berlin more exhibition space than any other city in Europe. In addition to serving useful functions, these projects provided jobs for thousands of construction workers, helping thereby to ease the problem of unemployment.
Model of Hitler’s planned north-south axis, including the Arch of Triumph and the domed Hall of the People
The Reich Air Ministry Building (Göring’s headquarters), 1937
These early buildings did not suit Hitler’s concept of grandiosity. Ignoring Berlin’s real needs, which were for more low-cost housing and retail space, Hitler sketched plans for representational buildings and roads that would dwarf not only the city’s existing public buildings but also the great monuments of other world capitals, past and present. The core of his concept, which he began to elaborate in late 1933, involved two gargantuan structures, an arch of triumph and a domed assembly hall, to be connected by his north-south avenue slicing through the center of the city. The projected Assembly Hall, Berlin’s answer to St. Peter’s, would be many times larger than that structure, just as Berlin’s planned Arch of Triumph, 386 feet high and 550 feet wide, would make Paris’s equivalent seem Lilliputian. The North-South Axis, while modeled on the Champs-Elysées, would be about seventy feet wider and two and one-half times as long. In July 1934 Hitler proposed to Berlin’s municipal authorities an annual budget of 60 million reichsmarks for the next twenty years to complete this scheme; much of the funding was to come from the city’s own budget.
Mayor Lippert and his colleagues, though themselves no paragons of architectural taste, were horrified by this plan and sought to replace it with a more modest venture. Galling Lippert “an incompetent, an idiot, a failure, a zero,” Hitler had him removed from all responsibility for the reconstruction of Berlin and brought in a young man with whom he believed he could work harmoniously: Albert Speer.
Speer, one of the most complex figures in the leadership of the Third Reich, came from a wealthy Mannheim family that regarded the Nazis as hopelessly plebeian. Befitting his background, Speer was a reserved and diffident fellow who would never think of pummeling Jews in the streets. Yet as an architectural student in Munich and Berlin he became so fascinated with the Nazis that he joined the party, and also the SA, in 1931. He later insisted that this had nothing to do with “politics,” as if the Nazis were some kind of hobby club. In fact, from early on Speer was determined to capture Nazi ideals in mortar and stone, though it took him some time to find a consistent “voice.” His first political commission in Berlin was to renovate a villa in Grunewald for a Nazi district headquarters. He used Bauhaus-inspired wallpaper even though he feared this might be seen as “communistic.” To his relief, the district leader assured him that the Nazis would “take the best they could get from everywhere, even from the Communists.” Next, Speer converted a Schinkel-designed palace on the VoBstrasse for use as the Nazi Gauleitung in Berlin. Pleased with the work, Goebbels commissioned him to renovate the propaganda ministry as well as his private townhouse in the city. The speed with which Speer completed these projects impressed Hitler, who was looking for an architect who could make big things happen in minimal time. In the wake of the Night of the Long Knives, he had decided to move the top leaders of the SA to Berlin so he could keep an eye on them. To house them, he wanted to rebuild the Borsig Palace. He assigned the project to Speer, telling him to start at once. When Speer objected that Papen’s office was in the Borsig Palace, and that the vice-chancellor would need time to move out, Hitler told him to start working with no consideration for Papen. Speer instructed his workmen to create as much noise and dust as possible, thereby expediting Papen’s departure. Hitler was delighted, making jokes about “dusty bureaucrats.” During the work, Speer noticed a pool of dried blood on the floor where Papen’s assistant, Herbert von Bose, had been gunned down in the Night of the Long Knives. He simply looked away—his response to unpleasant realities during the rest of his career in the Third Reich.
Having passed the Borsig test, Speer now received a much bigger assignment— that of designing a new complex for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. For this project he hit on the style that was to become his trademark: a pumped-up neoclassicism. He proposed a knockoff of the Pergamum Altar: “a mighty flight of stairs topped and enclosed by a long colonnade, flanked on both sides by stone abutments.” To make space for this monstrous structure, Speer blew up a streetcar depot. Its unsightly wreckage inspired him to propound his “theory of ruin value,” according to which all Nazi buildings should be constructed with materials and techniques that would make them look as noble as ancient Roman or Greek ruins when they themselves fell into decay in the distant future. Some Nazi leaders were scandalized by the thought that Third Reich artifacts might ever decay, but Hitler, a Romantic in such matters, gave orders that henceforth all major buildings of the Reich were to be erected in keeping with this “law of ruins.”