The exterior of Hitler’s New Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer, 1939
For many of Berlin’s Jews, the Night of the Broken Glass and the subsequent anti-Jewish measures served as a wake-up call, ending the illusion that the Nazis would become more “responsible” once they had been in office for a while, or the hope that the Jews, especially those in Berlin, could remain relatively unmolested if they maintained a low profile. More and more Jews now made the painful decision to leave Germany for one of the foreign lands that would take them—a step made all the more difficult by the tight quotas on Jewish immigration in the Western countries. In early 1937 Berlin still harbored about 140,000 Jews; by July 1939 only about 75,000 remained. Among them was the chief rabbi of the local Jewish community, Leo Baeck. He no longer believed that Berlin constituted a safe haven for Germany’s Jews and he no longer advised frightened people to stay in the city. However, as the community’s spiritual leader, he felt that he himself must remain at his post to serve those who could not or would not leave. As he told his fellow Berliner, the department store owner Wilfrid Israeclass="underline" “I will go when I am the last Jew alive in Germany.”
On January 8, 1939, two months after the Reichskristallnacht pogrom, Speer’s new Chancellery building stood ready for occupancy, forty-eight hours ahead of schedule. It had been completed in record time, an achievement Hitler was very proud of. “This is no longer the American tempo; it has become the German tempo,” he declared. But of course “tempo, tempo” had long been the Berlin motto, and there was something very “Berlin” both about the speed with which the Chancellery was built and the grandiosity of its design. Here architectural bombast was carried to extremes. Boasting a front facade some 400 yards long and a main entrance framed in giant square columns, the Neue Reichskanzlei embodied that hyperthyroid neoclassicism which had become Speer’s trademark. But if the brutalist exterior sought to impress, the cavernous interior strove to overawe. Visitors arriving for an audience with Hitler drove through the main entrance into a “Court of Honor” ringed with heroic statuary. From there they ascended a staircase leading to a medium-sized reception room, which Hitler rarely used. Passing through double-doors almost seventeen feet high, supplicants entered a long hall clad in mosaic. Another flight of steps took them into a round room with a domed ceiling, from which, with stamina perhaps flagging, they emerged into a central gallery stretching 480 feet in length. Hitler was delighted with this gallery because it was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. As we have seen, the Führer loved to contemplate the impression all this would make on visitors: “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the Third Reich!” he told Speer.
Hitler’s study in the New Chancellery
Hitler officially opened the New Chancellery on January 12, 1939, with his annual New Year’s reception for the diplomatic corps. On this occasion the Führer was ebulliently hospitable, thrilled to be showing off his Neronian quarters. The foreign guests were reportedly charmed. They would have been less charmed had they been present at the next major function in the Chancellery, a commissioning ceremony for 3,600 lieutenants of the Wehrmacht (as the German military was now called). In his speech to the soldiers, Hitler declared that the German Reich would soon be the dominant power in Europe.
The Nazi leadership spent the following months strengthening Germany’s hand in preparation for war. On March 15 Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia on the pretext that “wild excesses” against Germans had taken place in many Czech towns. Although the Western powers made no military moves to reverse this development, they now seemed to grasp that their efforts to placate Hitler had served only to whet his appetite. Britain’s ambassador Sir Neville Henderson called the Czech occupation “the final shipwreck” of his appeasement-oriented mission to Berlin, and the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax grumbled that while he could “understand Herr Hitler’s taste for bloodless victories . . . one of these days he will find himself up against something that will not be bloodless.”
Hitler’s birthday celebrations in Berlin on April 20 also had a martial air. Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled down Unter den Linden, while bombers and fighters roared overhead. The Führer’s presents included models of ships and planes, and a plaster mockup of his planned Arch of Triumph. On July 26 Berliners practiced an air-raid drill, not perhaps the most hopeful sign for the future. Nor especially hopeful was the introduction in August of ration cards, which imposed weekly limits on meat, sugar, jam, and coffee. Also in August, the Wehrmacht General Staff moved out of its offices in the Bendlerstasse to new headquarters in Zossen, about 25 miles southeast of Berlin. Here they worked on plans for an invasion of Poland, the next course in Hitler’s anticipated pan-European banquet.
Although most Berliners did not realize it, the invasion of Poland became a virtual certainty because of an astounding diplomatic development later in August— the Nazi-Soviet pact. A secret annex to the pact provided for a new partition of Poland by Germany and Russia. For Hitler, this agreement with Stalin ensured that he could attack Poland without having to fear countermeasures from the Soviet Union. Even if the Western powers finally decided that enough was enough and went to war against the Reich, Germany would not have to open hostilities against the West and Russia at the same time, as had been the case in World War I.
Berliners, like most people around the world, were shocked by the Nazi-Soviet pact, but they were also relieved, because they thought it portended yet another reprieve from war. After all, the townspeople reasoned, Hitler would certainly not resort to war if he could get everything he wanted through diplomacy. When the agreement was officially announced on August 24, spontaneous celebrations broke out all over the city.
German troops parade through the Brandenburg Gate following the defeat of France, July 18, 1940
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NOW PEOPLE, ARISE, AND STORM, BREAK LOOSE!
Berlin is the world-city of the future.
—Grieben Travel Guide, 1939
THE NAZIS HAD HELD power in Berlin for a little less than seven years when they launched their drive to make Germany a world power. During their brief peacetime rule they had done much to reprovincialize their capital, reducing it from a cosmopolitan metropolis to a chauvinistic enclave hospitable only to Germans (as defined by the regime) and their allies. During the next five years they would transform the city even more—turning it first into the nerve center of their war machine and then, as a consequence of the retaliation that their military crusade provoked, into a field of rubble. While bringing devastation to Berlin, the war also provided the final context for the destruction of the city’s Jewish population. A new, albeit divided and much diminished, Berlin would eventually rise from the rubble, but the city could never repair the human damage occasioned by the Nazis’ effort to make it the capital of the world and the largest “Jew-free” metropolis in Europe.