Berlin at War (23 page)

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’.

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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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103

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