Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (109 page)

Most of Hitler’s paladins followed the lead of their Führer and had themselves declared exempt from taxes, acquired luxurious homes and set up special funds, foundations and secret bank accounts shielded from any public financial scrutiny. Göring—the Third Reich’s “second man”—may have been particularly conspicuous with his grandiose lifestyle, including his feudal estate “Carinhall” in Schorfheide, north of Berlin. But other leading figures in the regime were hardly slouches either when it came to unscrupulously abusing their positions for personal gain. Goebbels, one of the more vitriolic critics of “bigwigs” in the Weimar Republic, lived in splendid fashion in his villa on Schwanenwerder Island in Lake Wannsee and had a second home on Lake Bogensee, north of the capital. And despite bemoaning the corruption among the clique of Nazi leaders while writing his memoirs in Spandau prison, Albert Speer was a more-than-willing beneficiary of the system of patronage, concealing his rocketing income from the tax authorities and acquiring an estate in Oderbruch to go along with his large new house on Berlin’s Lichtensteinallee.
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Functionaries lower in the party hierarchy, from the Gauleiter on down to the district and local leaders, exploited their respective networks in the same way as the top members of the regime. Wasting public resources, embezzlement, abuse of party funds, shameless greed and crass careerism were part of everyday reality.
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There was “no combating it,” Fritz Wiedemann reasoned in retrospect, because the Nazified press was not allowed to report on corruption and because Hitler covered up abuses committed by the party’s old guard: “This plague ate its way from the top to the bottom. What was allowable for the bigwigs was also all right for the little guy.”
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Along with flourishing corruption, another of the most striking characteristics of National Socialist rule was a feverish mania for massive construction projects. From the very beginning, Hitler thought in dimensions that went beyond anything that had previously existed. Size beyond all rational proportion, in Speer’s interpretation of his logic, “would impress and intimidate the people and psychologically secure his own rule and that of his successors.”
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Nazi architecture was intended as a visual representation of the power of the Third Reich, which Hitler’s genius had built up after a period of Germany’s decline and which he had bestowed as a gift upon its people. The monumental projects he commissioned, Hitler told those attending the Nuremberg rally in 1937, were conceived neither for the year 1940 nor for the year 2000. “They are intended,” Hitler said, “to cast their shadows like the cathedrals of our past into the millennia of the future.”
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One had to build “on as large a scale as technically possible,” he declared on another occasion, “and for all of eternity!”
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By no means did such megalomaniacal visions first crystallise in Hitler’s crude world view after 1933. On the contrary, they originated in ideas he had developed in the first volume of
Mein Kampf
while still an inmate in Landsberg. In that book, he had lamented that “today’s big cities…do not have any landmarks that dominate the entire look of the city…and could be seen as emblems of an entire era.” He contrasted this with the example of ancient and medieval cities, which contained monuments, be they the Acropolis or Gothic cathedrals, “constructed for eternity, not for the moment, because they were intended to reflect the greatness and significance of a society and not the wealth of an individual owner.”
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At the time when Hitler wrote these words, he complained to his fellow inmate Hess “how few monumental structures we will leave to prosperity aside from a few commercial skyscrapers.” There was “nothing comparable to our cathedrals that belonged to and unified the collective,” Hitler carped, adding: “Here, too, Germany must take the lead.” He then presented his astonished disciple with sketches for a gigantic domed building, which was to serve as a conference space for “great national celebration.” Even if such an expensive project would not meet with general understanding, and narrow-minded philistines would complain, Hitler believed that “generations to come would understand it—man doesn’t live from bread alone, and neither does the nation.”
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Hitler’s belief in his political mission and his passion for monumental construction projects were intimately connected, and he continued to engage in wild architectural fantasies after being released from Landsberg. After a joint visit to Berlin in 1925, Hess wrote that the “tribune” dreamed of “further expanding” a city that he “absolutely adored.” And in December 1928, Hess summarised Hitler’s attitude: “Only a metropolis that overshadowed everything as an uncontested centre could overcome the [German] tendency towards atomisation and provincialism.”
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Hitler also shared his architectural daydreaming with Goebbels. “He talks about the future architectural look of the country and is very much a master builder,” gushed the latter in July 1926. In the years that followed, the Führer and his chief propagandist regularly gave themselves over to self-indulgent musings about the colossal structures they would build some day. “Hitler is developing fantastic plans for new architecture—he’s a real humdinger,” Goebbels enthused in October 1930. One year later, a few days before the meeting of the “National Opposition” in Bad Harzburg, he noted: “The boss is developing construction plans for Berlin. Fantastic, genius. For the millennia. An idea hewn in stone. At heart he’s an artist.”
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From very early on, Hitler made no secret of his intention to fundamentally remake the look of Germany’s larger cities once he came to power. In a speech in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller in early April 1929, Hitler said that he did not want to construct purpose-driven buildings like department stores, factories, skyscrapers and hotels in the Third Reich. Instead he aimed to create “documents of art and culture…to last for millennia.” He proclaimed: “We see before us the ancient cities, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, we see the cities of the Middle Ages with their gigantic cathedrals and…we know that people need this sort of focus if they are not to come undone.”
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No matter how half-baked these plans were, Hitler set about trying to realise them immediately after taking power. In the night of 30–31 January 1933, he started talking about architecture in one of his never-ending monologues. For starters, he announced, he would have the Chancellery redesigned since in its current state it was nothing more than a “vulgar reception site.”
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At the leaders’ conference in Munich in late April 1933, he proclaimed his intention to create “new unforgettable documents,” which would make the German people the latest in a series of the “world’s great cultural peoples.” He added: “We are not working for the moment but for the judgement of millennia.”
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In the spring of 1934, when Speer introduced Hitler to his wife at an evening reception, the chancellor solemnly intoned, without a trace of irony: “Your husband will erect buildings for me, the like of which have not been created for four millennia.”
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There has been a lot of speculation as to why Hitler was so enthralled with Speer in particular. If we believe Speer’s own account, Hitler himself offered a plausible explanation: “I was looking for an architect to whom I could entrust my blueprints. He had to be young since, as you know, these plans stretch far into the future. I needed someone who could carry on after my death with the authority I invested in him.”
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But there was apparently more to it than that. With his typically keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people, Hitler recognised not only Speer’s architectural and organisational talent, but also the burning ambition concealed behind a cool, completely controlled exterior. Hitler may also have regarded the ambitious young architect as the embodiment of everything he had dreamed of becoming as a young man—as a kind of alter ego, albeit one that was “more effortless and secure thanks to his good social background.”
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In any case, Hitler treated Speer with more affection than any other member of his inner circle except Goebbels. There have been repeated speculations as to an “erotic element” in their relationship, but as is the case wherever Hitler’s emotional life is concerned, there is no concrete evidence for the idea.
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For his part, as he wrote in his
Spandau Diaries
, Speer felt at home around and “honestly drawn to” Hitler.
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Speer enjoyed being a favourite and receiving the patronage of such a powerful man, who opened up for him, although he was not yet 30, seemingly limitless opportunities in his profession. After 1945, when commenting on his role as Hitler’s favourite architect, Speer would repeatedly insist that he had had no other choice but to seize this dream chance and conclude a Faustian bargain. Hitler had exercised a “suggestive and irresistible power” over him, Speer claimed, and the magnitude of the task he was given had caused an “intoxication” and “massive increase in self-worth” which he had soon needed “as an addict needs his drug.”
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But Speer was not nearly as emotionally dependent as he tried to suggest. Hitler did not need to do anything much to win him over: from the very start, Speer was obsessed by grotesquely proportioned construction projects. The extent of his fundamental agreement with the dictator’s political and architectural ideas and the degree to which his behaviour was calculated to secure the latter’s lasting favour can be seen in an article he wrote in 1936 entitled “The Führer’s Buildings.” It was no less sycophantically wordy than any of Goebbels’s many paeans:

It will go down as unique in the history of the German people that at the decisive turning point, its leader not only commenced the greatest reordering of our politics and world view but also proceeded with superior expertise as a master builder to create structures of stone that will still serve as testaments of the political will and cultural ability of their great age thousands of years down the road.
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The pilot project for the new cooperative flurry between Hitler and Speer was Nuremberg, the home of the party rallies. In early 1934, Speer was commissioned to replace the provisional wooden stage on Zeppelin Field with gigantic stone terraces. Hitler was so pleased with Speer’s design that in the autumn he put the architect in charge of the planning for the entire Nuremberg rally site.
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Alongside the existing assembly buildings and marching ground—the Luitpoldhalle, the Luitpoldarena, the Old Stadium and Zeppelin Field—Speer was to construct a series of colossal buildings: the Congress Hall, the German Stadium and the March Field. A few months later, Hitler was able to present the Nuremberg mayor, Willy Liebel, with the first sketches. In late 1935, the Association for the Nuremberg Rally Site was founded to help realise these plans. Citing his Führer mandate, Speer had no trouble getting his way with this group. The tenth rally after the Nazi “seizure of power,” September 1943, was set as the deadline for the entire site to be finished.
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Hitler repeatedly travelled to Nuremberg to inspect progress. He also frequently studied Speer’s blueprints in the Chancellery. “The Führer showed us plans for Nuremberg,” Goebbels noted in December 1935. “Truly grand. A unique monumentality! Speer has done a good job.”
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Hitler was less interested in the financing of the project. When asked about who was going to pay for all the construction work, Goebbels recorded: “The Führer doesn’t want to talk about money. Build, build! It will get paid for. Friedrich the Great did not worry about money when he built Sanssouci.”
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Speer’s plans combined existing and planned structures into an ensemble, connected by a 2-kilometre-long “Great Street” of granite. At its southern end was the March Field, a 1,050-metre-wide and 600-metre-long parade ground surrounded by stands for 160,000 spectators and crowned by a Goddess of Victory that would have been 14 metres higher than the Statue of Liberty.
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The new Congress Hall on the northern end of the Great Street was to be based on plans by Nuremberg architect Ludwig Ruff, who had succeeded in winning Hitler’s approval for his designs in early June 1934. The building was conceived as the sacral centre of the rallies and would have accommodated 50,000 people. “The most monumental covered building since antiquity,” Goebbels effused.
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This, as Hitler declared when laying the foundation stone on 12 September 1935, was where “the elite of the National Socialist Reich” would meet annually for centuries to come. “And if the movement should ever fall silent,” Hitler proclaimed, “this building will speak as a witness for centuries. In the middle of a sacred grove of ancient oak trees, people will admire this first giant among the monuments of the Third Reich with reverent amazement.”
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