Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (110 page)

Even more gigantically proportioned was the German Stadium, a horseshoe-shaped arena with a planned capacity of more than 400,000, which would have made it the largest sports arena in the world. It would have positively dwarfed the 80,000-plus-capacity Olympic Stadium in Berlin. At the foundation-laying ceremony on 9 September 1937, Hitler congratulated Speer in front of a group of Nazi grandees with the words: “This is the greatest day of your life!”
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By that point at the very latest, the star architect could have been under no illusions about the political goals inherent in Hitler’s concept of colossal architecture. It was a prelude to the campaigns of territorial expansion soon to commence, at the end of which the Third Reich would not only aim to have hegemony over Europe but dominance of the entire world.
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In the spring of 1937, when Speer informed Hitler that oversized athletics fields did not conform to Olympic norms, the latter allegedly replied: “That’s of no consequence. The Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo in 1940 and thereafter, they will take place in Germany, in this stadium, for all time. And we’re the ones to determine how the athletics fields are to be measured.”
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None of these colossal projects was ever completed. By the start of the Second World War, the German Stadium had not got beyond the excavation stage. On the March Field, only a few of the twenty-six travertine gate towers were finished, and the Congress Hall was still a torso, although its construction was most advanced and was allowed to continue for a while.
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Still, even if Hitler had not unleashed war in 1939, the deadline for the inauguration of the facilities could hardly have been met.

The Nuremberg rally grounds were by no means the Nazis’ only gigantic construction project. Munich, the “capital of the movement,” was supposed to be fundamentally remade. Along with a new main train station, the city was to get a massive “pillar of the movement,” designed by Hitler himself, that would have loomed over the twin towers of the Frauenkirche. True to his habit of dividing responsibilities and encouraging competition so as to encourage improvements in performance, in 1937 Hitler commissioned the Munich architect Hermann Giesler, and not Speer, to oversee this project. In the autumn of 1940, Giesler also received a commission to supervise the remaking of Linz, “the hometown of the Führer.” Two monumental bridges over the Danube were planned there, as well as a “Gau forum” with a massive auditorium, a picture gallery and a retirement residence for Hitler. Hamburg was to receive a viaduct spanning the Elbe River that was intended to overshadow the Golden Gate Bridge. And a host of other German cities were also earmarked for epochal construction projects.
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But the Reich capital was the central focus of the planned construction. Berlin, Hitler declared in September 1933 to a delegation of city administrators headed by State Commissioner and later Lord Mayor Julius Lippert, “must be elevated in terms of culture and urban development so that it is capable of competing with capitals throughout the world.”
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To this end, he pledged to make 40 million reichsmarks per year available—that sum was increased to 60 million in July 1934. In the months that followed it emerged that the heart of the project was the construction of a North–South Axis. The space and railway tracks of the Potsdam and Anhalt train stations were to be sacrificed for two new rail stations at either end of the axis. In March 1934, Hitler shared his pet project with city fathers. In the vicinity of the southern train station, there should be “a gigantic triumphal arch dedicated to the unvanquished army in the Great War” and in the middle, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, there would be an enormous assembly hall capable of holding 250,000 people.
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Not much progress was made on these plans, perhaps because Berlin administrators hesitated in the face of such a radical intervention in existing city structures, perhaps because Hitler himself could not decide who should be entrusted with such a project for posterity. “He did not know the right architect,” Lippert reported him saying in late June 1935. “And he could not say whether Speer alone would be up to the job.”
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In the spring of 1936, Hitler seems to have made up his mind, mentioning to Speer that he still had one commission, “the biggest of all,” to hand out. Speer therefore was probably not surprised when Hitler summoned him a few months later and asked him to take charge of the entire redevelopment of the Reich capital. Hitler used the occasion, Speer recalled, to give him two sketches, one of the Victory Arch and the other of the massive, domed People’s Hall. “I did these sketches ten years ago,” Hitler said. “I always kept them because I knew that some day I would build them. And now we are going to do precisely that.”
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Speer, who had already followed Hitler’s specifications in the expansion of the Nuremberg rally grounds, eagerly accepted his suggestions for triumphal monuments in Berlin. “With the Führer looking at plans for the reconstruction of Berlin with him and Speer,” Goebbels noted in mid-December 1936. “A marvellous arrangement. Very large and monumental. Calculated for 20 years. With a gigantic street from south to north. The splendid new buildings will go there. With that Berlin elevated to the leading city in the world. The Führer thinks big and boldly. He’s 100 years ahead of his time.”
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Goebbels was attributing work largely done by Speer to Hitler. There is considerable evidence that the privileged architect believed he could best fulfil the architectural obsessions of his patron by designing buildings that were even more overwhelming and super-dimensional than Hitler himself envisioned.
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On 30 January 1937, Hitler officially named Speer “general building inspector of the Reich capital,” and the architect was given a new office in the Academy of Fine Arts on Pariser Platz, right in the city centre. Hitler could access it, away from the public eye, via the ministerial gardens.
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Sometimes he arrived with his lunch guests in tow, but more often he showed up after lunch or late at night in the former academy exhibition space, where the model city was gradually taking shape. Hitler was particularly enamoured with the 1:10,000 scale model of the North–South Axis that could be separated into individual components and pulled on tables with wheels. Never, Speer recalled, did he experience Hitler “so lively, so spontaneous, so carefree” as in the hours the two of them spent bent over the blueprints, intoxicated by the colossal size of the buildings.
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Speer’s father had a different reaction one day when his famous son proudly showed him the models, exclaiming: “You two have gone completely mad!”
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And in fact the “gigantomania” of these plans exceeded everything previously built in history. The North–South Axis, intended as the jewel of the new Berlin, was supposed to be 120 metres wide and 7 kilometres long—far wider and longer than the Champs Elysées.
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The main train station at the southern end of this boulevard was to contain four storeys connected by lifts and escalators and be considerably larger than New York’s Grand Central Station. People exiting the station were supposed to be overwhelmed by the massive Victory Arch—170 metres wide, 119 metres deep and 117 metres high—compared to which the Arc de Triomphe would have looked like a toy.
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The 80-metre-high arch would have magically directed the viewer’s gaze to the 5-kilometre-distant People’s or Great Hall, which was the most vivid example of the sheer insanity of the plans. It was designed to accommodate 150,000 to 180,000 people. With a height of 226 metres and a circumference of 250 metres, the interior would have been seven times the size of St. Peter’s Basilica. On Hitler’s forty-eighth birthday on 20 April 1937, Speer gave him a model of the structure. “We stayed up until 2 a.m. with the blueprints, giving free rein to our imaginations,” noted Goebbels.
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Along with the Victory Arch and the People’s Hall, a series of other prestige buildings were to line the boulevard: a Soldiers’ Hall with a crypt housing the sarcophagi of famous German military leaders from the past and future; a Reich Marshal’s Office for Göring, whose baroque stairwell, conceived as the largest in the world, was designed to match its future resident’s predilection for luxury; and last but certainly not least, a Führer Palace for Hitler, a fortress-like building with bullet-proof shutters and a steel entrance portal. “It cannot be ruled out that I may be compelled some day to take unpopular measures,” Hitler told Speer. “Perhaps there will be an uprising. This eventuality has to be planned for…We must be able to defend the centre of the Reich like a fortress.”
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Such statements suggest the basic fears concealed behind Hitler’s pomposity and self-deification. The oversized buildings were to be decorated with similarly monumental sculptures fashioned by Arno Breker, whose 1936 work
Decathlete
for the Reich Sport Field had found Hitler’s favour and who quickly gained access to the inner circles of power.
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Hitler’s megalomaniacal plans for Berlin can only be understood in conjunction with his hegemonic aspirations abroad. In a sense they anticipated architecturally what had yet to be conquered by martial expansion. “Do you understand now why we plan so big?” he asked Speer one day and provided the answer himself: “The capital of the Germanic Empire.”
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Nor did the dictator conceal his ambitions from Goebbels. Late one night in mid-March 1937, a few weeks after Speer’s appointment as general building inspector, Hitler told his propaganda minister that he intended to incorporate Austria and Czechoslovakia into the Reich. “We need both to round off our territory,” Goebbels reported Hitler saying. “And we’ll get them…When their citizens come to Germany, they’ll be crushed by the greatness and power of the Reich…Hence the Führer’s gigantic construction plans. He’ll never give them up.”
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In the early summer of 1939, after Hitler had concluded the first phase of this territorial expansion and was preparing the next one, he stood once again lost in thought before the architectural model and pointed to the swastika-bearing eagle that was to adorn the dome of the People’s Hall. “We’ll change that,” he said. “The eagle won’t be clutching a swastika. It will be clutching the globe!”
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Speer was not surprised, still less horrified, by the megalomania of such imperialistic statements. On the contrary, it was the “whole point” of his buildings, as Speer told the British journalist Gitta Sereny in the late 1970s: “All I
wanted
was for this great man to dominate the globe.”
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The new Berlin would be the capital of a future global empire—dictator and architect were in complete agreement about that. In his later monologues in his headquarters, Hitler repeatedly returned to their mutual flights of fancy. Anyone entering the Führer’s Palace, he said, “should feel as though he were approaching the ruler of the world.” Berlin, which as the capital of the world would be renamed Germania, would be comparable only with Babylon or Ancient Rome. “What is London, and what is Paris in comparison?” Hitler sneered.
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Of course, it was advisable not to go public with such plans, and well into the late 1930s Hitler continued to present himself as a man of peace. The German public received only snippets of information about the massive planned transformation of Berlin. In January 1938, Speer told the German News Agency about the basic idea of a North–South Axis, which Hitler had agreed with local politicians as early as 1933, but he merely hinted at the colossal size of the construction projects. The same was true of the articles that appeared in various newspapers in 1938 and 1939. For instance in June 1938, Hitler insisted that Goebbels rewrite his speech marking the beginning of construction on the House of Tourism: “For the sake of caution, he doesn’t want me talking too much about the monumentality of our architectural transformation.”
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Speer set himself a deadline of 1950 for the completion of all construction projects. Hitler was in a hurry. “You have to do everything to get it all done while I’m still alive,” Hitler told Speer during a picnic in the summer of 1936. “Only if I myself have spoken and ruled in them, will they be consecrated in the way my successors will need.”
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In June 1938, work on what Goebbels called “the greatest construction project of all time” commenced simultaneously at twelve sites. And it was no accident that the propaganda minister wrote in the same diary entry of his own goal: “expulsion of all Jews from Berlin.”
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The space occupied by the train tracks between Postdam and Anhalt train stations did not suffice to build the North–South Axis. Apartment blocks would have to be torn down, and replacement quarters found for tenants. In September 1938, Speer went on record at a meeting with city administrators about how he thought this should be done, suggesting that “the large apartments necessary should be freed up by compulsorily evicting Jews.” Speer asked for the suggestion to be treated confidentially since he first wanted to “determine the Führer’s view.”
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After the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 November 1938, Speer took one important step towards achieving this goal. On 26 November, in his capacity as special agent for the Four Year Plan, Göring stipulated that the general building inspector had a “right of first purchase” after the “removal of Jews from apartments, stores and warehouses.”
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Thanks to his Führer mandate, Speer succeeded in pushing aside all competing claims.