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.”130
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.”131 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.”132
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.”133
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.”134
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.”135 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.”136 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.”137
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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.”138 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.”139 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.140
For his part, as he wrote in his Spandau Diaries, Speer felt at home around and “honestly drawn to” Hitler.141 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.”142 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.143
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.144 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.145 Hitler repeatedly travelled to Nuremberg to inspect progress. He also frequently studied Speer’s blueprints in the Chancellery. “The Führer showed us p
lans for Nuremberg,” Goebbels noted in December 1935. “Truly grand. A unique monumentality! Speer has done a good job.”146 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.”147
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.148 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.149 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.”150
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!”151 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.152 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.”153
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.154 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.155
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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.”156 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.157 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.”158
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.”159 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.”160 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.161
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.162 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.163 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!”164
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 metre
s wide and 7 kilometres long—far wider and longer than the Champs Elysées.165 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.166 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.167
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.”168 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.169
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