Hitler
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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.”170 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.”171 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!”172 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.”173
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.174 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.”175
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.”176 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.”177 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.”178 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.”179 Thanks to his Führer mandate, Speer succeeded in pushing aside all competing claims.
With the start of the Second World War, work was suspended on all the construction sites. But on 25 June 1940, after the defeat of France, Hitler issued a decree reading: “Berlin must very soon, as the capital of a strong, new Reich, be reconfigured architecturally to express the magnitude of our victory.”180 With that, Speer’s claims on “Jewish apartments” were reactivated. Hitler’s star architect preferred to forget this after 1945, and he concealed it from Joachim Fest in their conversations. But since the 1980s, historians have uncovered the truth. Speer’s ministry played a pioneering role in the identification of Berlin Jews and their deportation to the death camps.181
On numerous occasions between the late autumn of 1940 and the spring of 1941, Hitler had the model of the new Berlin exhibited in the Academy of Fine Arts. “You sensed him warming and he repeatedly said: ‘Very nice, very nice,’ ” one of Speer’s colleagues wrote about a Führer visit in mid-March 1941. “ ‘Now everyone is surely convinced. In the face of such works are there any grumblers who are against the configuration of Berlin?’ Speer answered in the negative.” Hitler slapped his knees in joy at the model of the People’s Hall, which Speer had made several metres taller. “The Führer asked: ‘How high is the hall?’ Speer: ‘More than 300 metres. It’s a question of honour that it’s no smaller.’ The Führer laughed and said that that was the right attitude. That was the way to think. 300 metres was the elevation of the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden.”182 At this point, when he was preparing what he believed would be a Blitzkrieg of destruction against the Soviet Union, Hitler felt like a certain victor. But Germany’s unexpected military defeats in the autumn and winter of 1941 would fundamentally change the situation. Work on the construction sites was suspended until March 1943. As was the case in Nuremberg, none of the monumental structures in Berlin was ever completed.
Another building, the New Reich Chancellery on Vossstrasse, was completed before the start of the Second World War. If we were to credit Speer’s account, Hitler commissioned the building in late January 1938. “In the times to come, I need to hold important conversations,” Speer quoted Hitler as saying.
For that I need large halls and ballrooms, with which I can impress minor potentates in particular…How long do you need? For the blueprints, the demolitions, and everything else? A year and a half or two years would be too long for me. Can you be finished by 10 January 1939? I’d like to hold the next diplomats’ reception in the new Chancellery.183
But this account, like much of what Speer wrote in his memoirs, does not completely conform to reality. Hitler had already conducted discussions with city representatives in 1934 about the building of a new “residence” in keeping with his prestige. The property on Vossstrasse had been purchased in 1935, and the buildings on it demolished, including the Gau headquarters, which Speer had redesigned as recently as 1932. Plans for the New Chancellery were finished by mid-1937, and construction commenced in April 1938.184
Nonetheless, although much of the preliminary work had been done, the extremely tight deadline tested Speer’s talent for improvisation and created special challenges for architects Karl Piepenburg and Walter Kühnell, who managed the building site. Four and a half thousand construction workers laboured around the clock in two shifts. “This is now…no longer an American tempo—it’s a German tempo,” Hitler praised the work at the roofing ceremony on 2 August 1938.185 On 7 January 1939, Speer gave Hitler a tour of the nearly finished interior, and two days later, after the official handover, at a ceremony in front of 8,000 workers at the Sportpalast, the dictator celebrated the New Chancellery “as the first monument of the new, great German Reich.”186
The 422-metre-long building took up the entire northern side of Vossstrasse. Visitors entered through the main entranceway on
Wilhelmplatz into the “courtyard of honour” and from there via an external set of steps, flanked by two super-dimensional Arno Breker sculptures, into the building proper. Before they reached the reception hall, they had to pass through a series of spaces: an entrance hall, a mosaic-covered ballroom, a domed hall and, finally, a 146-metre marble gallery that was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, upon which it was modelled. Hitler liked the fact that foreign dignitaries had to walk such a long way, which he thought “gave them a sense of the power and dimensions of the German Reich.”187 Hitler’s office, which was more the size of a throne room—27 metres long by 14.5 metres wide by 9.75 metres tall—was also designed to intimidate. He particularly loved an inlay depicting a half-drawn sword in his gigantic desk. “Very good,” Hitler said. “When the diplomats who sit before me at this desk see that, it will put fear into them.”188 Less than six years later, the New Chancellery lay in ruins. Hitler’s monstrous dream of a global Aryan empire and a “world capital Germania” had burst like the balloon in Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant, prescient anti-Hitler satire The Great Dictator.
18
The Berghof Society and the Führer’s Mistress
“Noon at the Obersalzberg,” Goebbels noted on 17 July 1936, shortly after the Berghof was officially opened. “The Führer received us with great joy on the steps and showed us the new house with rooms for all of us. It’s magnificent. Comfortable guest rooms. A wonderful hall. The whole thing is a unique mountain manor. You can relax here. The Führer is very happy. Here he feels at home.”1 In 1928, when Hitler rented Haus Wachenfeld for the first time, he secured a right of first refusal to purchase it. In September 1932, the owner, an affluent widow named Margarete Winter from the northern German town of Buxtehude, offered to sell it to him. In June 1933, shortly after he became chancellor, the titles to the house and its entire inventory were transferred to Hitler’s name. When Albert Speer visited for the first time in the spring of 1934, he was less than impressed, however: “After Berchtesgaden, there was a steep mountain road full of potholes up to the Obersalzberg, where Hitler’s comfortable little wooden house with its protruding roof and tiny rooms awaited. The furniture was old-fashioned German ‘Vertiko’ rustic and gave the living spaces something cosy and petit bourgeois.”2
As Speer recalled, Hitler decided to expand his modest holiday home into an imposing mountain manor in the summer of 1935. The dictator himself made the initial sketches, on the basis of which architect Alois Degano from the village of Gmund on Tegernsee Lake drew up blueprints. Haus Wachenfeld was not torn down. Instead, walls on the ground and first floors were opened up, so that old parts of the structure could be integrated with the new ones, whose 17-metre gables and total length of 37 metres seemed very ostentatious in comparison. Construction work, which began in March 1936, was pushed through at an accelerated pace. The Berghof was inaugurated on 8 July, with the Berchtesgaden Christmas Marksmen marching by and firing their guns in salute.3 Martin Bormann, in his role of staff director of the deputy to the Führer, had been invaluable in getting the project financed. In the process he gained a useful entrée to the dictator’s private circles and exploited Hitler’s trust to make himself indispensable. Even before construction had been completed, Bormann began buying up land, lot by lot, around the Berghof. Those who did not want to sell were subjected to massive pressure, including threats that their property would be confiscated and they themselves sent to a concentration camp. The old farmhouses were demolished. In their stead, Bormann had new buildings constructed: a barracks complex for a company of SS men; an agricultural estate that was to serve as a model farm; a greenhouse to provide the vegetarian Hitler with fresh fruit and vegetables all year round; a small tearoom at the Mooslahner Kopf peak a few hundred metres down the mountain from the Berghof proper; and a further tearoom (the most expensive and difficult of Bormann’s projects) on the Kehlstein peak some 800 metres higher up.4
In the early years of the Third Reich, Hitler’s admirers had been able to make pilgrimages to the Obersalzberg at will in hopes of glimpsing their idol up close. Hitler often took walks in the surrounding area, for instance to Hochlenzer, a small mountain restaurant where customers could enjoy the sun and a refreshing drink on wooden benches. But in 1936, the Obersalzberg was declared a “Führer protection zone” and completely sealed off with barbed wire. Special ID was required to enter it, and access to the core of the area was strictly monitored by the SS. That ruled out any accidental contact between Hitler and the public at large.5
The Obersalzberg remained a major construction site up until the start of the Second World War. “Small, idyllic paths through fields were turned into broad lanes and concrete roads,” recalled Otto Dietrich. “Where previously teams of oxen had picturesquely gone on their way, there was now the constant din of gigantic trucks and diggers. Alpine pastures were buried under scree, and stretches of forest gave way to barracks and camps. The mountain stillness was shattered by the rumble of dynamite detonations.”6 In private, Hitler occasionally joked about Bormann’s mania for building, jesting that his name was fitting since he was “boring holes in the mountains,”7 but he also appreciated his industrious underling’s reliability. Bormann was like a wandering notebook, ever ready to record the Führer’s every wish.
Bormann’s rise to a central figure at the dictator’s mountain court did not escape the notice of Hitler’s entourage. Goebbels, who always wanted to see himself as Hitler’s favourite and was thus particularly sensitive to rivals, wrote in late October 1936: “The Führer is very satisfied with Bormann. He possesses energy and discretion.” After a visit to the Obersalzberg, Goebbels added: “Bormann works decisively and reliably up there. He’s firmly in the saddle.”8 In order to be at Hitler’s side whenever required, Bormann himself purchased a villa on the Obersalzberg. Göring, too, built an atypically modest house there in 1934. Speer was not about to be outdone. In the early summer of 1937, he rented a farmhouse, which he converted into a family holiday home, and built an adjacent studio, where he could work on his architectural plans.9
Hitler’s Alpine residence featured thirty rooms spread over three floors. The showpiece was the Great Hall and its gigantic retractable window looking out onto the Untersberg, where legend had it that the German emperor Friedrich Barbarossa was slumbering, waiting to return some day. In front of the window was a 6-metre-long marble table. Documents awaiting Hitler’s signature were often spread out on it, as were architectural blueprints and later, during the Second World War, military maps. Beside the table was a similarly oversized globe whose symbolic significance in terms of the Nazis’ emerging territorial designs was all too obvious. Two groups of chairs—one surrounding a coffee table near the window, and the other arranged around a fireplace on the far side of the room—completed the furnishings. They had been selected by Gerdy Troost, the widow of architect Paul Troost. Hitler thought highly of her, visiting her studio whenever he was in Munich. She was also responsible for the two Gobelin tapestries in the Great Hall which were more than just wall decoration. They also served a function in Hitler’s nightly film screenings: one covered the small window to the projection room, the other the screen on the opposite wall.10
Hitler was especially proud of his collection of works by sixteenth-century Italian masters and nineteenth-century German artists on display in the Great Hall. They included Venus and Amor by Paris Bordone, Roman Ruins Landscape by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Madonna tondo by Giuliano Bugiardini, Eve and Her Son Abel by Edward von Steinle, an exponent of the nineteenth-century Nazarene movement, and The Arts in Service of Religion by Moritz von Schwind. His favourite work was Anselm Feuerbach’s Nanna portrait, which bore a certain similarity to Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal. “Is not Nanna wonderful?” he told one of his secretaries. “I can’t help looking at her over and over again. She has a marvellous spot above the fireplace. Her hand glows as if it was alive.”11 And, of course, the collection would not have been complete without
a bronze bust of Richard Wagner by Arno Breker. It stood on a massive chest of drawers which housed the loudspeakers for Hitler’s film screenings.
Separated from the Great Hall only by a heavy velvet curtain, the rustically furnished living room left over from Haus Wachenfeld was the only room that recalled the old house and emanated a certain cosiness. It was dominated by a large green ceramic stove, whose tiles had been handmade by the Munich artisan Sofie Stork, the fiancée of Hitler’s main assistant, Wilhelm Brückner. During the winter months, in particular, guests liked sitting on its surrounding benches since the enormous Great Hall was always rather cold. To the right of the window was a large bookcase, containing, among other things, Meyer’s Conversational Lexicon. Hitler enjoyed consulting its volumes whenever there was a disagreement, to prove to others how phenomenal his memory was and that he was right once again.12
An expansive hallway connected the living room with the dining room, which had hardwood floors and patterned pine panelling. A long dining-room table offered space for twenty-four people. One length of the room had a semicircular bay window, in front of which guests would breakfast while Hitler was still in bed.13 Hitler’s private quarters—an office, a bedroom and a bathroom—were located on the first floor. Next to his bedroom, separated from it only by a small space with two connecting doors, was Eva Braun’s apartment, which consisted of a bedroom, a small living room and a bathroom. “Why did the housekeeper of the Berghof, as Eva Braun was introduced to us, need a special entrance to Hitler’s bedroom?” wondered Rochus Misch, who was part of the Führer’s escort command from 1940, in his memoirs. “Everyone imagined a reason.”14