Adolf Hitler’s fascination with architecture, both real and imagined, can be seen in many of the paintings he produced during his formative years surrounded by the imperial majesty of Vienna. It therefore comes as no surprise that the urban design of Germany, and specifically Berlin, was a major concern for him after he seized power in 1933 – and if it was a major concern of the Führer then it became a priority for the Nazi Party as a whole. Under the Nazi government and overseen by Hitler’s favoured architect, Albert Speer, the Third Reich embarked on an ambitious building scheme, much of which would never be completed. However what emerged was a standardised style of building that was intended, and in some cases succeeded, to impress and enforce the power and ideology of the evil regime on its people. Both spatial presence and architectural design were utilised to communicate the fundamentals of National Socialism to Germans, Europe, and the World.
The nature of Nazi power was absolute. It’s autocratic intentions were to forge a new sense of national unity by turning the German people against perceived enemies. Hitler saw it as his role to unite all the German speaking people of Europe under one banner and then provide them with a fitting continental empire. A strong emphasis was put on the Volksgemeinschaft, the concept of unity and community that attempted to unite the people for the national purpose. This national spirit was to be encouraged by the design of civic buildings and spaces such as the Königsplatz, Munich.
A large open space in the centre of town, the Königsplatz was adopted by the Nazis as the fulcrum of a city they saw as their birthplace – the national headquarters of the party, The Brown House, was located close to the square. Two neo-Greek temples were built around the square to hold the remains of those killed in the 1923 Beer Hall putsch – an important event in the founding of the party – as well as a theatre and political office. This collection of important and monumental public buildings set around an open space provided a civic and political centre for the people of Munich. Placing such grand structures in the centre of towns across Germany was intended to convey to the people a sense of nationalistic heroism and to encourage the belief that their nation was designed for great achievements.
The belief that, as Barbara Miller Lane puts it, architecture could “not only express the unity and power of the nation but could also help to create it” found its voice in Speer’s designs for the Zepplinfeld at Nuremberg. The vast buildings Speer proposed for this site, some realised and others not, were intended to host the annual Reichsparteitage (Reich Party Congresses), the largest gathering of the party faithful and the greatest show of pomp the Reich could muster. The high point of this event would be Hitler’s speech to the massed membership of thousands, for which Speer provided what he termed Versammlungarchitektur (assembly-architecture), designed to influence the masses by creating a space in which one could feel part of something larger than one’s self – a crowd of such a scale, contained in an enormous area, gathered before the symbolic altar of National Socialism – at once sublime, terrifying, overwhelming and glorifying.
Speer would describe the architecture as “a means for stabilising the mechanism of [Hitler’s] dominion.” The architectural theorist Daniel Grinceri has posited that, considering how successful the Nazis were in creating an ‘overwhelming and unified’ image of the Reich, the buildings themselves may have played a part in persuading the people to adopt the National Socialist ideology. I would argue that, in the case of Speer’s Zepplinfeld, this is certainly not only the effect but also its primary intention.
However, it was not only dynamics of space that the Nazis utilised to impress their power upon the people, they also adopted a unified style – neoclassicism. Neoclassicism was utilised to directly connect the Third Reich with the glories of ancient Imperial Rome, a city that offered up a kind of state architecture that testified to its builder’s power, strength, and achievements. Before the Nazis, neoclassical buildings in Germany tended to favour the revival of Grecian styles over the Roman, something Neil MacGregor has credited to a connection the pre-unified Germany felt between itself and the similarly composed quilt of City-states and Kingdoms that made up ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was also perceived as a more cerebral and peaceful civilisation in comparison to the militant empire building of ancient Rome. It is therefore no surprise that Hitler often turned more towards the Roman vernacular than the Greek.
An early example of this Roman inspiration were Werner March’s buildings in the Reichssportfeld, including his vast Olympiastadion completed for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The stadium springs from the same architectural language as the coliseum in Rome but reborn on an enormous scale, this competition in size with Rome is something that repeats throughout Nazi designs. Whilst the most obvious architectural source for an Olympic stadium would be the Greek ruins at Olympia itself, Hitler wanted to give his games a more imperial flavour and so, as architectural historian Alex Scobie remarks, Hitler’s stadium’s spatial arrangement seemed to mirror Trajan’s Forum with its giant order, widely spaced columns.
Although the Olympiastadion is far less decorative and greatly simplified than many Roman construction. Its vast rectangular colonnades running the circumference are made from roughly carved stone blocks, possibly referring back to an even earlier history of the pyramids and creating some sense of timelessness.
The historian Barbara Miller Lane wrote that under the Third Reich it was considered “the function of architecture to impress the ideas of its creators upon other nations and, even more important, upon posterity.” The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a perfect platform, this with delegations from almost every nation and the eyes of the world watching, for the bold, imposing, imperial form of the venue to impress a powerful image of the new regime on the world.
Hitler was obsessed with posterity to the extent that he had drawings made up of how his buildings may look in a thousand years time as ruins, but in reality only two major Nazi buildings survived in any significant way into the twentieth century – Speer’s Zepplinfeld, heavily mutilated by the iconoclastic guns of the victorious American army in 1945, and March’s Olympiastadion, now transformed into Germany’s premiere football ground with all reference to the ideology that birthed it removed. Ironically, while in their day these buildings acted to aid and enhance the power structure that built them, once it was defeated, they struggled to say anything specific about their creating ideology to posterity.
That is not to say that these buildings were without ideology when they were built, quite the contrary, during the 1930s and ‘40s they helped display and impose the ideological backbone of what was intended to be the Thousand Year Reich. Scobie writes that “art for art’s sake appealed no more to Hitler than it did to the Roman rulers, whose state art and architecture was primarily political.” The Nazis used the classical designs of Rome as a visual metaphor for their ideology. Classical architecture is built around the principles of clarity and purity of form, something that the Nazis wanted to see replicated socially in their new Reich, a racially pure, Aryan civilisation. This type of architecture also relies on a rigorous system of orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian etc.) and hierarchy, something also reflected in the structure of Nazi power, just think of the endless uniformed rows of perfectly perpendicular soldiers in the rally grounds and see how they seamlessly melt into the uniform classical colonnades of the party’s buildings. As Robert Hughes put it in his survey of modernism The Shock of the New, “authority demanded an architecture of absolute regularity, like the rhythm of jackboots on concrete. Its purpose was to promote unity, not to articulate feeling.” Chiming nicely with Speer’s own idea of Versammlungarchitektur (assembly-architecture) mentioned earlier.
All these mechanisms of political and ideological power in architecture became most powerfully manifest in Speer’s designs for a rebuilt Berlin. As soon as he came to power in 1933, Hitler was keen to reconstruct his capital in a style he saw befitting of what was to be the centrepiece of a European empire and would be re-dubbed ‘Germania.’ Once again dynamics of space were utilised to impress power, the city would be based on a strong North/South, East/West axis and at its centre all the important buildings in the Reich’s capital brought together along a new street. Positioning the government district at the centre of the city with uninterrupted lines of sight from all compass points has similarities with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon principle with the omnipresent eye of the government at the centre of life in the city and by extension the whole Reich. Here again there are links with Rome, the great axial streets such as the Via del Corso or that great avenue that terminates in St Peters – in fact that great vista was only created in 1937 in order to impress Hitler when he made his state visit to Mussolini a year later.
This space/power dynamic continued within the planned buildings. To take one example from the few of the completed plans, the interior of Hitler’s rebuilt chancellery building contained a lengthy Marble Hall with the main door to his personal study set centrally within it. Scobie sees this use of space as strongly reminiscent of the position of the Louis XIV’s bedchamber in relation to his Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The comparison continues to the men themselves, two autocratic leaders both feared and revered by those around them, existing as the central foci of their sycophantic courts – although Hitler’s Marble Hall was twice as long as Louis’ Hall of Mirrors… another power move.
The neoclassicism continued throughout the designs for Germania but nowhere was it more obvious than Speer’s pièce de résistance, The Volkshalle (“People’s Hall”). Heavily influenced by the Pantheon and St Peters in Rome, the Volkshalle intended to outdo all of them, it would be used for all the most important party and state events holding a capacity of 180,000 people. The plans show it to be nearly 300 meters high and seven times the size of the dome at St Peters – whilst the dome of the Pantheon would have been able to fit through the oculus at its summit. Here we see Hitler taking inspiration from the great and powerful buildings of the past and scaling them up to a size proportionate to his ambitions.
Ironically, if the Volkshalle had ever been built it would have been a victim of these ambitions – it is thought that, due to the enormous size of the dome, that the warm breath of its 180,000 inhabitants would have created indoor clouds and rain…not quite the clarity and order the Nazis sought. But most importantly Speer himself thought that the scale of the project would, in reality, only diminish the power of its patron, in an interview with Robert Hughes he said, “in such a huge building the man who is most important, the person for whom it is really done, shrinks to nothing. One can’t see him, I tried to solve the problem, but I couldn’t…Hitler would have really been invisible in the grandeur.” The man at the very centre of it all, defeated by his own ideological tool.
If fully realised, the Third Reich’s architectural schemes would have put it in the same category as ancient Egypt or Rome as an empire communicated through its design. In reality it was Hitler’s overreaching ambition that caused the downfall of his empire and its architecture. By 1943 the war on the eastern front was drawing so many resources and so much manpower that any grand architectural ambitions had to be put on hold and eventually abandoned all together. But what was constructed and what was planned stands as testament to the importance that the Nazis placed on grand gestures of state architecture as mechanisms of power. Architecture was fundamental to Hitler’s vision of a greater Germany, reborn from the ashes of the First World War and Weimar democracy but when the advancing Soviet forces pushed him back into his Berlin bunker, he chose to take Speer’s model of Germania with him, for him, this plan for the perfect urban form was emblematic of the power that he once wielded.
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Morgan Haigh 