Berlin at War (24 page)

carrying out his task. Almost overnight, Speer had become one of

the most important men in the Third Reich.

Thus empowered, Speer pressed on with the job of redesigning Berlin.

Though the plans would develop and be finessed over the coming

months and years, a project of works – complete in all its essentials –

was presented to the public only a year after Speer’s appointment, on

28 January 1938. The reaction within Germany was predictably enthu-

siastic, with newspapers carrying detailed explanations of the plans.
Der

Angriff
stated that the designs were ‘truly monumental . . . far exceeding all expectations’.12 The
Völkischer Beobachter
proclaimed grandly that

‘from this desert of stone, shall emerge the capital of a thousand-year

Reich’.13 The foreign press, though less effusive, nonetheless concurred.

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berlin at war

The
New York Times
described the project as ‘perhaps the most ambi-

tious planning scheme of the modern era’14, while
The Times
noted

that the scheme promised ‘to turn a substantial area of Berlin into an

excavation [
sic
] for 10 years to come’.15

Speer’s plans certainly did not want for ambition. In accordance with

Hitler’s original designs, they centred on a grand axis, which was to run

from north to south for around five miles, linking the city’s two new

rail termini. This grand new boulevard would begin at the South Station,

which would serve as one of the primary interchanges between local

commuter services and regional rail traffic approaching from the south.

Though it demonstrated uncharacteristic flashes of modernism in its

conception, with its framework of steel and copper sheeting visible

through a partially glazed frontage, the South Station at least conformed

to type in its scale. At over 1,000 feet wide, it comfortably surpassed New

York’s Grand Central Station.16

By design, the visitor stepping out of the South Station would be

dazzled by the vista that opened up before him. He would find himself

on an enormous plaza one kilometre in length and over 300 metres

wide. In the distance to the north, the epicentre of Nazi power, the

Great Hall, would be visible. The plaza itself would be lined by trees

and a two-lane thoroughfare, while at its heart a ceremonial drive

would be laid out, flanked with manicured gardens – or, as was later

proposed, captured weaponry.17 To either side, elegant, four- or five-

storey, neo-classical buildings would frame the plaza; hotels, restaurants,

a swimming-pool complex, and the ‘KdF block’ – a site to provide

entertainment for German workers.

After proceeding to the northern end of the plaza, the visitor would

encounter one of the key features of the project – the
Triumphbogen
.

This enormous Romanesque arch was essentially a gigantic version of

the Arc de Triomphe, which – at over 100 metres high – would have

dwarfed its Parisian counterpart. Square in profile, it was topped with

an ornate balustrade and an equine statue, while its 80-metre arches

would have housed a network of elaborate cloisters at ground level.

According to Speer, the
Triumphbogen
was ‘the heart of [Hitler’s] plan’.

It was, he wrote, ‘the classic example of the architectural fantasies

[Hitler] had worked out in his lost sketchbook of the 1920s’.18 Like its

Allied equivalent, the Menin Gate at Ypres, it was intended to serve as

a memor ial to the fallen of the First World War. Decorated with

brutality made stone

107

seventy-five bas-reliefs, it was to bear the names of the nearly two million

Germans who had died in that conflict.19 It was specifically in prepara-

tion for this massive edifice that the ‘mushroom’ had been constructed

in 1941, to test the load-bearing capability of the Berlin soil.

Leaving the arch, the visitor would follow the axis north, through

the administrative heart of the new capital. This area would be home

to many of the most important offices of the German state, including

the headquarters of the SS, and the ministries of Justice, Propaganda,

Foreign Affairs, Economics and the Interior. In order to counteract

the potential lifelessness of such a bureaucratic quarter, Speer reserved

a majority of the sites on the street for private buildings. Also, along-

side the ministries, he planned for

a luxurious movie house for premieres, another cinema for the masses

accommodating two thousand persons, a new opera house, three

theatres, a new concert hall, a building for congresses, the so-called

House of the Nations, a hotel of twenty-one stories, variety theatres,

mass and luxury restaurants . . . There were to be quiet interior court-

yards with colonnades and small luxury shops set apart from the noise

of the street and inviting strollers.20

Continuing north for around three miles, through this curious mix

of grey officialdom and brightly coloured hedonism, our visitor would

arrive at the Circus. Over 200 metres in diameter, the Circus was fore-

seen, in essence, as a large roundabout marking the intersection of

Potsdamer Strasse with a new North-South Axis. Its focus would be

an elegant fountain, with a central sculpture of Apollo mounted on

a stepped dais, surrounded by water fountains in a wider circular pool.

Skirting the outer edge of the fountain would be a further six bronze

figures, all by the noted Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. Surrounded by a

ring of six-storey, neo-classical buildings, including a casino and a

cinema, the Circus was intended to serve as the entertainment hub

of the new district. However, it would have been overshadowed –

quite literally – by a number of nearby edifices, whose purpose and

significance were far from entertaining.

Firstly, to the west, in an enormous block bounded by the Tiergarten

to the north and the Landwehrkanal to the south, the supreme head-

quarters of the German Armed Forces was to feature a large tower

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berlin at war

looming over a central parade ground. To the north, meanwhile, the

monolithic Soldiers’ Hall was to be constructed. Though its precise

purpose was never explicitly stated, Speer suggested that the Hall

would serve in part as a military museum and in part as an ossuary

for Germany’s fallen, containing a crypt for the tombs of the country’s

field marshals. Its design, devised by the prominent architect Wilhelm

Kreis, represented the purest Nazi neo-classicism. Flanked by two

single-storey colonnades, with bas-reliefs of martial scenes and equine

statues, the front entrance of the Hall was a mass of vertical twin

columns rising over three storeys to support a flat stone roof.21

North from the Soldiers’ Hall, the boulevard continued for another

750 metres, through the comparative peace and tranquillity of the

Tiergarten, the former hunting forest of the Hohenzollerns, before

arriving at the East-West Axis – the first stage of the project, which

had been completed for Hitler’s birthday in 1939. Beyond lay the polit-

ical heart of the new capital. Two identical buildings, the Army High

Command and the new Reich Chancellery, would form an imposing

entrance. But the visitor’s eyes would inevitably be drawn to the

massive domed building beyond. The Great Hall, inspired by the

Pantheon in Rome, would be the largest building in the world. Standing

over 1,000 feet tall, topped with an enormous copper-clad dome, it

was designed to hold up to 180,000 of the Party faithful. The square

over which it towered was similarly immodest. Paved with granite,

Adolf Hitler Platz encompassed over 50 hectares and was intended to

be large enough to hold a million people. On its eastern side, the

square would incorporate the old Reichstag building – the former icon

of the German capital, now reduced to insignificance by the sheer

scale of the buildings planned to surround it.

Beyond the Great Hall, the line of the development, which previ-

ously had run along a north-south axis, shifted some 30° to the west

to match the orientation of the existing streets and to incorporate the

now redundant railway sidings. Here a grand rectangular lake would

be built, one kilometre in length and containing crystal-clear water,

rather than the polluted flows of the nearby Spree. On its western

and eastern edges, the lake would by bounded by further huge build-

ings, including the Berlin Town Hall, the city Police headquarters and

the Navy High Command. All of them would be constructed in the

stark, relentless symmetry of Nazi neo-classicism, or what Albert Speer

brutality made stone

109

called ‘our Empire Style’.22 Finally, to the north of the lake, beyond

two 100-metre stone obelisks set in manicured gardens, the visitor

would arrive at the North Station – the second new rail terminus, just

as grand in scale as its counterpart seven kilometres to the south.

Though Hitler’s interest in the Germania project was restricted

almost exclusively to the dramatic main thoroughfare described above,

Speer incorporated those glamorous headline plans into a wider, more

thoroughgoing reorganisation of Berlin’s infrastructure. Firstly, and

most importantly, the rail network was to be overhauled. In fact, the

entire project was actually predicated on this one aspect, as much of

the land required for the North-South Axis was to be reclaimed from

the redevelopment of railway sidings approaching the Lehrter Station

to the north, and the Potsdamer and Anhalter Stations to the south.

In the revised plans, these three stations, which handled much of the

capital’s local and national traffic, were to disappear and be replaced

by the two new termini. In addition, the other existing rail termini

were to be downgraded or removed entirely, while the two new stations

would be linked by a circular line which would skirt the city centre.23

The capital’s roads, too, were to be redrawn. The two new boule-

vards – the North-South Axis along which the majority of the new

building was planned, and the East-West Axis already completed in 1939

– were seen by Speer as the centrepiece of a radical redevelopment.

Where it had previously grown organically in a fairly haphazard fashion,

Berlin was now to be rationalised by the addition of a series of four

concentric ring roads, intersecting with the two radial axes. The inner-

most ring road would encircle the city centre and the Tiergarten, while

the outermost one was envisaged as sweeping around the entire metro-

politan area of the capital.24

One of Speer’s overarching intentions was to clear the city centre

slums and provide modern housing stock in the suburbs.25 To this end,

the
Südstadt
, or ‘South Town’, was designed to house over 200,000

Berliners and provide work for around 100,000. It was to be located just

inside the outer ring road, strung for around 15 kilometres along the

southern reaches of the extended North-South Axis, with a series of

monolithic apartment blocks alternating with smaller developments

of villas and family houses. Nearby, a military academy was planned, as

well as the headquarters of the Waffen-SS, a Reich Archive, numerous

industrial concerns and one of Berlin’s new airports.26

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berlin at war

The planning was not restricted to stone and concrete, however.

Though Berlin already had plenty of parks – such as the Tiergarten,

Humboldthain, Friedrichshain and Grunewald – it was nonetheless to

be further provided with green spaces for the amusement and recreation

of its inhabitants, and also to define the city’s suburbs and districts.

With this in mind, one planning document of the time anticipated that

no Berliner should have more than fifteen minutes’ walk to reach a park,

a forest or a public garden.27

Furthermore, the very nature of those proposed green spaces was

subjected to the closest scrutiny. Speer instructed a leading horticulturist

to draw up a list of shrubs and trees, outlining which of them were

suitable for planting at the roadside, on river banks or in marshy ground.28

Beyond the city limits, he even had large numbers of deciduous trees

planted to restore the original eighteenth-century flora of the region.29

The entire plan was extraordinarily ambitious. Given carte blanche

and an almost unlimited budget, Speer had designed a city that was

intended to become the very centrepiece of the civilised world – a

city whose scope and scale would bear comparison with the likes of

Rome. When Speer’s father, himself an architect, saw the plans, he

summed up the thoughts of many of his contemporaries succinctly:

‘you’ve all gone completely crazy’.30

Certainly, there was a substantial dose of arrogance and megalomania

in Speer’s plans. The enormous scale of the designs – ‘incomparably

monumental’31 as Goebbels put it – neatly expressed the puffed-up, self-

aggrandising misanthropy of Nazism. It is notable, for instance, that