Hitler’s Edifice Complex

He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

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Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”

Hitler’s interest in architecture originated in his teenage years when, as an aspiring artist, he applied to the Academia of Arts in Vienna, only to be rejected and informed that his real talent, such as it was, lay in architecture rather than painting. Of the several hundred surviving sketches and paintings from Hitler’s years as a struggling artist, 80 to 90 percent are of physical structures, the best-known being some watercolors from 1912, of the State Opera House in Vienna, and from 1914, of the Courtyard of the Royal Residence in Munich. There is also a 1915 pencil sketch of the farmhouse, near the northern French village of Fournes, where Hitler, then a 26-year-old corporal, was billeted as a message runner for the List Regiment during World War I.

[Read more from Timothy Ryback: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days]

Glimmerings of Hitler’s grandiose architectural imaginings can be discerned from that time. In the rare-book reading room at the Library of Congress, you can request an early-20th-century architectural guide to Berlin, entitled simply Berlin, that is smeared with trench dirt and drips of red paraffin wax, most likely traces of nighttime reading by candlelight, and features this inscription on the inside cover: Adolf Hitler, Fournes, November 5, 1915. The book, by a Jewish art critic named Max Osborn—whose books were burned in the spring of 1933, though Hitler’s copy survived in his private library—mocks Berlin’s pretensions to architectural greatness. “Berlin among the famous cultural sites?” Osborn writes in his introduction. “There will be no shortage of skeptics,” since the city can scarcely compare to urban gems like Paris, Prague, and Venice.

Heinrich Hoffmann / ullstein bild / Getty
The Grand Reception Room designed by Albert Speer.

Osborn calls Berlin a “cornucopia of artistic missteps,” a hodgepodge of neoclassical architectural structures built on swampland and overlaid with decades of uncontrolled growth and chaotic urban planning. Having imbibed Osborne’s perspective as a young soldier, Hitler 20 years later as chancellor echoed the Jewish critic’s aesthetic disdain. “Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world!” Hitler told Speer. “Or even Vienna! Those cities are magnificent. Berlin, however, is nothing but a haphazard jumble of buildings.” As chancellor, Hitler set about righting the capital city’s many architectural wrongs with a fierce and unbridled dictatorial will.

When Speer was appointed general inspector of the capital of the Reich in 1938, the architect, then only 32, was given carte blanche in redesigning the Berlin cityscape. Hitler did not want Speer hobbled by legal or bureaucratic restraints. “Neither the interior minister nor the mayor of Berlin, and not even the Berlin Gauleiter Goebbels was to have any authority over me,” Speer recalled. He reported only to Hitler.

One reason that Hitler was so concerned with freeing Speer of architectural constraints was that he himself had confronted them when he sought to have a second-floor balcony added to the Reich chancellery. Eduard Johst Siedler, the Berlin architect who had updated the old Reich chancellery and the adjacent Wilhelmplatz in 1927, objected to the Hitler balcony as an intrusion on Siedler’s intellectual property, a legally enforceable claim. “Siedler has defaced the entire Wilhelmplatz,” Hitler raged, making the chancellery look “like the administrative office of a soap company, not the center of the Reich.” Hitler eventually secured Siedler’s approval by offering him a new commission. The chancellery’s new balcony, designed by Speer, was installed and became the setting for Hitler’s iconic appearances before jubilant throngs.

In the spring of 1937, Hitler ordered an entire block of historic houses razed, including the justice-ministry building and the “Adolf-Hitler-Haus,” the local headquarters for his own political party, to make way for construction of the new Reich chancellery annex. Protest was muted. Joseph Goebbels held a eulogy before the local party offices were obliterated. Berliner Morgen-Zeitung observed gingerly that bricks and stones that had stood for “decades even centuries” were now “wandering” to other places in the city, where “they will fulfill useful purposes for coming generations.”

Late in January 1938, Hitler summoned Speer to discuss his vision for the annex, which was to fill the entire vacated block of Voss Street that ran perpendicular to the chancellery’s Wilhelmstrasse address and dwarf the rest of the building. A marble gallery leading to Hitler’s new office was to be twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Hitler’s time frame for the project was comparably ambitious: He wanted the new extension completed within a year, in time for the next annual diplomatic reception, in early January 1939. “I place the entire Voss Street at your disposal as the site,” Hitler told Speer. “What it costs is of no concern to me.”

Hitler wanted the new extension built fast but also to endure, at least for the span of his thousand-year Reich. Hitler’s “law of ruins,” as Speer called it, required structures to be built with an eye cast many generations into the future, when they would be “overgrown with ivy, with tumbled columns, and pieces of masonry scattered about.” Speer sourced construction materials from across the country, and following Hitler’s annexation of Austria that March, he was also able to procure large quantities of the distinctive red Adnet marble from Salzburg.

Arno Breker, the sculptor who became known as the Nazi “poet of the human form,” was commissioned to create two 11-foot-tall bronze male nudes—representing “The Party” and “The Army”—to flank the chancellery’s ceremonial Wilhelmstrasse entrance. Josef Thorak, the “master sculptor of the Third Reich,” designed an enormous horse for the garden, under which an air-raid shelter would eventually be expanded into a sprawling underground labyrinth that included the Führerbunker, reinforced with four meters of concrete overhead. Kurt Schmid-Ehmen, who had designed the iconic wide-winged eagle clutching the swastika cross in its talons for the Nürnberg-party rally grounds, created an enormous bronze replica to be placed above the Voss Street entrance. Another iconic addition to the expanded chancellery was the enormous globe that would be parodied by Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator. Seven thousand laborers worked night and day, in multiple shifts, seven days a week, erecting the structure that came to occupy the vacated city block. The final tab came to 90 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of half a billion dollars today.

Hitler reviewed plans and progress on the construction at every turn, studying each detail of every proposed design, sometimes making adjustments, sometimes offering evident approval. Hitler enthused over his office desk, blazing with gold gilt and an inlaid sword half drawn from its sheath. “Good, good,” Hitler said to Speer. “When the diplomats who sit before me at this table see it, they will learn the meaning of fear.”

On Wednesday, January 9, Hitler took a final walk through what he had taken to calling the “new Reich chancellery,” even as he retained his living quarters in the old chancellery. The following day, the doors were opened for the traditional new-year diplomatic reception. Guests entered through a wide portal flanked by the Breker statues, then passed through the polished marble gallery illuminated from above by a glass ceiling and lined below with white orchids, until arriving at Hitler’s cavernous office.

Heinrich Hoffmann / ullstein bild / Getty
A model of sculptor Josef Thorak’s horse at the New Reich Chancellery, where an air-raid shelter would eventually be expanded into a sprawling underground labyrinth that included the Führerbunker.

“The German nation recalls with profound gratitude that the year 1938 brought the German people fulfilment of the incontestable right to self-determination,” Hitler said in his welcoming remarks, then alluded to the Munich Agreement, signed in August, which saw France and Britain sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Hitler in putative exchange “for peace in our time.” Hitler could not have been more pleased with the evening or with Speer.

“I flatter myself that I accomplish more than the other statesmen in the so-called democracies,” Hitler told Speer afterward. “I believe that we also set a different pace politically and, if it is possible to incorporate a state into the Reich in three or four days”—a reference to the annexation of Austria and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia—“then it must also be possible to erect a building in one or two years.” Eight months later, Hitler plunged the world into war. Speer’s mission to transform Berlin into the “capital city of the world” was put on hold. Speer was eventually put to work as minister of armaments.

In the coming years, Hitler would employ his Reich chancellery extension as a marble-and-gold-gilt symbol for impressing celebrities, most notably film and stage actors, and for intimidating foreign dignitaries. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s translator, recalled that the most notable feature of a visit was the walk along the five-hundred-foot grand hallway to the new chancellery office, where Hitler received them at his desk with its half-unsheathed sword. “The floor was so smooth that visitors felt compelled to cover the five hundred feet to the great double doors of the anteroom to Hitler’s office with short, prudent, courtly steps,” Schmidt said.

In March 1939 Emil Hacha, the aging, frail president of Czechoslovakia, which had been recently truncated by the Munich Agreement, was summoned to the new Reich chancellery by Hitler, forced to wait until 1:15 in the morning, and then finally marched through the marble gallery and into Hitler’s office where he was met with a tirade from the führer. “Finally, I had worked the old man over to such an extent,” Hitler boasted afterward, “that his nerves were completely shattered and he was already willing to sign; then he had a heart attack.”

Throughout the war years, even long after Allied bombing raids of Berlin had begun, Hitler continued to use the Reich chancellery annex to court and cudgel, as he did with Stalin envoy Vyacheslav Molotov in November 1940, before invading the Soviet Union the following June. As late as December 1944, Hitler received Ferenc Szálasi, the puppet head of the Hungarian government, in his gilded chancellery office, with the chandeliers and wall hangings fully intact. An advent wreath with four candles rested on a table for a seasonal touch.

Even as large tracts of the city were laid to waste in the bombings, the Reich chancellery remained relatively unscathed, as did Hitler’s architectural ambitions. Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, recalled that as even German cities fell into “rubble and ash,” Hitler was planning their resurrection, with wider streets, taller buildings, more beautiful than ever. “The plans for Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Linz and many other cities were not just in Hitler’s mind,” Junge recalled, “but in fact had taken on concrete form as completed plans on paper.”

On Saturday, February 3, 1945, more than 1,000 American B-17 bombers flattened much of central Berlin in the largest daylight raid of the war. The Reich chancellery emerged from the bombing with its façade scored by shrapnel and its windows shattered but with its interior halls and galleries still intact.

By then, Hitler had relocated from his private quarters in the old Reich chancellery into the Führerbunker. Hitler passed hours in the bunker complex studying table-size models of his future construction projects. Speer recalls sitting with Hitler as late as April 1945, the month of his suicide, while he pored over architectural projects that included a palatial residence that Hitler hoped to have completed by 1950, with an office that measured 960 square meters, 16 times the size of the old Reich chancellor office, and a dining room that could seat 1,000 guests. “The isolation of this bunker world,” Speer recalled, “surrounded on all sides by concrete and earth, ultimately sealed Hitler’s isolation from the tragedy that was playing out outside under the open sky.”

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