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Nazi architecture is an often dismissed and derided aspect of Nazi plans to create a cultural and spiritual rebirth in Germany.

Hitler, founder of the Third Reich, admirer of imperial Rome, yet aware that the ancient Germans were never Romanized and were traditionally regarded by the Romans as enemies of the Pax Romana, developed architecture in the neo-classic style and erected edifices as cult sites for the Nazi party a type of Victory Altar borrowed from the alleged racial ancestors of the Germans - the Greeks. His dilemma was that because of his admiration for the Classical cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, he could not isolate and politicize German antiquity, as Mussolini had done with respect to Roman antiquity. Therefore he had to import political symbols into Germany and justify their presence on the grounds of a spurious racial ancestry, the myth that Greeks and the Romans were the ancestors of the Germans.

Hitler's fantasies about being the founder of a thousand-year Reich were in harmony with the Colosseum being associated with eternity. Hitler envisioned all future Olympic games to be held in Germany in the Deutsche Stadion. It is clear that Hitler anticipated that after winning the war, a subjected world would have no choice but to send its athletes to Germany every time the Olympic games were held. Thus, this building foreshadowed Hitler's craving for world domination long before this aim was put into words. Hitler habitually derived satisfaction from seeing world-famous monuments being surpassed in size by German equivalents. However, architectural elephantiasis alone does not explain the full significance of the choice of edifice.

Most regimes, especially new ones, wish to make their mark both physically and emotionally on the places they rule. The most tangible way of doing so is by constructing buildings and monuments. Architecture is the only art form that can actually physically meld not only the world, but the people who inhabit it. It forces people to move in a determined way, to look at specific things and conduct their lives in certain ways. Architecture affects not only the physical environment, but mental environment of the populace. The Nazis believed architecture played a key role in creating their new order.

Hitler the architect

Hitler was quite fond of the numerous theatres built by Hermann Helmer and Ferdinand Fellner, who built in the late baroque style. In addition, he appreciated the stricter architects of the nineteenth century such as Gottfried Semper, who built the Opera House, the Picture Gallery in Dresden, the court museums in Vienna and Theophil Hansen, who designed several buildings in Athens in 1940. He raved about the Paris Opera and Palace of Justice by the architect Poelaert.

Ultimately, he was always drawn back to inflated neobaroque such as Kaiser Wilhelm II had fostered, through his court architect Ihne. Fundamentally, it was decadent baroque comparable to the style that accompanied the decline of the Roman Empire. Thus, in the realm of architecture, as in painting and sculpture, Hitler really remained arrested in the world of his youth: the world of 1880 to 1910, which stamped its imprint on his artistic taste as on his political and ideological conception.

The Führer did not have one particular style; there was no official architecture of the Reich only the neoclassical baseline that was enlarged, multiplied, altered and exaggerated, sometimes to the point of ludicrousness. Hitler appreciated the permanent qualities of the classical style as it had a relationship between the Dorians and his own Germanic world.

It would be a mistake to try to look within Hitler's mentality for some ideologically based architectural style. That would not have been in keeping with his pragmatic way of thinking.

Three primary roles

Nazi architecture has three primary roles in the creation of their new order: (i) Stage; (ii) Symbolic; (iii) Didactic. In addition, they saw architecture as a method of producing buildings that had a function, but also served a larger purpose. For example, the House of German Art had the function of housing art, but through its form, style and design it had the purpose of being a community structure built using an Aryan style, which acted as a kind of temple to acceptable German art.

Stage

Many Nazi buildings were stages for communal activity, creations of space for the construction of the myths on which the National Socialist ideology was based. From Albert Speer's seemingly iconoclastic use of banners for the May Day celebrations in the Lustgarten, to the Nazi co-option of the 'Thing' tradition, the Nazis wanted to link themselves to a German past.

The link could be direct; a Thingplatz or Thingstätte was a meeting place near or directly on a site of supposed special historical significance, used for the holding of festivals associated with a Germanic past. This was an attempt to link the German people back to both their history and their land. The use of 'Thing' places was closely associated with the 'blood and soil' part of Nazi ideology, which involved the perceived right of those of German blood to occupy German land. The Thingplatz would contain structures, which often included natural objects like stones and were built in the most natural setting possible. These structures would be built following the pattern of an ancient Greek theatre, following a structure of an historical culture considered to be Aryan. This stressing of a physical link between the past and Nazism aided to legitimatize the Nazi view of history, or even the Nazi regime itself. Still, the 'Thing' movement was not successful.

The link could be indirect; the May Day celebrations of 1936 in Berlin took place in a Lustgarten that had been transformed into a stage. This transformation was not the standard dressing of a specific place but a creation of a new anonymous, pure, cubic space that freed itself from the immediate history of Berlin, the church and the monarchy, yet was still associated with the distant aura of a Hellenic past. This was simply the creation of a new ceremonial place in direct competition with the former Royal Palace and Altes Museum, both even in the 1930s, still symbols of a royal Berlin. The symbolism was clear; any speaker at the event would be standing in front of the Altes Museum, which housed Germany's classical collection that could only be seen by the audience through Nazi banners. There was a link between the new order and the classical past, but the new order was paramount.

The Nazis would bring the community together using architecture, creating a stage for the community experience. These buildings were also solely for the German people, the great hall in Berlin was not a supranational People's House like those being built in the Soviet Union, but the stage where tens of thousands of recharged citizens would enter into a solemn mystic union with the Supreme Leader of the German Nation. The sheer size of the stage itself would magnify the importance of what was being said.

How these stages were set was also an issue, from the most mundane building to the grandest, the form and style used in their construction tell a great deal about and are symbols of those who created them, when they were created and why they were created. Designs of this kind occasionally occur by accident; however, the architectural styles speak to the tastes of those who constructed the building or paid for its construction. It also speaks to the tastes of the general architectural movements of the time and the regional variants that influenced them. Nazi buildings were an expression of the essence of the movement, built as a National Socialist building should be, regardless of the style used.

Symbolic

Determining what National Socialists saw as the concept of Nazi Architecture is problematic. Various members of the leadership had differing views and tastes and commentators see the same style in different ways. Roger Eatwell sees the format used at the Nuremberg rallies as a mixture of Catholic ceremony and left-wing Expressionist form and lighting, while Sir Neville Henderson saw a cathedral of ice. Still, if a building was designed and built using the Nazi version of what was German, it was considered Nazi Architecture.

In general, there were two primary National Socialist styles of architecture. Nazi Architecture in its crudest sense was either a squared-off version of neo-classical architecture, or a mimicry of völkish buildings and structures.

The neo-classical style was primarily used for urban state buildings or party buildings such as the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg, the planned Volkshalle for Berlin and the Dietrich Eckart Stage in Berlin. This style was not just used for physical construction, but on the ordered columns of searchlights that formed Speer's 'cathedral of light' used at the Nuremburg Party Rallies.

The völkish style was primarily used in rural settings for accommodation or community structures like the Ordensburg in Krossinsee, the walls and watchtowers of KL Flossenbürg and KL Mauthausen. It was also to be applied to rural new towns as it represented a mythical medieval time when Germany was free of foreign and cosmopolitan influences. This style was also used in a limited way for buildings with modern uses like weather service broadcasting and the administration building for the federal post office.

Most Nazi Architecture was neither novel in style nor concept; it was not supposed to be. Even a cursory inspection of what was intended for Berlin finds analogues all over the world. Long boulevards with important buildings along them can be found in the grid pattern road structures of Washington and New York, the Mall and Whitehall in London, and the boulevards of Paris. Large domes can be found on the buildings of the Mughal Empire of India, the Capitol in Washington, the Pantheon and Basilica di San Pietro in Rome. Even the 'Kraft durch Freude' "Strength through Joy" resort at Prora is not wholly unlike the buildings envisaged by Le Corbusier in his 'City of Three Million Inhabitants'. The building of a formal governmental zone outside the center of an old city or totally on its own had become commonplace by the 1930s. This is not to say their plans were simply an attempt to copy others, but that they were following a pattern already established in human society. The forms used may have been inspired by other city redevelopment plans like Lutyens Delhi, Burnham's Chicago or even Burley Griffin's Canberra, but they were not an attempt to copy them. The Nazis sought not to rebuild, but to build.

National Socialism is often viewed as anti-modern and romantic or having a pragmatic willingness to use modern means in pursuit of anti-modern purposes. This confuses the Nazi dislike of certain styles like the Bauhaus with a blanket dislike of all modern styles. This was based mainly on what the Bauhaus and others were seen as representing, like foreign influences or the decadence of the Weimar Republic. The lack of any human scale details or plain exteriors may have produced an overwhelming effect, but this style was common from the 1910s onwards. This modern approach was not limited to the neo-classical buildings for city centers, but was also used for völkish buildings like Ordensburgs and Autobahn garages.

The neo-classical style used was not novel for the time; it was firmly anchored in time. Speer's style was assimilating the international 1930s style of public architecture, which was then being pursued as a modernizing classicism. This is in direct contrast to Peter Adams's attempts to separate Nazi art from the Zeitgeist and present it as something that can only be looked at through the lens of Auschwitz. This is trying to establish by default a thesis that ugly regimes must produce ugly buildings and such regimes are so evil that everything they produce must be evil or third-rate. The reality was that destroying to build anew was a standard polemical gesture of the Modernist movement and the styles chosen were not unlike the ones being used at the time. To criticize Speer's architectural style is to criticize buildings being built at the same time all over the world. Ultimately, Nazi Architecture was not supposed to be pleasing; its purpose was to fulfill its task.

Hitler saw the buildings of the past as direct representations of the culture that created them and how they were created. Hitler believed they could be used by man to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity and that in his time, ultimately, all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture. Nazi Architecture should speak to the conscience of a future Germany centuries from now.

Central to this was Albert Speer's Theory of Ruin Value, in which the Nazis would build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models. Speer intended to produce this result by avoiding the elements of modern construction as steel girders and reinforced concrete, which are subject to weathering and by designing his buildings to withstand the impact of the wind even if the roofs and ceilings were so neglected that they no longer braced the walls. In this respect, it can be seen that by going back to the materials of the past and by the proper engineering of buildings it was possible to create a permanence that was impossible with contemporary building materials and styles. It has been suggested that the use of stone was more a result of economic necessity or the product of an attempt by the SS to build up a stable position within the German economy, but both are at most secondary to the desire for the permanence stone gives. To Hitler, only the great cultural documents of humanity made of granite and marble could symbolize his new order.

The theory of ruin value could be seen as a backward looking concept; however, what it actually does is look at the type of buildings that survive from the past and why they survived and attempts to build into the new buildings of the Reich such principle. In addition, the infrastructure and organization behind the provision of material was purely of the time. Hitler was not like Shelley's Ozymandias, a leader boasting about his power to the future, but rather the builder of symbolic expressions of the movement and the new Germany they would create.

These buildings were not to be like the Reichstag, seen as a grandiose monument conjuring up historical reminiscences, but as symbols of a new Germany. These buildings had to be suitable for their intended role. An example of this is the rebuilt Reichskanzlei that was planned as a symbol of the Greater German Reich, which included Austria even though at the time of planning the Anschluss was still three years away. So important was the symbolism of the buildings that their form was decided on long before their construction and in some cases, before the events they were to symbolize. Speer himself remarked that many of the buildings Hitler asked him to construct were glorifying the victories he hasn't yet in his pocket. Hitler had drawn sketches of buildings he hoped to build as early as the 1920s, when there was not a shred of hope that they could ever be built. In addition, these buildings had to look the part. The Reichskanzlei must look like the center of the Reich not the head-quarters of a soap company. These building would be the great cultural documents that the new order would create in their stronger, protected community.

Symbolic architecture need not be built as it often already existed. In 1941 the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps published an essay by Heinrich Himmler entitled "German Castles in the East", in which he wrote, "When people are silent, stones speak. By means of the stone, great epochs speak to the present so that fellow citizens; are able to uplift themselves through the beauty of self-made buildings. Proud and self-assured, they should be able to look upon these works erected by their own community." Himmler continues by creating a cyclical process linking the people, their blood and their buildings, "Buildings are always erected by people. People are children of their blood, are members or their race. As blood speaks, so the people build."

Where buildings held important cultural items, they would either be remodelled like Braunschweig Cathedral, which was the burial place of Henry the Lion, co-opted like Strasbourg Cathedral as the monument to Germany's unknown soldier, or moved to a more appropriate position, like the Victory Column in Berlin.

Like the Sacré-Coeur basilica in Montmartre or the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome, the new buildings of the National Socialists would replace the commercial buildings that were signs of the cultural decay and general break-up of the Berlin of the 1930's. To express their true Aryan nature, the Nazis had to destroy the creations of non-Germans and the decadent past and accept Hitler's judgment as to which way German art must go in order to fulfil its task as the expression of German character. The new Berlin, like the new National Socialist Germany, would superimpose itself onto the decadence of the old. The Nazi vision of a city would replace the visions of the past, they would replace the twilight, or the past, with clarity, cleanliness, and pure, distinct lines.

Symbols were not just limited to permanent buildings; familiar symbols of the north European past were used regularly in the decorations for Nazi festivals. An example of this is the use of the Maypole at the May Day celebrations. It is the traditional symbol throughout northern Europe of the end of winter and of the reawakening of nature and the focus of community events. At the doors of the German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition were two sets of seven meter high statues that symbolized family and community. The pavilion that was designed as a blatant symbol of Nazi Germany was planned by a German, Albert Speer and built solely out of German materials shipped from within Germany.

Didactic

Hitler saw architecture as, "The Word In Stone," a method of imparting a message. This is not regime architecture primarily for general propaganda purposes as argued by Benton, but is work meant to impart a specific message. This would be a message that all decent Germans would understand, like the lessons of events at the Degenerate Art exhibition staged in Munich in 1937. They would not understand it because they were told too; they would understand it simply because of who they were.

The Nazis chose new versions of past styles for most of their architecture. This should not be viewed simply as an attempt to reconstruct the past, but rather an effort to use aspects of the past to create a new present. Most buildings are copies in some form or other, but for the Nazis, copying the past not only linked them to the past in general, but specifically to an Aryan past. Neo-classical architecture and Renaissance architecture were direct representations of Aryan culture. Völkish architecture was also Aryan but of a Germanic nature. Still, these analogues were not part of an attempt to recreate an actual past, but were meant to emphasize the importance of Aryan culture as a justification for the actions of the present. Many other nations from the Austro Hungarian Empire to the United States have constructed major government buildings in historical styles to get across a specific message.

While Hitler saw the architecture of the Weimar Republic as an object lesson in cultural decline, the new buildings he would build would teach a different lesson, that of national rebirth. The size of the buildings proposed for Berlin were not megalomaniacal in size but meant to restore to each individual German citizen their self-respect and to signify the insignificance of the individual in relation to the community as a whole. The distinct lack of any detailing at a human scale in the urban neo-classical building would have simply overawed, imparting the message without any subtlety. If the message was not understood it would be drummed in by making people go in straight lines to predetermined positions. The message of community would even affect holidays. Clemens Klotz Prora would not only have a Festhalle in which people would hear speeches and get involved in communal events, but would also give everyone the same view of the sea.

Engineering could be coupled with architecture to teach lessons too. It is clear that the Autobahn was seen as a way of creating a community, which was both physically and symbolically linked. When Carl Theoder Protzen entitled his painting of the Autobahn bridge at Leipheim, "Clear the forest - dynamite the rock; conquer the valley; overcome the distance; stretch the road through the German land," he was linking clear connections between what should be done and what it was to accomplish. Building the Autobahn would not only teach the German people that they were linked together but would also show that it had been accomplished by Germans working together. It would be a mile post for the construction of the community of the German People. The effort that went into the styling of Autobahn bridges and garages show plainly that it was more than just a motorway. In some circumstances the design used for the Autobahn actually affects the functioning of its supposed purpose.

The role the Nazis hoped architecture would play in the creation of a new order was like that of a book: to provide a place to hold the message, the symbols to impart it and a teacher to read it. Architecture, like every other art form, would be produced to serve the new Nazi order. For them, if this meant following existing architectural styles or providing analogues of other buildings, then so be it.

Cult of victory

Both the Nazis and the Romans employed architecture of colossal dimensions to overawe and intimidate. Both cultures were preoccupied with architectural monuments that celebrated or glorified a victory ideology: triumphal arches (the largest in the world on Berlin's north-south axis), columns, trophies and a cult of pageantry associated with the subjugation of others. As Albert Speer remarked, when it was safe to do so: "The Romans built arches of triumph to celebrate the big victories won by the Roman Empire, while Hitler built them to celebrate victories he had not yet won".

The Nazis planned and built many military trophies and memorials [Mähnmaler] on the eastern borders of the Reich. In the same way, the Romans had built celebratory trophies on the borders of their empire to commemorate victories and warn off would-be attackers. One of the most prominent memorial buildings intended to commemorate Germany's past and anticipated military glory was Wilhelm Kries's Soldatenhalle. This was to be yet another cult centre to promote the regime's glorification of war, patriotic self-sacrifice and virtutes militares. The main architectural features of this building were overtly Roman. A groin-vaulted crypt beneath the main barrel-vaulted hall was intended as a pantheon of generals exhibited here in effigy. In addition, it functioned as a herõon, since the bones of Frederick the Great were to be placed in the building.

Flags and insignia played an important part in Nazi ceremonial and in the decoration of buildings. The eagle-topped standards carried by the SA at Nuremberg rallies were reminiscent of Roman legionary standards, the uniformity of which Hitler admired. There can be little doubt that Hitler state architecture, even when seen today in photographs of architectural models, conveys a sense of "Power and Force" [Macht und Gewalt], which of course Hitler wanted it to embody.

Inevitably, after Hitler's defeat, the colossal dimensions of his buildings tended to be seen, as they were by Speer in his memoirs, as symbols of Hitler's megalomania. This is perhaps a valid view point, but it is also something of an oversimplification, since at the time the buildings were planned and erected, they were valid symbols of Germany's rapidly rising power and expressed the optimism generated by Hitler's spectacular initial victories. The vast public buildings of ancient Rome have rarely been explained as symptoms of imperial megalomania, except perhaps for the Domus Aurea, since Roman imperialism, which generated money and labour necessary for the erection of Rome's monumental buildings, was supremely successful and long-lived. Hitler's architecture is sometimes misjudged because he was building for the future in anticipation of a greatly enlarged Reich. Here it is worth noting that Vitruvius perceived that Augustus was building on a large scale for future greatness. Hitler's optimistic expectations were thankfully frustrated and in the aftermath of catastrophe his architectural plans seemed by many to be those of a madman. However, difficult it may be to view these plans objectively; it would be a mistake to regard his buildings as either psychologically ineffective or symbolically impotent. This is certainly not the impression given by Speer or Giesler at the time they were articulating Hitler's architectural plans.

Had Hitler achieved all his political and military aims and had his successors consolidated and perhaps even expanded his territorial gains, the art and architecture of Germany would undoubtedly have reflected the sentiment that pervaded much of Rome's art in the Augustan period, that is, a confidently assumed right to dominate others, which Virgil elegantly, if brutally, expressed in Aeneid 6.851-53: "Remember, Roman, to exercise dominion over nations. These will be your skills: to impose culture on peace, to spare the conquered and to war down the proud." This passage, so much in tune with Nazi aspirations is repeatedly referred to in the political literature of Germany at the time.

Berlin's reshaping

In Mein Kampf  Hitler states that industrialized German cities of his day lacked dominating public monuments and a central focus for community life. In fact, adverse criticism of the rapid industrialization, of German cities after 1870 had already been voiced by other critiques.

The ideal Nazi city was not to be too large, since it was to reflect pre-industrial values and its state monuments, the products and symbols of collective effort [Gemeinschaftsarbeiten], were to be given maximum prominence by being centrally situated in the new and reshaped cities of the enlarged Reich.

Hitler's comments in Mein Kampf indicated that he saw buildings such as the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus as symbols of the political might and power of the Roman people. Hitler stated, "Architecture is not only the spoken word in stone, it is the expression of the faith and conviction of a community, or else it signifies the power, greatness and fame of a great man or ruler." In Hitler's cultural address, "The Buildings of the Third Reich," delivered in September 1937, in Nuremburg, he affirmed that the new buildings of the Reich were to reinforce the authority of the Nazi party and the state and at the same time provide "gigantic evidence of the community" [gigantischen Zeugen unserer Gemeinschaft]. The architectural evidence of this authority could already be seen in Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin and would become still more evident when more plans had been put into effect.

On September 19, 1933, Hitler told the mayor of Berlin that his city was "unsystematic", but it was not until January 30, 1937, that Speer was officially put in charge of plans for the reshaping of Berlin, although he had been working on them unofficially in 1936.