Speer, one of the most complex figures in the leadership of the Third Reich, came from a wealthy Mannheim family that regarded the Nazis as hopelessly plebeian. Befitting his background, Speer was a reserved and diffident fellow who would never think of pummeling Jews in the streets. Yet as an architectural student in Munich and Berlin he became so fascinated with the Nazis that he joined the party, and also the SA, in 1931. He later insisted that this had nothing to do with “politics,” as if the Nazis were some kind of hobby club. In fact, from early on Speer was determined to capture Nazi ideals in mortar and stone, though it took him some time to find a consistent “voice.” His first political commission in Berlin was to renovate a villa in Grunewald for a Nazi district headquarters. He used Bauhaus-inspired wallpaper even though he feared this might be seen as “communistic.” To his relief, the district leader assured him that the Nazis would “take the best they could get from everywhere, even from the Communists.” Next, Speer converted a Schinkel-designed palace on the VoBstrasse for use as the Nazi Gauleitung in Berlin. Pleased with the work, Goebbels commissioned him to renovate the propaganda ministry as well as his private townhouse in the city. The speed with which Speer completed these projects impressed Hitler, who was looking for an architect who could make big things happen in minimal time. In the wake of the Night of the Long Knives, he had decided to move the top leaders of the SA to Berlin so he could keep an eye on them. To house them, he wanted to rebuild the Borsig Palace. He assigned the project to Speer, telling him to start at once. When Speer objected that Papen’s office was in the Borsig Palace, and that the vice-chancellor would need time to move out, Hitler told him to start working with no consideration for Papen. Speer instructed his workmen to create as much noise and dust as possible, thereby expediting Papen’s departure. Hitler was delighted, making jokes about “dusty bureaucrats.” During the work, Speer noticed a pool of dried blood on the floor where Papen’s assistant, Herbert von Bose, had been gunned down in the Night of the Long Knives. He simply looked away—his response to unpleasant realities during the rest of his career in the Third Reich.
Having passed the Borsig test, Speer now received a much bigger assignment— that of designing a new complex for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. For this project he hit on the style that was to become his trademark: a pumped-up neoclassicism. He proposed a knockoff of the Pergamum Altar: “a mighty flight of stairs topped and enclosed by a long colonnade, flanked on both sides by stone abutments.” To make space for this monstrous structure, Speer blew up a streetcar depot. Its unsightly wreckage inspired him to propound his “theory of ruin value,” according to which all Nazi buildings should be constructed with materials and techniques that would make them look as noble as ancient Roman or Greek ruins when they themselves fell into decay in the distant future. Some Nazi leaders were scandalized by the thought that Third Reich artifacts might ever decay, but Hitler, a Romantic in such matters, gave orders that henceforth all major buildings of the Reich were to be erected in keeping with this “law of ruins.”
With his construction of the Nuremberg rally grounds and his staging of the 1934 Party Congress, in which he employed antiaircraft spotlights to create a “Cathedral of Light” around the field, Speer found himself an architectural celebrity, a Nazi Schinkel at age twenty-nine. Unable to tolerate that Speer had worked for Goebbels but not yet for him, Göring hired him to renovate his own palazzo, even though it had just been refurbished. There was no doubt, however, that Speer was Hitler’s man above all. The Führer clearly saw an idealized image of himself in the tall, handsome young architect. He decided in 1936 that Speer must be the one to undertake “the greatest of all plans,” the reconstruction of Berlin. On January 30, 1937, the fourth anniversary of his coming to power, Hitler named Speer General-bauinspektor (General Building Inspector) for the Construction of Berlin. The architect would report directly to the Führer, who promised to clear all obstacles in his path. Hitler also made clear that he would brook no small-mindedness in this endeavor. As he told Speer: “Berlin is a big city, but not a real metropolis. Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Or even Vienna. Those are cities with grand style. Berlin is nothing but an unregulated accumulation of buildings. We must surpass Paris and Vienna.”
