In discussions with Speer over the next months and years, Hitler steadily expanded on his original ideas. In addition to his domed hall and arch of triumph, he envisaged a new city hall modeled on the neogothic pile in Vienna, but “more beautiful than Vienna’s, no doubt about that.” He also demanded a new Chancellery, since the existing building was “fit only for a soap company.” He would, he noted, “be holding extremely important conferences in the near future,” for which he needed “grand halls and salons which will make an impression on people, especially on the smaller dignitaries.” When entering the Chancellery, he explained, “one should have the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world.” He placed the entire VoBstrasse at Speer’s disposal for this project, insisting that it be completed by January 10, 1939. To overcome the municipal administration’s reluctance to help finance this and other Nazi works, he proposed threatening to build an entirely new capital elsewhere, perhaps on the plains of Mecklenberg. “You’ll see how the Berliners come to life at the threat that the national government may move out,” he told Speer.
As Speer and his team took over Hitler’s plans for the reconstruction of Berlin, they scrupulously retained the original concept’s grandiosity while adding some practical ideas of their own, such as the consolidation of Berlin’s railway stations into two northern and southern terminals, and the opening of new urban areas in the east to accommodate the thousands of citizens whose homes in the center were scheduled to be razed. The team planned to construct new airports outside the city to relieve pressure on Tempelhof, which they hoped eventually to convert into an amusement park, like Copenhagen’s Tivoli. In the west, bordering the Olympic grounds, Speer planned a huge new university and medical quarter. Hitler went along with these proposals, but he could not work up much enthusiasm for them. All he wanted to talk about was his representational structures, along with plans for new ministries, showrooms for German industry, luxury hotels, and a grand new opera house. Looking back years later on Hitler’s vision, Speer found it “rather sinister that in the midst of peacetime . . . [the Führer] was planning buildings representative of an imperial glory which could be won only by war.”
This insight should have come earlier, for the most obvious aspect of Hitler’s scheme, aside from its derivative monumentality, was its bellicosity, its intimate connection with the Nazi drive for a new German empire. Ironically, it was just this ambition for a new empire that ultimately made the realization of Hitler’s Germa-nia impossible, since the demands of war required postponement of most of the building projects. Aside from the Neue Reichskanzlei (New Chancellery) and three large Flak bunkers, the only major part of the Germania program to be completed before the war began was an autobahn ring around the city. Perhaps fittingly, this belt would constitute Berlin’s outer line of defenses during the Russian offensive in 1945.
“Tempo, Tempo!”—Berlin Readies for War
While Speer was honing Hitler’s plans for a new imperial capital, Hitler himself was laying the diplomatic and military groundwork for Germany’s future empire. As in the Kaiserreich, Berlin was the focal point of Germany’s quest for world power. It was also the primary arena in which, with the Olympics safely over, the Nazis could reveal more brutally and systematically than ever the domestic dimensions of their ideological agenda.
