The architect of the Reich

by M ichael J. Lewis

I t is one o f historys cheekier pranks that the

first architect ever to appear on television was
that thirty-year-old prodigy with the moviestar face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the
first country to introduce television broadcast
ing, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party
Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you
can watch a short clip as Speer drives his con
vertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds,
banters with a reporter, and then speeds off
w ith a jaunty H itler salute.
O f course the world knows Speer from an
entirely different media appearance. This was
his testimony at the Nurem berg trials, where
he dramatically accepted full personal respon
sibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one o f
the accused to do so. His subdued, humble de
meanor could n o t have contrasted more with
the evasiveness, self-justification, and uncon
cealed haughtiness o f his co-defendants. It was
literally the performance of his life, and it saved
him from certain execution. Having stepped
into the role o f the good Nazi, Speer never
relinquished it. U pon serving his twenty-year
sentence, he published a series o f fascinating
though self-serving memoirs, beginning with
Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he
played the part o f the naive and innocent artist,
who was guilty o f nothing more than letting
his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his
good judgm ent and moral sensibility.
T hat pose is no longer tenable. Archival
finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown
that Speer could no t have been ignorant of
the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed,
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but was involved in finicky detail with their

construction and operation. Although these
finds caused a sensation in Germany a decade
ago, it is only now that we have a comprehen
sive treatm ent in English, M artin Kitchens
Speer: H itlers Architect. 1 As an architectural
biography, it does not altogether satisfy. What
is the relationship between Speers architecture
and Nazi ideology? Is one permitted to speak
about his work in aesthetic terms? If not, why
not? Only in passing do these questions di
vert Kitchen, who is much more interested in
Speer the war criminal than Speer die architect.
And that he was a war criminal, right up to
his elbows, there can be no doubt. Hitlers
Architect makes a persuasive case that Speers
escape from the gallows at Nurem berg m ust
count as one o f the last great crimes o f the war.
A lb e r t Speer (1905-1981) was born in
Mannheim, Germany, the son and grandson
o f architects. Pushed by his father to study ar
chitecture, he studied first in Karlsruhe, then
Munich, but he only became serious after he
transferred to Berlin. There he applied to study
with Hans Poelzig, the brilliant expressionist
architect o f Weimar Germany, who rejected
Speer as an inferior draftsman. Disappointed,
he turned to the man who was Poelzigs polar
opposite, Heinrich Tessenow, a reform-minded
architect with a love o f simple, dear volumes
and neoclassical claritydie ultimate basis o f
1 Speer: H itlers Architect, by Martin Kitchen; Yale
University Press, 4+2 pages, $37.50.

The architect of the Reich by MichaelJ. Lewis

Nazi architecture. Speer, who all his life knew

how to ingratiate himself, sufficiently impressed
Tessenow to become his teaching assistant.
Speer joined the Nazi Party in January 1931, two
years before Hitlers election as chancellor. He
was die 474,481st German to join and presum
ably did so more out o f conviction than calcu
lation, as a Nazi electoral victory was then by
no means certain (in die elections dre previous
September, they had come in second, receiv
ing just over 18 percent o f die vote). Whatever
die reason, it took Speer just diree quick leaps
to vault to the center o f power. In 1931 he re
modeled a villa for Karl Hanke, a Berlin party
boss (later notorious as die hangman o f Bre
slau); this job led to a commission from Joseph
Goebbels in 1932 to remodel die Nazi party
headquarters in Berlin; this in turn brought
his career-making commission, the decoration
o f Berlins TempelhofAirport for die National
Day o f Labor on May 1,1933, die first o f many
monumental settings he designed for Hider.
This was the Nazis first great public rally
following their election diree m onths earlier,
and it gave Speer no time for an architectural
solution. Extemporizing, he created a mighty
backdrop o f nine enormous flags, each over
one hundred feet high, arranged artfully in
groups o f three and dramatically lit from below
by searchlights. It was a nimble improvisa
tion and it highlighted his one architectural
strength, a flair for the theatrical and for co
lossal scale. Speer proudly showed the site to
Tessenow, who was not enthusiastic: All you
have done is create an impression. But the
same can be said, as Kitchen points out, o f
everything Speer built.
The Tempelhof project made Speer the logi
cal choice as architect for the Nuremberg Rally,
held by die Nazis every year from 1933 to 1938
(it was the rally o f 1934 that was die subject of
Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will). As at
Berlin, his task was essentially scenographic,
to create a theatrical backdrop to a vast pa
rade ground. N o fewer than 150,000 SS and
SA m en would file past the grandstand, and
Speer sensed he needed a solid and monumen
tal object to serve as a visual counterweight
to their surging masses. His solution was the

Zeppelin Field Tribune (1935-1937), surely the

worlds most monumental set o f bleachers. He
found his model in the Pergamon Altar, the
celebrated Hellenistic Greek altar of the second
century B.C. that is housed in its own museum
in Berlin. He inflated its scale to stupendous
proportions, turned its graceful Ionic columns
to severe square pillars, and outfitted it with
upraised searchlights that lifted its columnar
theme to the heavens.
Speers earliest work, including interior
alterations for Goebbelss residence, were in
die crisp and understated Tessenow mode. But
the Nuremberg commissions revealed a distinct
tendency toward megalomania. He followed
up his Zeppelin Field Tribune with what was
envisioned as the worlds largest stadium, the
Deutsches Stadion. In accordance widi Hitlers
decree, it was to be large and grand enough
to host all the worlds future Olympic Games
(after die ill-fated Tokyo Olympics o f 1940).
Once again Speer turned to classical antiquity
for his model, the Panathenaic Stadium in
Adiens, which he again inflated to immense
sizegiving it a seating capacity o f 400,000.
Unlike its Greek prototype, which was tucked
into a natural hillside site, it was to tower over
the earth, a 300-foot-high cliff o f massive pink
granite. Its cornerstone was laid in 1937 and
construction continued well after die outbreak
o f the warnow with prisoners o f warwhen
it was at last abandoned.
Speer found an ideal patron in Hitler, who
had a keen understanding o f the potential o f
architecture as an instrum ent o f power, and
how to wield it effectively and imaginatively.
O ther absolutist rulers from Mussolini to
Stalin to Ceausescu have enjoyed playing the
architectural patron, but their buildings were
incidental to their careers; H itlers rise to
power was predicated on public persuasion,
for which he enlisted all the instruments o f
modern technolog}': die airplane, loudspeakers,
electric lighting, the m otion picture. Speers
highly theatrical architectural scenography was
yet another instrument. Moreover, unlike those
other dictators, Hider had once intended to be
an architect, and had spent much time studying
and drawing die buildings o f Vienna; in every
respect he was an exceptionally well-informed
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The architect o f the Reich by Michael J. Lewis

client. This did n o t make it a collaboration o f

equals. H id er continued to w ork w ith other
architects, such as Speers rival Herm ann Giesler,
w ho was assigned the rem odeling o f M unich
and was even prom ised die com m ission for
H itlers sarcophaguswhich H id er offered in
the presence o f Speer, a humiliating gesture but
characterisdc o f H ider, w ho enjoyed keeping
his subordinates o ff balance by playing them
o ff one another.
Still, w h en it came to his m o st visionary
project, die rem odeling o f Berlin, Speer was
his architect o f choice. As o f January 1937 he was
made Generalbauinspektorfiir die Reichshauptstadt
(Inspector General o f Buildings in the Reich
Capital), and given virtually unlim ited financial
resources60 m illion Reichsmarks per year,
and die right to com pel Berlin to contribute
an additional 70 million. H is m andate was to
reshape the old imperial capital into Germania,
w hich H id e r envisioned as th e w orlds first
capital (W elthauptstadt). To achieve this,
Speer also was given considerable pow ers o f
em inent dom ain, w hich he exercised primarily
by confiscating die property o f Berlin Jews.
O th er than certain prelim inary w o rk and
th e relocation o f several m onum ents, littie o f
Germania was realized, and none o f his m o n u
m ental projects. B ut the scope was staggering.
Historically, the principal axis o f Berlin was
U n ter den Linden, a stately allee running eastw est th a t was precisely gauged to the courdy
habits o f die eighteenth century. N o w Speer
proposed to traverse this w ith a m ighty new
n o rth -so u th axis th a t was Im perial R om an in
sensibility b u t far m ore than R om an in scale.
A t either end was to be a railway station, each
prefaced by a wildly inflated version o f an exist
ing m onum ent. To die south would be an Arch
o f T rium ph, well over twice the height o f that
in Paris and large enough to have inscribed on
it the nam e o f each one o f the millions o f G er
m an and A ustrian soldiers w ho died in W orld
War I. To die no rth w ould be a Volkshalle (Hall
o f the People), m odeled o n th e Pantheon in
R om e b u t grotesquely enlarged so th at it rose
som e 950 feet and enclosed a cubic volum e
equivalent to seventeen St. Peters in R om e.
G orgeously detailed scale models o f the whole
ensem ble w ere built, and H itle r m ade it his
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habit to relax by visiting Speers studio and

brainstorm ing over the details, continuing to
do so long after the approaching Soviet arm y
ensured th at none o f it w ould com e to pass.
Speer m anaged to com plete only one m o n
um ental building in Berlin, the new Reich
Chancellery, w hich he pushed to com pletion
in just one year so that it opened in time for die
annual diplom atic reception in January 1939.
It was a curious building. I t consisted oflittie
m ore than an interm inable corridor w rapped
in a m ande o f offices and stretching o u t for
1,380 feet, m ore than a quarter o f a mile (it
is telling th at their dim ensions are often the
m o st im p o rtan t features o f N azi buildings).
Speer conceived the w hole as a continuous
spatial journey, choreographed architecturally
so as to heighten the suspense and tension o f
the visitor to the breaking point. In order to
arrive at H itlers reception room , he had to
pass five m ajor spaces, w hich w ere contrast
ingly large and small. The fourth o f these was
deceiving. A gracefully proportioned rotunda,
hum an in scale, it suggested diat the destina
tio n had been reached. In fact, it was only
the halfway point. Behind this came die long
M arble Gallery, w hich Speer m ade precisely
twice as long as die Hall o f M irrors in Versailles
(480 instead o f 240 feet). It was a staggering
spectacle n o t m eant to be enjoyed: instead o f
carpeting the room , as Speer requested, H ider
insisted on polished m arble so th at the visitor
would arrive uneasily on a slippery slope. The
n o tio n o f die long axis m ay have com e from
the enfilade o f the B aroque palace, b u t diose
were always suggestive o f ease and grace, and
never o f menace and degradation.
If this miscellany o f scenographic backdrops
for political rallies and visionary fantasias o f
an im perial Germ ania w ere all th a t Speer
achieved, perhaps he w ould be as forgotten
as those anxious dunkies w h o supplied Stalin
w idi similarly extravagant b u t insipid show
pieces. K itchens verdict seems exaedy right:
the pretentious hovers on the brink o f the
preposterous. B ut as it happened, Speer did
a great deal m ore.
I n February 1942 F ritz Todt, the M inister o f
A rm am ents, died in a suspicious plane crash,

The architect of the Reich by Michael J. Lewis

and Speer was promptly appointed to succeed

him. At the same time he was put in charge
o f Organization Todt, the government-owned
construction and engineering company that
had built die Autobahn system but now served
the war effort. Speer proved a manager o f
extraordinary competence, and managed to
increase the production o f tanks, planes, and
submarines almost to the end o f the war. This
he was able to do in large part through his
decentralized network o f m unitions factories,
scattered across greater Germany in order to
evade Allied bombing, as well as relying gready
on the unrelenting use o f slave labor. And this
is why he found himself fighting for his life at
Nurem berg four years later.
K itchen shows diat Speer was complicit in die
slave labor system from the beginning, and to an
unwholesome degree. For the first five years of
the Nazi Reich, die concentration camps run by
the SS were used purely for political incarcera
tion, but in 1938 Heinrich Himmler decided to
make diem financially self-supporting. In con
sultation witii Hider and Speer, he established
die Deutsche Erd- und Steimverke GmBH (dest)
or German Earth and Stone Work Limited,
which would put concentration camp inmates
to work. Speer advanced the dest a credit o f
9.5 million Reichsmarks which it was to pay off
over die next decade by supplying brick and
stone for his monumental building projects in
Berlin. He had an insatiable diirst for granite,
particularly die pink and red slabs with which
he liked to clad buildings o f state. And he went
beyond merely accepting deliveries o f granite
but took an active part in scouting out the sites
for new concentration camps, which he placed
at profitable stone quarries. Himmler sited the
concentration camps at Maudiausen and Flossenbiirg in 1938 on die advice of Speer, and soon
was delivering granite to die new Fuhrerbauten
in Berlin.
In 1940 Himmler turned again for advice to
Speer, who now directed him to GroB-Rosen,
a Silesian quarry with a handsome blue-gray
granite, and Natzweiler-Struthof, a quarry in
Alsace diat produced an attractive red granite
coveted by Speer for his Nuremberg stadium.
Bodi diese concentration camps were notorious

for working their prisoners to death, for which

reason most of dieir officials were executed after
die war, while Speer got off relatively lighdy.
At Nurem berg he would claim that he did
not realize how inhumane conditions were,
but Kitchen quotes one offhand remark that
sheds a cold light on his attitude at die time.
When told about the horrific conditions faced
by Jewish workers at die Oranienburg brick
factory, Speer replied, The Yids got used to
making bricks while in Egyptian captivity.
Speers defense at Nuremberg hinged on his
supposed ignorance o f die Final Solution, a
strategy made possible by the absence o f writ
ten evidence (Nazi officials spent much o f the
final weeks o f the war frantically destroying
documents). It was no t until 1970 that the
Canadian historian Erich Goldhagen discov
ered the text o f Him m lers infamous address
in die Posen tow n hall on October 6, 1943.
The transcript had been hiding in plain sight
since the end o f the war but had never been
recognized for what it was, perhaps because
investigators had conflated it widi a similar
speech diat Him m ler delivered in Posen two
days earlier, and which was introduced as evi
dence at Nuremberg. In diat second address,
he explained with unusually brutal clarity why
die Nazi strategy had to be one o f total exter
mination o f die Jewish people
It is very easy, gendemen, to utter the simple sen
tence that die Jews must be exterminated. It is
exceedingly difficult and hard for those who have
to carry it out
We were faced widi the question
of what to do widi the women and children. In
this instance I decided to find a simple solution.
I did not consider it justifiable to exterminatein
other words kill, or order to be killeddie men
and to permit the children to grow up who will
seek revenge on our sons and grandchildren. We
had to take the difficult decision to make diis race
disappear from die face of die earth.

What was devastating to Speer was a casual

aside made to him by Himmler, in die course of
describing die uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto
(O f course, this has nothing to do with
Party Comrade Speer. It wasnt your doing.).
The revelation threw Speer into a panic, and
The New Criterion March 2016

The architect of the Reich by Michael J. Lewis

he insisted with inventive desperation that

H im m ler had merely been apostrophizing
him rhetorically, and that he had left the
conference earlier. There followed an elaborate
and embarrassing effort to prove that he flew
to Hitlers headquarters that afternoon and
missed Him m lers dramatic statement. H e
could not deny that he dined the next day with
four Gauleiters who had attended the talk and
would have happily filled him in. By this point,
Speeds defense required an intricate contrivance
o f sudden exits and absences to avoid knowing
what he, as the Reichs chief logistical mind,
had to know as an essential part o f his job. But
more damning evidence was to come.
After a September 1942 meeting with the
SS officials in charge o f concentration camp
construction, Speer approved 13.7 million
Reichsmarks for the enlargement o f Auschwitz
and other camps, as well as the building of
crematoria and disinfestation facilities. Two
o f Ms deputies visited Auschwitz the following
May to inspect the new work and to meet its
commandant, Rudolf Hoss, who was hoping
to wheedle from Speer more structural steel, a
commodity in desperately short supply. Hoss
made clear, as Kitchen relates, that the reason
for the camps existence, whatever incidental
benefits it offered as a source o f cheap labor,
was the solution o f the Jewish question. The
report o f his deputies seems to have satisfied
Speer, who wrote a chummy letter to Himmler
on May 30, granting him a one-time allotment
o f one thousand tons o f steel. It is telling that
the same letter denied a request for additional
steel for Himmlers Waffen SS divisionsthis
at a time when the Germans were still reeling
from the defeat at Stalingrad. Such were the
priorities o f the man in charge o f German
wartime production.
A n artist may w ork for a tyrant, even a
tyrant astride a m ountain o f skulls, w ithout
discrediting the art. Sergei Eisenstein and
Dmitri Shostakovich both served Stalin, whose
death toll exceeded Hitlers, and yet their works
are monuments o f twentieth-century art. To
create on a lavish scale requires working for
men o f power, who did not necessarily achieve
that power through their moral punctiliousness.
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And even the most ideologically self-righteous

artists are likely to say, like Groucho Marx,
these are my principles, and if you dont like
themI have other ones .Thus the Commumst
sympathizer Le Corbusier could work for Stalin
but later seek work from Marshal Petain. And a
Jacobin like Jacques-Louis David could eagerly
vote for the beheading of Louis XVI as an enemy
o f the people, and then go on to paint the most
toadying portraits o f Napoleon.
But somehow one senses that Speer falls in
a different category, that one cannot excuse
the opportunism o f die artist in order to ap
preciate the integrity o f the art. Kitchen briefly
mentions w ithout com m ent one telling fact,
wMch is that as an architecture student Speer
occasionally paid poorer students to prepare
his drawings. The practice is not uMtnown,
but it is not what one expects from a truly
architectural mind, from someone who lives
and thinks architecture, and who exults in the
making o f form. Kitchen suggests that Speers
cleverest design ideas, such as the Luftwaffe
searchlights illuminating the Nuremberg Rally
grounds, came from his assistants.
Why is it, one might ask, that there are no
arcMtectural drawings by Speer among the
books illustrations, not a single sketch, not
one perspective? The idea sketches that survive
for Germania are not by Speer but by Hitler.
Hitler was not an arcMtect o f terrible original
ity or distinction, but in a certain sense he was
more o f an arcMtect than Speerthat is, he was
brimming over with ideas for buildings and
formsderivative and conventional to be sure,
but fired with all the passion and longings and
resentments o f Ms frustrating years in Vienna
around 1909. He had the one arcMtectural qual
ity that Speer did not: an urgent arcMtectural
imagination. One somehow cannot imagine
Speer waiting up in the middle o f a night with
die compulsion to sketch a sudden idea.
TMs is what makes Speer in the end so repel
lent, and all the more so because o f his courtly
good looks and air o f easy urbaMty; it is that he
does not even have the excuse o f the opportun
ist, that he made political compromises in order
to practice Ms art. Stripped o f die murderous
politics, in which his complicity is now beyond
all doubt, there is precious little art left.

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