Bryn Mawr College

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr

College
Growth and Structure of Cities Faculty Research
and Scholarship

Growth and Structure of Cities

1997

Interpreting Nazi Architecture: The Case of Albert

Speer
Barbara Miller Lane
Bryn Mawr College, blane@brynmawr.edu

Let us know how access to this document benefits you.

Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/cities_pubs
Part of the Architecture Commons
Custom Citation
Lane, B., "Interpreting Nazi Architecture: The Case of Albert Speer," in Ultra terminum vagari: scritti in onore di Carl Nylander, ed. Brje
Magnusson, et al. Rome: Quasar, 1997. 155-169.

This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/cities_pubs/30
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Barbara Miller Lane,

Interpreting Nazi Architecture: the case of Albert Speeri
The Zeppelinfeld, at Nuremberg (fig. 1), was built by Albert Speer in 1934-7 to
accommodate the annual Congresses of the Nazi Party. From its tribune, Hitler harangued
more than 150,000 of the Party faithful, eliciting from them an ecstatic adoration. The plan
for a new center for Berlin (fig. 2), capital of Hitler's new expanded empire, was a project
envisioned by both Hitler and Speer, who worked together on it for many years. Its broad
North-South axis was to be framed by a giant arch of triumph, four hundred feet high, and a
huge domed Great Hall which would provide space for rallies of 180,000 people. Of such
buildings and projects Speer remarked in his Memoirs, "For the commission to do a great
building, I would have sold my soul like Faust."ii
As principal architect to Adolf Hitler from 1934 to 1945, Albert Speer (1905-1981)
had the opportunity to build a few "great buildings" and to plan many more. Among the
major buildings actually completed by Speer before 1945, in addition to the Zeppelinfeld and
other buildings at Nuremberg, were Hitler's new Chancellery in Berlin, completed in 1938
(figs. 3 and 4), and a German Pavilion for the Paris World's Fair of 1937 (fig. 5). As Hitler's
Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 to 1945, Speer was personally
responsible for the organization of labor -- much of it forced labor -- and materiel in support
of the war effort. In this capacity he also laid down many building plans that affected the
future.
Among architects practicing in Germany under the Nazi regime, Speer was the most
powerful. Indeed he was for a time one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. His
buildings, and those plans in which Hitler collaborated with him, were endlessly celebrated in
the official press, in often-repeated exhibitions, and in popular films. Did Speer sell his soul
in the service of National Socialism? Were Speer's buildings in fact his own or were they
primarily Hitler's? If they were his own, were Speer's buildings nevertheless tools of Nazi
repression, full of political imagery that their audience understood and internalized? Or is
architecture, despite the repeated claims of Nazi propaganda, fundamentally apolitical, so that
Speer's work, if studied at all, should be seen apart from its Nazi context? These issues are
now hotly debated by scholars and architects, especially in Germany and the United States.
The ramifications of this debate are of immense significance for our understanding of
German history and modern architecture. They also have important implications for art
historical methodology in general. The following discussion will trace the development of
interpretation of Speer's work since 1945 and then set forth my own analyses. In the process, I

BML/Speer/8/13/96

hope to arrive at some conclusions about the nature of Nazi architecture, and the methods
which are appropriate to its study.
For more than twenty years after the end of the second World War, scholarly
discussion of Nazi architecture was almost non-existent. Hitler's claims that Nazi buildings
expressed the central purposes of National Socialist ideology were accepted at face value, so
that postwar revulsion against National Socialism focused also on the buildings featured in
Nazi propaganda. The only early systematic analysis of Nazi architecture from this period -Helmut Lehmann-Haupt's Art under a Dictatorship of 1954 -- describes Nazi buildings and
plans as gigantic and overwhelming, expressing in their size and scale the repressive and
terrorist nature of a totalitarian regime.iii Representing a debased neoclassicism and
misunderstood baroque, Nazi architecture in his view lacked significant merit. LehmannHaupt believed that Speer was almost entirely subordinate to Hitler in creating these
buildings. Such ideas were widespread both among victors and vanquished; little research
was done on Speer or Nazi architecture more generally (although studies of Hitler as a
political leader and warlord abounded). Little, therefore, was really known about Nazi
buildings or about Speer's work. Among architectural historians, Nikolaus Pevsner expressed
the dominant attitude in his famous Outline of European Architecture: "Of the German
buildings for the National Socialist Party . . . the less said the better."iv
Since the early 1970s, however, a great deal of attention, both scholarly and popular,
has focused on Nazi architecture. Speer himself was a catalyst. After his release from
Spandau prison in 1966 (where he had served a twenty-year sentence for war crimes), he
began to publish a hugely popular series of memoirs and to be in great demand as a public
speaker. In these memoirs and reflections, on which most writers on Nazi architecture still
depend, Speer described his own role in Nazi architecture and politics, and the inspirations,
both ideological and political, for his work.
Speer took great pains to explain his relationship to Hitler. He was mesmerized by the
Fhrer, he said, and entirely persuaded that this new leader could guide Germany out of
defeat and economic depression, back to power and greatness. Speer made clear that as a
patron Hitler gave the young architect an astonishingly free rein in most of the executed
buildings. But it was Hitler, Speer said, who conceived the general outlines of the Great Hall
and Arch of Triumph for Berlin, and who was concerned that they be as big as possible.v
Hitler was insistent about the need for grand and impressive buildings, buildings that
would last "for thousands of years."vi During their snowy walks above the Berghof and in
their more intimate conferences in Munich, Nuremberg and Berlin, Speer and Hitler often
discussed what Nazi buildings would look like in ruins. On these occasions they also spoke
of the ancient empires, of Babylon and Karnak, and of Rome, agreeing that these empires still

BML/Speer/8/13/96

expressed their power even as their buildings lay in ruins. Hitler and Speer hoped that the
buildings of the Third Reich, when and if that Empire fell, would also express its lasting
power.vii It will be useful to keep this macabre preoccupation in mind when considering
Speer's ancient models.
Apart from Hitler's ideas about monumentality and "ruin value," however, according
to Speer he was thoroughly compliant in matters of style, planning, and decoration. He
allowed Speer, for the most part, to design according to his own stylistic preferences.
Although Speer acknowledged certain other influences, his memoirs, essays and interviews
emphasized again and again his admiration for Greek architecture, especially that of the
Doric order, and his dependence on the legacy of German neoclassicism. Speer said that he
had been deeply influenced by the neoclassicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work he
often saw as a student in Berlin (fig. 6). This neoclassical tradition was mediated for Speer,
he said, by the work and teaching of his beloved mentor in Berlin, Heinrich Tessenow (fig.
7).viii But there were great disparities in scale and proportion between Speer's Paris pavilion
(fig. 5) and the works of his so-called mentors. Clearly Speer's statements about the
influences upon him were not entirely accurate. I will return to these points below.
Speer also stressed the theatrical and technological aspects of his work. In retrospect,
he said, he was most proud of his designs for the party congress grounds at Nuremberg. Here
bright flags by day and searchlights by night echoed and dramatized the vertical piers of the
grandstand, and framed the complex marching patterns of thousands of Nazi delegates inside
(figs. 8 and 9). Speer called the vertical columns of the searchlights his "cathedral of light,"
and wrote, in the first of his memoirs, that this "cathedral" was his "most beautiful
architectural concept."ix (It is interesting that although Speer spoke of "great buildings," and
claimed to share Hitler's concern with "ruin value," the architectural accomplishment he
valued most was this ephemeral creation of light.) Speer was also gratified when the Party
leadership allowed him to help choreograph the movements of participants in the ceremonies.
He was responsible for arranging these movements during at least one major party meeting at
Nuremberg; there may have been other occasions.x But despite his fondness for his
accomplishments at Nuremberg, Speer also claimed that as an architect in the Third Reich, he
had been primarily an artist and a technician, rather than a politician.xi
Speer's postwar memoirs and public appearances provided the public with a great deal
of information about Nazi architecture and about the structure of Nazi government. In the
climate of the 1970s and early 1980s, when younger Germans have begun an effort to come
to terms with the recent past, and younger architects in Germany and elsewhere have sought
to rehabilitate the traditions of neoclassicism, Speer's self-presentation has been attractive for
several reasons: (1) Speer's claim that his work was representative of the long and

BML/Speer/8/13/96

distinguished tradition of neoclassicism made the rehabilitation of his work attractive to

postmodernist architects in Germany and elsewhere. (2) Speer's claim that as an architect he
was fundamentally apolitical allowed scholars to study his work, and architects to admire it,
without thinking about its political implications. (3) The sense that Speer's work was rooted
in a still-living past enabled younger Germans to de-emphasize the importance of both 1933
and 1945 as turning points, and to find some continuity in modern German history. Speer's
assertion that he was relatively independent of Hitler's influence contributed to these
interpretations, for if one sets aside any consideration of Hitler's role in Nazi architecture, it is
much easier to think of Speer's work as part of a continuum.
At the same time, even Speer's detractors have for the most part accepted Speer's
account of his own importance. For those Germans who have sought to renew public
awareness about the evils of the Nazi regime -- and there have been many of them in recent
years -- Speer's architecture has been the object of special opprobrium, which has obscured
the importance of other architects and other buildings. In the last twenty years, then, a great
deal has been published about Speer. Some of it has been laudatory, some full of outraged
condemnation. Some has been strenuously and self-consciously value-free.xii
Let us turn first to a lavishly illustrated book on Speer's work, edited by Speer
himself, and published in 1978. In this volume, the historians Lars Olof Larsson, Georg
Friedrich Koch, and Karl Ernst Arndt argued that Speer's work resides firmly within a
neoclassical tradition reaching from Schinkel to the present.xiii Of this group, Larsson had
already begun to investigate Speer's planning for Berlin in some detail; he described it as
dependent, like the architecture, on older traditions in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe).xiv
The idea that Speer was significant mainly as a continuer of the German neoclassical tradition
was stated most polemically, however, not by a scholar but by an architect, Leon Krier. In a
later and even more luxurious version of the volume mentioned above, Krier describes Speer
as "the most famous architect of the twentieth century" and one who understood that
"classical architecture has been the noblest instrument of politics and of civilizing
propaganda for thousands of years and throughout all great cultures and continents."xv Krier
has frequently protested the "slandering" of "the grandeur, the elegance, the solidity, and the
stability of [Speer's] public buildings," which he sees as a part of "an articulate and intelligent
critique of modern architecture" that "existed in effect in Nazi Germany....in the line which
runs through Tessenow, Schmitthenner, and Schultze Naumburg."xvi Krier, in other words,
has made explicit an idea that is implicit in some of the more scholarly works on the Nazi
period: that Speer's work must be valued as an essential link between the traditions of
neoclassicism and the concerns of current postmodernism, and that it is free of any
specifically Nazi taint.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Another group of scholars vigorously questions these assumptions and interpretations.

Wolfgang Schche, Berthold Hinz and Angela Schnberger, among others, have urged that
Speer was practicing political oppression in his buildings from the start, by adopting a
monumental scale and site arrangements that direct the user in repressive ways, and by
organizing forced labor in building construction. Speer's work as an architect was a rehearsal
for his work as Minister of Armaments and War Production; it looked ahead to an
expansionist foreign policy, and to war.xvii By making the kind of comparisons mentioned
above (between Speer, Tessenow, Schinkel and others), Schche also emphasizes the
scalelessness and consequent inherent inhumanity of Speer's work. These qualities, he
believes, separate it decisively from the neoclassical tradition. Kurt Vondung, and most
recently Dieter Bartetzko, have also dwelt at length on the ways in which Speer's imagery and
building arrangements manipulated the masses, and created a setting for a Nazi political
cult.xviii In her splendidly documented study of the new Chancellery, Angela Schnberger
demonstrates that the conception and intended purpose of this building differed greatly from
Speer's account of it in his memoirs. Her challenge to Speer's self-representation has been
confirmed more recently by Matthias Schmidt, who writes about Speer's whole political
career. He shows that the memoirs seldom tell the truth, especially when it is embarrassing
truth, and produces incontrovertible evidence for Speer's early knowledge of, and implication
in, the "Final Solution".xix
Perhaps partly in response to the bitterness of debate over Speer, still another group of
German scholars has begun to deny to Nazi architecture any intrinsic "meaning." Hartmut
Frank has said that "stones speak no language"; "fascism is a problem not of stones but of
men"; and "architectures are not political, architects are."xx Werner Durth sees strong
continuities between the Nazi period and the postwar years, both in the work of specific
individuals and in the legacy left by Nazi architects including Speer.xxi Neither Frank nor
Durth has written directly in response to Speer's memoirs and public statements, nor do they
share the exaggerated views of Krier. Both, furthermore, are meticulous scholars. But their
work goes as far as any in denying political content to Speer's architecture.
My own work contributed to these debates at several points. When I first wrote on
Nazi architecture in 1968, I emphasized Speer's dependence on Hitler's ideas and influence,
but I also argued that Speer's were not the only important Nazi buildings. Instead, I stressed
that Nazi government and Nazi propaganda promoted a multiplicity of official styles.xxii For
example, Ordensburg Vogelsang (fig. 10), which looked like a medieval castle, and the halftimbered Hitler youth hostel (fig. 11), were representative of the "Blood and Soil" strain in
Nazi ideology, and were described as such in official publications.xxiii But I also noted that the
great majority of Nazi buildings were not really characterized by much ideological content.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

These existed in a wide range of types and styles, from the simple slope-roofed and stuccoed
buildings of many military installations, to modern-looking factory and laboratory buildings.
Insofar as Speer's buildings are concerned, I suggested that their distant relationship to
neoclassicism expressed a strain in Nazi theory that saw the Greeks as the first Aryans. But I
also said that their clean lines and relatively abstract facade composition demonstrate the
influence of the modern movement upon the young Speer.xxiv
After Speer emerged from prison and produced his various apologias, I returned to the
question of his architectural sources and suggested further that some of Speer's work was
influenced by the buildings of the ancient Near East, particularly by those of the Assyrian
Empire. One of Speer's teachers in Berlin was the principal excavator at Assur. There are
striking visual similarities between reconstruction drawings by this archaeologist, Walther
Andrae, and some of Speer's executed work, such as the Luitpoldhalle in Nuremberg (figs.
12, 13). If Speer was influenced by these buildings, then he was more eclectic in his sources,
and less reliable in his testimony, than had earlier been believed. This influence would also
suggest that both he and Hitler found authoritarian models congenial.xxv
More recently still I have revived a small point I made in 1968, one also made in the
1950s by Bruno Zevi and very recently taken up by Franco Borsi -- namely, that there are
many similarities between Speer's buildings and public buildings erected in other countries in
the 1930s.xxvi Like Speer and Hitler, government patrons and architects in France, Italy, Great
Britain and the United States showed a preference during this period for somber and
dignified-looking buildings. Both Marcello Piacentini's Senate Building for the University of
Rome (fig. 14) and the Erie County Jail erected in Buffalo, New York under the Public
Works Administration (PWA) (fig. 15), display the axiality, overscaled entryways,
exaggeratedly thick walls, and reminiscence of antique motifs also found in Speer's buildings.
Similar features are apparent in many and diverse buildings erected under the aegis of the
PWA, ranging from the Municipal Building in Austin, Texas (fig. 16) to Paul Cret's Federal
Reserve Board Building in Washington, D.C. (fig. 17).xxvii Such buildings shared an
appearance of durability, a hint of antiquity, an apparent modernity, and an atmosphere of
power. Yet they also appeared accessible, suited to the uses of the common man.
Where does all this leave us? If Speer's work was part of a broader pattern in the
architecture of the 1930s, does that mean that it was without political content? If Speer's
memoirs and postwar statements are suspect, what should we believe about his role in Nazi
architecture, or about his importance in relation to Hitler? Should we regard Nazi architecture
as having its own identity, or, as historians such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock and, more
recently, David Watkin have implied, should we see it as part of a widespread twentieth
century revival -- or debasement -- of traditional architectural forms?xxviii

BML/Speer/8/13/96

I think that Speer's architecture, like other historical phenomena, requires several
levels of investigation and explanation. It should not surprise us that the governments of most
technologically advanced countries sought, during the depression era, to project an image of
stability, power, durability, modernity and accessibility. Yet this fact does not deprive Speer's
architecture of its German context or of a relationship to Nazi ideology. Speer's buildings
differed from similar buildings in neighboring nations in their uses and in their theatrical
impact. At the Mayday Ceremony of 1936 held in the Berlin Lustgarten in 1936 (fig. 18),
lights and flags, arranged in a columnar way around the square, blotted out the buildings
behind them. (So much, then, for Schinkel, whose Altes Museum was blotted out, too.)
Views of the Zeppelinfeld, again, from the entry side, reveal vertical flags working together
with the other verticals of the composition (figs. 19, 20). Here, as at the Mayday Ceremony,
Nazi insignia (which were probably originally designed by Hitler) functioned as an integral
element of Speer's compositions. Speer's buildings and stadia, as we have seen, helped to
shape the movements of Nazi Party members as they went about official business, or
participated in official ceremonies.
Further, whatever the truth about the sources of Speer's imagery, there is no question
that he (and Hitler) intended his buildings to express Nazi ideology. Speer and Hitler said so
again and again, in public and in private, and so did Nazi publications and propaganda in
every form.xxix There is no reason to doubt that the Germans who were ruled by Hitler (and to
a lesser extent by Speer) saw these buildings as expressive of Nazi ideology, too. As to what
specific tenets of Nazi political thought were perceived by the users of these buildings, much
research remains to be done. (Indeed much research remains to be done on most of the
subjects I have discussed.) But certainly it would be safe to assert that the users, like the
makers of Speer's buildings, understood them as representative of the power of the new oneparty state, of the charismatic leadership of Hitler, and of the experience of renewed national
community, or Gemeinschaft. Now let us remember that National Socialism defined the true
national community, the Gemeinschaft, as a supra-national racial community, as inclusive of
Germans everywhere, and as exclusive of the Jews. The conclusion then is inescapable: Speer
participated -- as an architect -- in preparing Germans for the Holocaust and for the drive
toward total war. He later served the same causes as Minister.
This does not mean, of course, that Nazi ideology, to say nothing of the Holocaust, is
implicit in all buildings, in all times and places, that look somewhat like Speer's. Government
architecture is always political, filled with political intent and political effect. It is therefore
one of the first responsibilities of architectural historians to examine the political content of
such buildings. But the political meanings of government architecture are almost entirely
specific to a particular time and place. After studying the common features between German

BML/Speer/8/13/96

architecture of the 1930s and, say, PWA buildings in this country, it is essential to understand
the differences as well; to understand, in other words, how the forms, purposes and effects of
Nazi buildings differed from those of the architecture of the PWA. And after pointing to the
links between Speer's forms and those of earlier German revivals of the antique, or the
connections between the architecture of the 1930s and that of postmodernism, it is important
to stress the discontinuities that framed and shaped the buildings of the Nazi era. As
architectural historians, our first obligation is to understand Speer's work, and that of other
Nazi architects, in its own context.
But how? This is not an easy task. Fewer than fifty years have passed since the end of
the Nazi era. While we may study the palace at Versailles without fear of a Bourbon
restoration, it is still hard to revisit images of the Zeppelinfeld without remembering -- almost
reexperiencing -- the roar of the crowd in response to Hitler's exhortations. To borrow a
phrase, the question is not whether stones speak -- of course they do -- but for how long, and
in what ways their message should affect our judgment. When buildings still clamor for
remembrance, the architectural historian bears a double burden: to achieve distance and
objectivity, but also to express her or his own values.
Barbara Miller Lane,
Interpreting Nazi Architecture: the case of Albert Speer
LIST OF FIGURE CAPTIONS AND CREDITS
1. Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1934-7.
2. Albert Speer, north-south axis with Great Hall, Berlin, Model, c. 1941.
3. Albert Speer, New Chancellery, Berlin, 1938. Street side.
4. Albert Speer, New Chancellery, Berlin, 1938. Honor court.
5. Albert Speer, German Pavilion, Paris World's Fair, 1937.
6. Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Lustgarten, Berlin, 1824-30.
7. Heinrich Tessenow, Dalcroze School of the Dance, Dresden-Hellerau, 1910.
8. Albert Speer, Luitpoldarena, Nuremberg, c. 1934. Party Congress.
9. Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1934-7. Party Congress with searchlights,
night.
10. Clemens Klotz, Ordensburg Vogelsang, Eiffel Mountains, 1934-39.
11. Hanns Dustmann, Hitler Youth Hostel, c. 1936.
12. Walther Andrae, reconstruction drawing of the Temple of Tukulti-Ninurta at
Assur, 1921.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

13. Albert Speer, Luitpoldhalle, Nuremberg, c. 1936.

14. Marcello Piacentini, Senate Building, University of Rome, 1935.
15. Erie County Jail, Buffalo, New York, c. 1938.
16. Municipal Building, Austin, Texas, c. 1938.
17. Paul Cret, Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C., 1932-34.
18. Mayday Ceremony, Berlin, Lustgarten, 1936. Night view.
19. Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1934-37. Entry side.
20. Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1934-7. Entrance.

SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1, 10, 11, 19
Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1968).
2
Lars Olof Larsson, personal photograph collection.
3,5
Library of Congress
4, 9, 18, 20
Albert Speer, Neue deutsche Baukunst (Berlin: Volk und Reich Verlag, 1941).
6
Bryn Mawr College, photograph collection.
7
Gustav Adolf Platz, Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit (Berlin: Propylen, 1927).
8
Emil Wernert, L'Art dans le IIIe Reich (Paris: Centre d'tudes de politique trangre,
1936).
12
Werner Rittich, Architektur und Bauplastik der Gegenwart (Berlin: Rembrandt
Verlag, 1938).
13
Walther Andrae, Der jngeren Ischtar-Tempel in Assur (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs,
1935).
15, 16

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Charles W. Short and Rudolph Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings: A Survey of

Architecture . . . completed between . . . 1933 and 1939 with the assistance of the Public
Works Administration (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939).
14, 17
Barbara Miller Lane, personal photograph collection.

This paper is a revised version of a talk given at the College Art Association Annual
Meeting at San Francisco, California, on February 16, 1989. My interpretation of Speer's
work, here and elsewhere, owes a great deal to conversations with Carl Nylander.
ii
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 31. First
published as Erinnerungen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1969).
iii
Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New York: 1954).
iv
Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (7th ed. Baltimore: Penguin,
1963), 411 (first ed. 1943). Exceptions to these generalizations were Hildegard Brenner's Die
Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963); and Anna Teut's
Architektur im Dritten Reich 1933-1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1967). Yet Brenner did not provide
a comprehensive discussion of architecture as such, and Teut's volume, still very useful, is a
collection of source materials. My own work began to be published in 1968: Barbara Miller
Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1968; Italian ed., Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1973; rev. American ed.,
Harvard, 1985; German ed., Wiesbaden, Vieweg, 1986). I will return to my own
contributions below.
v
Speer, Inside, 74-75.
vi
Inside, 58; Erinnerungen, 71.
vii
Inside, 56, 114-15, 154.
viii
Inside, 11, 62; Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (New York: Macmillan,
1977), 3, 122 (first published as Spandauer Tagebcher, Berlin: Ullstein, 1975).
ix
Inside, 59; Spandau, 477.
x
Erinnerungen, 71-72; Inside, 58-59. See also Kurt Vondung, Magie und
Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 81-82.
xi
Inside, 32-33, 59-60; Albert Speer, Technik und Macht, Adelbert Reif, ed.
(Esslingen am Neckar: 1979, ), 34-36.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

xii

My discussion includes only a selection of the many recent works dealing with
Speer and Nazi architecture. Much of the debate up to 1985 is treated in the new preface to
my Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (rev. ed. 1985, German edition, 1986),
and in my biographical entry in The Dictionary of Art (London, forthcoming 1996).
xiii

Albert Speer ed., with Karl Arndt, Georg Friedrich Koch and Lars Olof Larsson,
Albert Speer Architektur: Arbeiten 1933-1942 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1978). Among these essays,
Arndt's gives more prominence than the other two to the political role of Speer's architecture.
xiv
Lars Olof Larsson, "Berlins planering," in Ordet i Sten [exh.cat., Swedish Museum
of Architecture] (Stockholm: Swedish Museum of Architecture, 1975), 3-21 (catalogue of an
exhibition at the Swedish Museum of Architecture); Lars Olof Larsson, Die Neugestaltung
der Reichshauptstadt (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978).
xv

Leon Krier, "An Architecture of Desire," in Leon Krier ed., Albert Speer
Architecture 1932-1942 (Brussels: 1985), 217, 223.
xvi
Leon Krier, "Vorwrts, Kameraden, Wir Mssen Zruck," Oppositions 24 (Spring
1981), 24; (NOTE: this is correctly cited) see also Leon Krier, "Krier on Speer,"
Architectural Review 173 (1983), 5-6 and Leon Krier, "An Architecture of Desire," AD 56
(1986), 30-37.
xvii

Wolfgang Schche, "Die Bedeutung der 'Berliner Neugestaltungsmassnahmen' fr

die NS-Architekturproduktion," in Berthold Hinz, Hans-Ernst Mittig, Wolfgang Schche, and
Angela Schnberger eds., Die Dekoration der Gewalt: Kunst und Medien im Faschismus
(Giessen: Anabas, 1979), 149-162; Angela Schnberger, "Die Neue Reichskanzlei in Berlin
von Albert Speer," Ibid., 163-172. Wolfgang Schche, "Nationalsozialistische Architekten
und Antikenrezeption," in Wilhelm Arenhvel and Christian Schreiber ed., Berlin und die
Antike (Berlin: 1979), translated as "Nazi Architecture and its Approach to Antiquity," in AD
53 (1983), 81-88. Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolfgang Schche, Von Berlin nach Germania:
ber die Zerstrung der Reichshauptstadt durch Albert Speers Neugestaltungsplanungen
(Berlin: Landesarchiv, 1985). Angela Schnberger, Die Neue Reichskanzlei von Albert Speer
(Berlin: Gebrder Mann, 1981).
xviii
Vondung, Magie und Manipulation. Dieter Bartetzko, Illusionen in Stein:
Stimmungsarchitektur im deutschen Faschismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985). Dieter Bartetzko,
Zwischen Zucht und Ekstase: zur Theatralik von NS-architektur (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1985).
xix
Matthias Schmidt, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth (New York: St. Martin's,
1984), originally published as Albert Speer: Das Ende eines Mythos (Bern and Munich:
1982). On Speer's knowledge of the Final Solution, see especially Myth, 181-198. Schmidt

BML/Speer/8/13/96

and Schnberger's books are particularly notable in their thorough use of the most important
archival collections, such as the Bundesarchiv at Koblenz.
xx

Hartmut Frank, "Welche Sprache sprechen Steine?" in Hartmut Frank ed.,

Faschistische Architekturen: Planen und Bauen in Europa, 1930 bis 1945 (Hamburg:
Hans Christians Verlag, 1985), 7-21; Hartmut Frank, "Auschwitz im Kopf: Die
architektonische Gestaltung eines Neubeginns," ms. of speech before the Hamburger
Architektenkammer, May, 1985, 15.
xxi

Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen

(Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986). An emphasis on continuity has also inspired recent shows at
the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main. Two exhibitions have traced
continuities from the period before the First World War: one on "Reform and Tradition," and
one on "Expressionism and New Objectivity." A third, on the Nazi period itself, is planned.
See Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Romana Schneider eds., Moderne Architektur in
Deutschland 1900 bis 1950, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, vol. 1:
Reform und Tradition, 1992; vol. 2: Expressionismus und neue Sachlichkeit (1994).
xxii

Lane, Architecture and Politics.

xxiii
Lane, Architecture and Politics, chapters 7 and 8. See also Barbara Miller Lane
(with Leila J. Rupp), Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation (Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1978).
xxiv
Lane, Architecture and Politics, chapter 8.
xxv

Barbara Miller Lane, "Inside the Third Reich," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 32 (December, 1973), 341-346; excerpts in Adelbert Reif ed., Albert
Speer: Kontroversen um ein deutsches Phnomen (Munich: Bernard & Graefe, 1978), 343351. See also Barbara Miller Lane, "Architects in Power: Politics and Ideology in the Work
of Ernst May and Albert Speer," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (summer 1986),
283-310, reprinted in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Raab eds., Art and History: Images
and their Meaning (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
283-310.
xxvi
Bruno Zevi, Towards an Organic Architecture (London: 1950). Lane, "Architects",
1986. Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design, 1929-1939
(New York: Rizzoli, 1987).
xxvii

My work differs from Borsi's in stressing the American buildings of the period.

xxviii

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

(Baltimore: Penguin, 1958; 3rd ed. 1969), chapter 24; David Watkin, A History of Western
Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 522-524.

BML/Speer/8/13/96

xxix

Albert Speer, "Die bauliche Gestaltung von Grosskundgebungen," in Wille und

Weg 1 (1933), 19-22; Rudolf Wolters, "Die Bauten des Dritten Reichs," Deutscher Wille:
Jahrbuch 1937 (Berlin: Wille und Weg, 1937), 138-48; Albert Speer ed., Die Kunst im
Deutschen Reich, Munich, 1937 ff., especially "Ausgabe B," Die Baukunst, 1939 ff; Albert
Speer ed., Neue Deutsche Baukunst (Berlin: Volk und Reich Verlag, 1941); and other
sources cited in Lane, Architecture and Politics, chapters 7 and 8.
FIGURES
Figure 1

Figure 2

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 3

Figure 4

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 5

Figure 6

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 7

Figure 8

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 9

Figure 10

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 11

Figure 12

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 13

Figure 14

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 15

Figure 16

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 17

Figure 18

BML/Speer/8/13/96

Figure 19

Figure 20

BML/Speer/8/13/96