ENSANGUINED:

ARCHITECTURE, MILITARISM, AND SLAVE LABOR IN THE NAZI MONUMENTAL BUILDING PROGRAM

ARCHITECTURE THESIS - DR. LAWRENCE CHUA, DR. SUSAN HENDERSON

UNDERGRADUATE EUROPEAN HISTORY THESIS - DR. ROBERT TERRELL, DR. SAMANTHA HERRICK

This project examines the monumental building practices and program of the Third Reich. By looking at the way monumental building was imbedded within the regimes policies of displacement, horrific and extractive labor, and genocide, this thesis establishes a critique of architecture and architects direct complicity and willing engagement with authoritarian regimes and genocide.

It is often said that Hitler wanted to build a new European order in Nazi Germany. In the past, historians have taken this premise to predominantly refer to the remaking of the world politically, racially, and militarily. Yet for Hitler, this new germanic world he so craved was a world built in stone, steel, brick, and concrete, in addition to one built up by exclusion, racism, violence and genocide.

In the same way that architecture had served its purposes for the emperors, kings, warlords and tyrants of history, architecture in Nazi Germany would serve as a physical manifestation of Nazism’s radical new political ideology. Hitler’s architectural aspirations cannot be better encapsulated than in his plan, done in conjunction with Albert Speer, for Welthauptstadt Germania, a completely new masterplan for “world capital” Berlin. If completed, the master planning project would have been the single largest building program in history.

At the center of Hitler’s new masterplan was a massive domed hall that the fuehrer had sketched years earlier while in prison writing Mein Kampf, it was to be called the Volkshalle, the hall of the people. Planning documents for The volkshalke called for a simultaneous slave labor force of over 1 million people for 10 years of construction along with millions of tons of extracted materials. it was to be the pinnacle of Hitler’s new Germanic nation. But the Volkshalle, and all other Berlin reconstruction projects were to be built utilizing the massive systems of brutal oppression and slave labor that the Third Reich had created, often parts of it being purpose built for the monumental buildings themselves. This massive network of slave labor facilties, deportation centers, and extermination camps were the horrific reality of Hitler’s sketches and lofty architectural aspirations. Given the number of laborers called for and available information about mortality rates in SS run material extraction and processing facilities, as well as construction sites, it is estimated that from between 1.2 to 1.5 million people would have died building the Volkshalle and producing its materials.

ARCHITECTS AND POLITICIANS IN NAZI GERMANY HAD USED MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE DIRECTLY IN THE PURSUIT OF GENOCIDE.

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH

One of the biggest challenges of this project has been research and access to information. Existing academic work on nazi monumental building largely exists in the realm of architectural critique and does not engage primarily in the brutal reality that was building in the Reich.

As a result, I was largely unable to find material to get the project to a sufficient level of depth through conventional research means. So, over winter break, I spent two weeks at the Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) in Berlin conducting my own original research.

In addition to viewing working drawing sets for the monumental building projects, I spent most of my time scouring the files of the Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt, the office headed by Albert Speer, which was responsible not only for design to the Welthauptstadt project but also material and labor procurement PURCHASING FROM THE SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, THE SS ORGANIZATION RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EXPLOTATION OF MILLIONS OF CONCENTRATION CAMP INMATES FOR SLAVE LABOR.

THIS PROJECT IS JUST THE BEGINNING, IT REPRESENTS A MERE SNAPSHOT OF WHERE I PLAN TO TAKE THIS LINE OF INQUIRY INTO ARCHITECTURE HISTORY, THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I AM PLANNING TO PURSUE AT A GRADUATE AND DOCTORAL LEVEL.

THE DOCUMENTS BELOW ARE A VERY SMALL SNAPSHOT OF THE 7,635 PAGES OF DOCUMENTS I VIEWED FOR THIS PROJECT:

MODEL MAKING

During a break day while researching in Berlin, I visited the museum which exhibits the original models that Hitler had commissioned of the Volkshalle. Walking into the room, I was greeted with flawless, pristine, white architectural models, as I walked the museum one thing became immediately apparent, everyone who was there thought the models were beautiful. Nobody in the audience understood the brutal reality that these buildings had unleashed on occupied Europe. Hitler and Speer had succesfully hidden the lives that their buildings were going to destroy under white paint, wood, and foam.

Therefore, I chose to use models for my project, I believe that my model of the Volkshalle showcases the truth that Hitler and Speer were so desperate to hide. The Volkshalle itself has been exsanguinated, ripped apart and dirtied. The model is to be read as a physically assembled object and not as an imitation of Hitler and Speer’s work. The cut on the model reveals some of the individual building elements used in the project, for the sake of brevity I have chosen four materials, granite, brick, cement, and structural steel. Around the model of the building sit the facilities that these materials were produced in as well as indications of the infrastructural methods used to transport those materials to Berlin.