The arson that severely damaged Hitler’s mountain-top retreat near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria prompted Tom Jones to write about some of the other surviving architectural works of the Nazi regime:
The Nazi rally grounds at Nuremberg, 1938.
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in German history … This fire is the beginning,” Hitler told a news reporter at the scene of the Reichstag fire.
The power of architectural destruction as a political tool was well understood by the regime established following the fire — although it went far beyond that single event. Hitler, with the amateur enthusiasm of any failed creative, took a deep interest in the architecture of Nazi Germany, where his adoration of Greece and Rome as Aryan civilisations put him in the arms — and vice versa — of Albert Speer.
By and large, Nazi architecture is remarkable for its scale, rather than architectural worth. But beyond Speer’s simple reliance on elevating classical forms to monumental scale lay a theory that appealed directly to Hitler’s thousand-year vision for the Reich — and of his sense of the war as a civilisational struggle of “the existence or non-existence of the nation”.
That was ruinenwerttheorie, or ruin value. It did not originate with Speer: he was always a rather lesser intellectual figure than he portrayed himself. Rather, it was inspired by the romanticised vision of ancient ruins, inherited from the Picturesque and capriccio movements that shaped eighteenth-century European taste. His principle was that Third Reich monuments should be built to leave striking ruins, as the great buildings of Greece and Rome had done, retaining their aesthetic power for thousands of years.
Perhaps conscious of this theory, subsequent governments have been judicious in their use of architectural destruction as a political tool, and a surprising number of the most notable Nazi buildings have survived.
The Olympiastadion in Berlin, built for the 1936 Olympics, is still in use as a sports venue. Speer’s Nuremberg rally grounds, seared into the minds of anyone thinking of Nazi rallies thanks to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, now plays host to motorsports festivals and rock festivals, as well as a memorial to victims of Nazi repression. The former Reich Air Ministry in central Berlin, the headquarters of Hermann Göring and the Luftwaffe, is now the Finance Ministry.
Hitler’s private and public approach to architecture were notably different, the Führer preferring the sparse, Spartan interiors that were deliberately and carefully designed to project the image of a simple leader dedicated solely to the service of his nation. Ironically, though designed without ruinenwerttheorie, many of Hitler’s Führerhauptquartiere — the various headquarters around occupied Europe — have become ruins.
Though the Wolfsschanze — the Wolf’s Lair, from which Hitler directed Operation Barbarossa — now serves as a huge tourist attraction and even has a hotel — most were only temporary structures, and have either been allowed to rot or were destroyed by retreating German forces. The Füherbunker, the final home of the going man, is now a car park, marked only by a small plaque. The Berghof, Hitler’s holiday home near Berchtesgaden, was first subjected to a bombing raid involving hundreds of Lancasters, set fire to by retreating SS troops, stripped and looted by Allied troops, before the burned out shell was demolished in 1952.
