Hitler’s Top Architect January 26, 2009
Posted by cantueso in Design, building, german, photography, war, writing.trackback
Speer finished architect school during the Great Depression, the years following the NY stock exchange collapse, and could not find work.
Hitler gave him a little commission: he let him prepare the premises for a rally. The stage display had to be spectacular, novel, and cheap.
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Speer’s idea became famous overnight: he set up a row of evenly spaced flags and between them large spotlights. These would throw their beams miles up into the night sky and create a dome of light.
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It is very difficult not to get bewitched by the organization and the scale of a spectacle like that. It worked like a drug and people surrendered to its power by the millions, not just in Germany.
From then on Hitler gave orders for Speer to project and carry out further constructions, immense buildings, road, bridges, government premises, entire cities.
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Hitler loved architecture and gave Speer unlimited access to materials and manpower. In return Speer made daily visits to Hitler’s small inner circle to attend the tea and movie sessions where Hitler talked endlessly about his ambitions and his views.
The visitors, secretaries and staff sat and listened in silence for hours every day.
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The war broke out. The architetural plans had to be shelved. Speer became Secretary of State for Armaments. He became responsible for the design and the construction of factories and ships, bridges, roads, airplanes, bombs.
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When his factories got bombarded, his was the task to relocate them underground. His were the directives for the manufacture of fuel, guns, tanks, U-boats, power plants and transports.
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To make the factories run he used people herded into in large special prisons called “concentration camps”. And when the whole thing came to its awful end, he was a hungry prisoner at Spandau.
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He got 20 years. To prevent himself from going nuts, he designed a little garden and grew vegetables and flowers in the prison yard. In his cell, secretly he wrote “Inside the Third Reich” as an autobiography that became a bestseller and is a very great book.
“Reich” has the same root as your English “rich” but means “realm” or “Empire”
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In his shoes he hid the drafts to be collected and sent out by a friendly warden.
With all of his knowledge and discipline Speer had managed to turn himself into the most finely developed and versatile instrument in Hitler’s hands.
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Hitler drew the house he imagined for himself before he became the Führer.
Speer designed the palace that Hitler wanted for himself as the victorious Führer.
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I thought he was too technical for the general public and that he never completely overcame his fascination with Hitler.
He is not technical in his writing, but as a type, a typical engineering type always trying to be objective, and so he does not judge, but observe. That is of course no way to resist the power of a thing like Hitler.
He is almost funny in his Hitler parodies, but there is very little about the other men in the game. The book should have been called “Hitler and I”, beause that is its subject. Then he could have left out about 80% of his organizational stuff.
There is too much about how to organize a war. If Bush had read the book, he would never even have considered starting a war.
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Can you access some newspaper library and look up “The Observer” of April 9th, 1944? There you’d see an article about Speer concluding that “It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast, and the ease with which he handles the terrifying…..machinery of our age, which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays.
I think I saw your quote in Speer’s book. Churchill, too, thought that without Speer the war would have ended sooner.
I find Speer’s book self-serving. Interesting to be sure, but he downplayed his involvement with the use of slave labor. So Hitler’s greatest architect never actually built anything, but he did create one of the most memorable images of the 20th century, lovingly immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl on film, Triumph of the Will. Just like I never thought we’d see another Great Depression in the US, I also never thought we’d see anything like Hitler again, but here we are playing it all again, Sam.
“Self-serving”: I don’t know the meaning of this expression. I see that in the book Speer is aware only of Hitler and himself. He does not portray anybody else.– However, in prison, later, he captures countless instances of small-talk to make fun of the other inmates, the wardens, and above all the prison organization and also of himself. And he sees all of it with the same detached exactitude, often amused and sometimes depressed.
He does not downplay his management of the work camps. It was simply too painful to remember and so he confessed and told the story point by point and assumes the guilt. That’s all. You can’t expect anyone to elaborate on such a terrible thing.– You should know about this because of the way Americans refuse to be reminded of what they don’t want to know about those secret prisons that are legally defined as being beyond the reach of the law .
I am also reading the Spandau diary at the same time. They are spontaneous writings without system and great to read. I have read all these things a few times before.
He did build quite a few things, though, as he himself said, none survived. Look up http://tinyurl.com/dcymuk for the Reichskanzlei, the seat of Hitler’s government. –