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The Nazis’ earliest buildings in Berlin, however, were designed as much for function as for display. Their first major project was an expansion of the Reichs-bank (National Bank), which yielded a complex whose long curved facade was rather austere save for the inevitable Nazi eagles. Among the architects who competed for this project were the Bauhaus veterans Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, which suggests that at this point there was no clear National Socialist architectural aesthetic. In 1935/36, when Germany reintroduced military conscription, a huge new building went up on the Wilhelmstrasse: the Reichsluftfahrtmin-isterium (Reich Air Ministry). Designed by Ernst Sagebiel, a pupil of Heinrich Tessenow, the structure was meant to provide much-needed space for a new ministry that was expanding along with the Nazis’ military ambitions. Master of this domain was Air Minister Hermann Göring, who ensured that the 400,000-square-foot complex had plenty of heroic reliefs on its facade and in its marbled hallways. Berliners joked that Göring’s new quarters reflected the minister’s motto: “Pure and simple, and hang the expense.” Berlin’s civilian airport, Tempelhof, underwent an extensive facelift and expansion in the mid-1930s. Now boasting the largest airport on the continent, Berlin billed itself as the “air hub of Europe.” The city’s claim to technological superiority was buttressed by a series of new industrial exhibition halls at the Funkturm (Radio Tower), and by an all-purpose building called the Deutschlandhalle, which gave Berlin more exhibition space than any other city in Europe. In addition to serving useful functions, these projects provided jobs for thousands of construction workers, helping thereby to ease the problem of unemployment.

Model of Hitler’s planned north-south axis, including the Arch of Triumph and the domed Hall of the People

The Reich Air Ministry Building (Göring’s headquarters), 1937

These early buildings did not suit Hitler’s concept of grandiosity. Ignoring Berlin’s real needs, which were for more low-cost housing and retail space, Hitler sketched plans for representational buildings and roads that would dwarf not only the city’s existing public buildings but also the great monuments of other world capitals, past and present. The core of his concept, which he began to elaborate in late 1933, involved two gargantuan structures, an arch of triumph and a domed assembly hall, to be connected by his north-south avenue slicing through the center of the city. The projected Assembly Hall, Berlin’s answer to St. Peter’s, would be many times larger than that structure, just as Berlin’s planned Arch of Triumph, 386 feet high and 550 feet wide, would make Paris’s equivalent seem Lilliputian. The North-South Axis, while modeled on the Champs-Elysées, would be about seventy feet wider and two and one-half times as long. In July 1934 Hitler proposed to Berlin’s municipal authorities an annual budget of 60 million reichsmarks for the next twenty years to complete this scheme; much of the funding was to come from the city’s own budget.

Mayor Lippert and his colleagues, though themselves no paragons of architectural taste, were horrified by this plan and sought to replace it with a more modest venture. Galling Lippert “an incompetent, an idiot, a failure, a zero,” Hitler had him removed from all responsibility for the reconstruction of Berlin and brought in a young man with whom he believed he could work harmoniously: Albert Speer.