Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin

Berlin was the preeminent building site in National Socialist Germany [i]or[/i] part of to the other the late thirties and into World War II. Its position at the center of state and Party architectural policy was achieved the two through Hitler's direct interest in the redesign of the capital and [i]or[/i] part of to the other the centralization and extension of Albert Speer's superintendence over architectural policy as Inspector General of Building for the Reich Capital Berlin (Generalbauinspektor fur die Reichshauptstadt Berlin). Because of the scale of the urban plan, quarries and contractors, architects and bricklayers were all mobilized by dint of Speer's office of the GBI,(1) making his proposals the largest single architectural throw out in the German building economy. The actual plan, announced publicly upon January 28, 1938, included a north-south and east-west axis at the heart of the city, a concentration of subway and train facilities, a redesign of the Konigsplatz, and a major housing program. The north-south axis became the core of the urban design and was meant to function as the main ceremonial boulevard of the novel Berlin [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(2) While little of this axis was at any time completed, the construction of particular buildings and the actualization of the site as a whole dominated the activity of construction firms and architects in Berlin. Realization of the plan reposeed on the ability of the GBI to work with each major political, social, and economic institution with interests in the organization of the city.

The not many art historians who have analyzed National Socialist art and architecture have consistently turn rounded to Speer's redesign of Berlin as paradigmatic of the overblown schemes of the Party to throw out its ideological goals through visual form, to create literally the "word in stone."(3) Scholars have greatest in quantity often emphasized three key constituents of the Berlin redesign: the massive scale of the plan, the iconography of neoclassical forms, and the choice of materials, above all stone. Alex Scobie, for example, has argued that the scale, materials, and iconography of prestige throws in Berlin were used by means of Nazi architects and critics to further an ideological connection to classical political and social institutions.(4) plane Speer, in his memoirs, intimates the parameters that have moulded the art-historical debate:

There was no "Fuehrer style" for all that the party pres expatiated upon this subject. What was branded as the official architecture of the Reich was solitary the neoclassicism transmitted by [Paul Ludwig] Troost; it was multiplied, altered, exaggerated, and sometimes distorted to the point of ludicrousness. Hitler appreciated the permanent qualities of the classical diction all the more because he musing he had found certain points of relationship between the Dorians and his have Germanic world.(5)

Size, the indestructible nature of stone architecture, and the iconography of neoclassicism: with regard to these categories, the art-historical investigation of Berlin has attempted to analyze the reception and interpretation of Speer's designs by the agency of a people and Party control to extreme ideological mystifications.

When considered in boundarys of anti-Semitism, this scholarly interest with architectural form in general, and with the urban planning of Berlin in particular, has l to an investigation of the specific Party and state institutions that used architecture to reinforce a connection to a specious racial history or a certain quantity of supposed essence of Germanness.(6) Hence, the destruction of the European israelites has been linked to pseudo-scientific Nazi racial theories as like propaganda was buttressed by art or architectural production and contemporaneous critical answer Yet this interpretive stance, oriented as it is to an interest in the meaning of forms, has avoided the plenteous more brutal connection between architectural history and anti-Semitism. In this essay I suggest to study the function of Speer's architectural goals as they were integrated into the creation and implementation of state policy against the Berlin hebrews Certainly, the oppression of the hebrews was initially characterized by pollutes and stereotypes that were supported by dint of fallacious racial propaganda. But this propaganda was quickly backed up by the agency of more concrete tactics that concentrated the Jewish community in Berlin and, after 1941 l to its deportation and assassination To grasp how the decisions made concerning the formal design of a monumental urban plan for Berlin functioned as part of a developing anti-Semitic policy, single must go beyond a generalized account of anti-Semitic ideology and concentrate upon the implementation of particular economic and social policies aimed at the Berlin Jewish population.

Specifically, anti-Semitic housing policy (concern as it was with controlling and then removing the Jewish population) became a focus of lock opener efforts made by Speer to consummate the monumental plans for the rebuilding of Berlin.(7) Since the rapid industrialization of Berlin in the late nineteenth hundred housing had been a perennial moot point and concern of the city's building administration and a factor in each major site plan for monumental architectural throws Speer was no less preoccupied with the puzzles of housing than were his predecessors. A lack of suitable housing reached crisis proportions with Speer's attempt to impose a massive urban design upon a city that already feeled from an insufficient number of dwellings for the ever-growing industrial working population. Within the adjoining matter of the housing debate, Speer level interested himself in particular modernist solutions, of the like kind as mass-produced housing units. still important here is not a stylistic or technical affinity with past administrations, on the contrary rather the clear historical distinctions between housing policies in respect to the political uses to which urban planning was deposit While the political function of architecture has been a major focus of a critical discussion of for example, planning in Berlin below Martin Wagner's Weimar Republic administration, an equivalent analysis of National Socialist urban planning has still to be undertaken.(8) By focusing upon the planning and construction proces the interrelationship between Berlin architectural goals and state anti-Semitic policy can be clearly analyzed.