Quick questions on Speer as Hitler's architect: HSC Modern History Personality

Hitler believed architecture was the central public art of a regime. He told Speer that "buildings stand or fall with the regimes that built them" and that the new Germany required a permanent monumental record. The taste was neoclassical and gigantic: a synthesis of Roman imperial precedents, the Pergamon Altar, and Wagnerian theatre.

From 1934 Speer designed the annual Nuremberg Party rallies on the Zeppelin Field (Zeppelinfeld) and the projected Marsfeld and German Stadium.

Hitler commissioned Speer in January 1938 to build a new Reich Chancellery on the Voss Strasse, adjacent to the existing Old Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, in time for the diplomatic season of January 1939. Speer claimed in his memoir that the building was completed in less than a year; Brechtken's archival work shows the timeline was tighter still through the use of three shifts.

From 1937 Speer's office planned the rebuilding of Berlin as the world capital after victory. Plans included: - The Volkshalle (People's Hall) on the Spree, dome 250 m high (16 times the volume of St Peter's in Rome), to seat 180,000 inside. Hitler feared the breath of so many people would condense and produce rain inside the dome. - A 5 km north-south axis from a new North Station to the South Station.

The GBI office under Speer required clearance of around 75,000 dwellings in central Berlin to construct the north-south axis. Documents from the GBI office (recovered and analysed by Susanne Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude, 2000, and Jan-Erik Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung, 2001) show that Berlin Jewish families were systematically evicted from their apartments by the GBI office between 1939 and 1942 to make way for projected Germania construction.

From 1938 the GBI's appetite for granite, marble, and brick exceeded the capacity of private German industry. The SS founded the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DEST, German Earth and Stone Works) on 29 April 1938 as a profit-making enterprise to supply the GBI from concentration-camp quarries.

Joachim Fest (Speer: The Final Verdict, 1999) treats the architecture as the aesthetic core of Speer's career and the moral hinge of his complicity.

From 1938 the procurement chain made his work structurally dependent on the SS slave-labour economy.

They drove real Berlin policy: 75,000 Jewish dispossessions in central Berlin between 1939 and 1942.

Built January 1938 to January 1939; demolished by the Soviets after 1945.

The SS Granite Works (founded 29 April 1938) is the operational link between Speer's architecture and the camp system.