Ensanguined: Architecture, Militarism, and Slave Labor in the Nazi Monumental Building Economy

ENSANGUINED: ARCHITECTURE, MILITARISM, AND SLAVE LABOR IN THE NAZI MONUMENTAL BUILDING PROGRAM

Parker D. Klebahn 01

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To all of those whose lives have been destroyed by monumental architecture...

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Maps & Drawings

1: The Sketch

2: Cultural World Building

3: The Realizers

4: Spatial Planning

5: Reich Building Economics

6: Material, Infrastructure & Labor Reflection 7: The Model Endnotes

Works Cited

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Acknowledgments This project could not have happened without a substantial amount of guidance, critique and reality checks.

Firstly, I would like to thank the team of wonderful professors I have had the privilege to work with during the 2021-2022 academic year. In the Syracuse School of Architecture thank you to Dr. Lawrence Chua and Dr. Susan Henderson. In the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, thank you to Dr. Robert Terrell and Dr. Samantha Herrick.

Außerdem möchte ich mich bei Frau Simone Langner und Herrn Otto Steiner vom Deutschen Bundesarchiv in Berlin bedanken. Vielen Dank, dass Sie mir bei meinen Archivrecherchen als Übersetzer, Wegweiser und Helfer zur Seite standen.

Finally, so many people came together to help me realize the model and films for this project. A very special thank you to Mike, John, Andy and their teams in the shops and a thank you to Annabelle Sablan and Bryce Edwards.

Thank you for helping me make this into reality.

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Preface This project is the result of a journey which started three years ago, in a field in Poland. While studying abroad, I visited Auschwitz, it was an experience that will be deeply ingrained in me for the rest of my life. During the tour of the camp, one of things we were pointed to was a brickworks, a complex where thousands of inmates would be worked to death, beaten and shot by the SS. In hindsight I feel foolish to say that I had never thought of the Holocaust as having a distinct relationship with architecture but in the camp on that warm spring afternoon I was engulfed by nausea. The idea that the Holocaust was used directly to produce monumental buildings was incomprehensible to me. As I began to learn more about the building economy and system in Nazi Germany my abhorrence grew, Hitler weaponized Architecture, through Speer and his architects at the Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt, as annihilation. As I bent over, violently vomiting on the side of the road, having asked the bewildered taxi driver to pull over, it occurred to me that throughout history, architecture has been used, directly, in the pursuit of genocide. Since Antiquity, up until today, and probably long into the future, architecture has had an evil and intimate relationship with tyranny and tyrannical leaders. Architects have manifested, in the same way that Speer and his team did in the Third Reich, conformity and dominance for millennia. In many ways, Albert Speer was given the dream architectural project: the design of a whole new city, with no oversight or budget. There is not a single architect alive who wouldn’t jump at that opportunity, myself included. I hope that this work is the first of many to come over the years; as designers we need to hold our predecessors and ourselves accountable to who we work for, the systems we work under and the lives that we can destroy with our work.

Parker D. Klebahn 07

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Introduction It is often said that Adolf Hitler wanted to build (or re-build) a new European order in Nazi Germany. In the past, historians have understood this premise to predominantly refer to the remaking of the world politically, racially, and militarily.

Yet for Hitler, this new world he so craved was a material world built in stone, steel, brick, and concrete, in addition to one built up by hatred, racism, violence and genocide. In the same way that architecture had served its purpose for the emperors, kings, warlords and tyrants of history, architecture in Nazi Germany would serve as a physical manifestation of Nazism’s radical, new political ideology. Hitler’s architectural aspirations cannot be better encapsulated than in his plan, crafted in conjunction with Albert Speer, for Welthauptstadt Germania, a complete master plan for a new “world capital” Berlin. If completed, the master planning project would have been the single largest building program in history.1 At the center of Hitler’s new Berlin was the Volkshalle, the hall of the people, a massive domed hall that, if completed, would have been the largest building in the world.2 The Volkshalle was to be the architectural pinnacle of Hitler’s new Germanic nation. In reality the Volkshalle, and all other Berlin construction projects were to be built utilizing the massive systems of oppression and slave labor that the Third Reich would develop as the monumental projects themselves would develop, parts of the system being purpose built for the monumental buildings themselves.3 This massive network of slave labor camps, deportation centers, mass violence and ethnic cleansing were the brutal reality of Hitler’s sketches and lofty architectural aspirations. It is estimated that from between 1.2 to 1.5 million people would have died building the Volkshalle and producing its materials.4 Nazi monumental architecture had become directly dependent on and responsible for genocide.

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The Sketch In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “I was firmly convinced that I should someday make a name for myself as an architect”. architect”.5 The arts is one of the key aspects of any national identity and cultural identity. Now, of course, this is often a warped, biased and innately political history, but it is that political narrative that will endure and define a society. The Nazis, realizing this power, became obsessed with defining and controlling every level of German arts and culture.6 From fine arts, music, fashion, literature and architecture, the Nazis sought to instill a dominant German cultural identity. The manifestation of this saw a clampdown and rejection of what had been a blossoming German modern scene during the Weimar republic: modern art was rejected for traditional art forms and subjects. Richard Wagner and his piece, Walkürenritt or Ritt der Walküren (Ride of the Valkyries) became a force of music along with party songs. But most important among the arts was the way that the new Deutsches Reich looked architecturally. To Hitler, architecture was the pinnacle of the propaganda that the Nazi state engaged in.7 The Fuhrer himself had a unique relationship with architecture, a distinction from the majority of previous authoritarian leaders in world history. In fact, while imprisoned in Landsberg writing Mein Kampf, he drew sketches of the buildings he planned to realize when he eventually rose to power.8 Whereas dictators have always built monumental buildings, almost always with horrific consequences for their populaces, Hitler stands relatively alone in that these architectural efforts were, at every level, his designs; his projects; and, ultimately, his world to be built.

Of the completed drawings contained in Hitler’s 1925 sketchbook, one stands out in particular, a sketch noted simply as “eine kuppel halle” or “a domed hall”.9 Modeled after the Pantheon in Rome (erected in the second century by the Roman Emperor Hadrian) Hitler’s domed hall sought to emulate antiquity. Yet, as with other buildings Hitler borrowed from Romanesque antiquity, his designs sought to outdo antiquity, not in architectural complexity or nuance, but by building on a bigger scale.

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Hitler’s sketch stayed with him during his rise to power from the latter half of the 1920s into the beginning of the 1930s. It was this building, now called the Volkshalle (the hall of the German people), that would sit as the centerpiece of the Fuhrer’s plans for a reconstruction of Berlin.10 Following his appointment to Chancellor of Germany in 1933, as Hitler walked down off the rostrum to his retinue, he handed his sketch to Albert Speer and remarked under his breath, “Wenn ich Europa regiere, wirst du das für mich bauen” - “When I rule Europe, you will build this for me”.11 Finally in power legally, Hitler now had the absolute power and finance needed to build his buildings and remake Germany and all of Europe in his architectural image. Berlin, along with the cities of Linz, Munich, Hamburg and Nuremberg were given the designation of Führerstadt (Fuhrer city).12 Berlin would serve as the new Reichshauptstadt, or Imperial Capital of the Reich. After the Wehrmacht’s crushing of Poland, the Benelux and France, Hitler would change Berlin’s designation to be Welthauptstadt or World Capital and planned to rename it to Germania, the capital of his new Germanic empire.13 If completed the Volkshalle would have dwarfed the Berlin skyline; the dome of the Volkshalle alone would have been so large that all of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome could have fit inside of it.14 The Volkshalle design represents the largest stadium in the world, even by today’s standards, with seating for 250,000 people and space for another 120,000 soldiers to parade on the floor of the hall.15 Cost estimates for the project, compiled by the Generabuainspektor’s Office, put construction costs at over 15 billion Reichsmarks–part of the 150 billion Reichsmark plan for Berlin’s redevelopment.16 In comparison, the 1939 budget for the entire German economy, heavy with infrastructure projects and rearmament costs, was 38 billion Reichsmarks, a fifth of the capitoline-rebuilding projects.17 In terms of labor, the Volkshalle alone called for a labor force of a little over one million forced laborers to continuously live and work in the heart of Berlin for over two decades.18 In its entirety, the larger Berlin project called for a combined, simultaneous 3-4 million forced laborers.19

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Order on the Rebuilding of Berlin, Adolf Hitler, 1940 // Bundesarchiv BLD R3 1809 p.0034 023

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Cultural Worldbuilding One of the hallmarks of National Socialism is a rabid pursuit of what will be called, for the purposes of this essay, cultural worldbuilding. During their rise to power, Hitler and the NSDAP leadership focused on selling a unifying “Germanness” to potential followers.20 For many Germans, this was a deeply unifying, and therefore appealing, political message in what was, at that time, a deeply disjointed and divisive political landscape. Weimar politics was comprised of dozens of political parties, some of which refused to cooperate and, when faced with near constant Reichstag (German Parliament) elections, largely resorted to ultra-partisan smear campaigns, along with murder and paramilitary violence in order to win votes.21 The Reichstag became synonymous with inaction and divisiveness in the eyes of the German people. These divisions were not rectified by Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which granted the German President the ability to rule by decree in the event of national unrest and instability.22 While Article 48 in a vacuum might not have necessarily been a bad thing, Article 48 became grossly overused by Weimar Presidents to break the perennial deadlocks in the Reichstag.

In practice, the most extraordinary aspect of the Weimar constitution became a commonplace of Weimar political life. Looking forward to the 1930s, the overuse of Article 48 in the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s set the stage for von Hindenburg and Hitler to use Article 48 and institute the enabling laws without protest or mass social upheaval. For the average German in the early 1930s, the everyday reality for the better part of two decades was disjointed, partisan politics with practically no unified government structure.23 Hitler and the NSDAP sought to change that reality. The NSDAP sold themselves to the public as the party that would restore unity and pride to Germany; in order to achieve this, they would also need to be handed absolute power. Proclaiming the beginning of the thousand-year Reich, Hitler said, “[Germany] forgot the highest values of our past, of the Reich, of its honor and its freedom, and thereby lost everything”. everything”.24 025

The Nazi’s preached the doctrine of folk community, the populace learning to become ‘Germans’. Under the state’s definition, everyone was to be members of the Volksgeimnschaft, which emerged as one of the defining words in Nazi political messaging.25 This is where the concept of “worldbuilding” comes in, most Germans thought of themselves as members of various German states and identified with those subcultures, whether it be Bavarian, Westphalia, Silesian and so on. The Nazi’s attempt at erasing these provincial identities and working towards a universal definition of ‘Germanness’ was the starting point for what would soon give way to a national identity that was, in practice, whatever Hitler and party leadership decided to announce.26 The identity was profoundly unclear and hypocritical, but also specific in its describing who did and didn’t belong to the German people and defining, what Hitler and the party were now calling, the German race.27

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Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in the Reichsgesetzblatt, April 1933 027

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The Realizers While the Fuhrer could sketch until exhaustion, he lacked the ability and the time to produce feasible drawings to build his sketches into plans. More than anything, Hitler needed a person to shape and build as his master contractor. His first dalliance with a partner to realize his ambitions began in 1929 with Paul Ludwig Troost, a relatively minor Munich architect.28 Troost, among other architects that Hitler would work with, had largely been sidelined during the interwar period. A devoted neoclassicist, Troost’s sensibilities clashed directly with the likes of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Groupius of German interwar modernity. Simply put, Troost served as Hitler’s architect in the years before the Nazis formally took power in 1933.29 Designer of the Munich headquarters of the NSDAP in its relative infancy, Troost would also go on to design the Haus der Kunst, the House of Art. Following his sudden death in 1934, Troost was summarily replaced in the Fuhrer’s inner circle by a young Albert Speer.30 After his ascendancy to the cadre, Hitler remarked to Speer’s wife Margarette, “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years”. years”.31 While Troost had served as the executor of the beginnings of the reality of Hitler’s architecture, ‘Professor’ Albert Speer would rebuild all of Germany according to Hitler’s vision. As Frederic Spotts notes in his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, “In reality, Speer was an organizational wizard who happened to be an architect, and it was his ability to get things done, as Hitler wanted them done and on time, that made him stand out”.32 This executional wizardry explains why, as defeat rolled in from the Eastern Front, Hitler moved Speer away from his tasks as an architect, and moved him into armaments production. This view also demolishes the notion, cultivated by Speer himself, that Speer served as the master architect devising the vision for Nazi Germany and reinforces the fact that, for every major architectural project in Nazi Germany, it was Hitler’s brainchild, his designs realized in detail by others.33 029

Of course this was also in part because Hitler himself lacked all degrees of technical skill required to construct buildings. In his architecture, like many other things during his time as Chancellor, he preferred to state his end goal and be mercurial and nonspecific in how he wanted it carried out, leaving the execution of his desires to his underlings. However, I will later describe how these details and organization by others, pushed Hitler’s monumental architecture across boundaries between the sketch on the page and genocide throughout Europe.

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Solider on Guard at an Ehrentempel, Das Bauen im Neun Reich, 1938 031

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Spatial Planning This new Germanic nation and its Germanic people began as concepts rather than a clearly defined reality under the Nazis, the definitions for both were inconsistent, hypocritical and would, in reality, be politically malleable terminology that would lead to genocide and ethnic cleansing. One of the core foundations of Reich spatial planning was the pursuit of Lebensraum, or living space for the German people.34 Lebensraum as policy wasn’t invented by the NSDAP, even though they wanted people to think that they had, but it was the Nazi manifestation of existing radical-German political thinking. Germany, unlike other long standing European states, only became a unified country in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck; thus, Germany had not pursued large colonies overseas.35 Even smaller countries like Portugal and the Netherlands had overseas territories that dwarfed Germany’s. After unification, Germany managed to acquire some colonies in the Scramble for Africa during the 1880s to 1910s. However, these few colonies were handed over to the Entente after the German defeat in the First World War. Following the defeat, radical German political thinkers had theorized and advocated for a vast German colonial empire once more; this advocacy combined with a desire to rid Germany of dependence on imports by sea for raw materials and critical foodstuffs.36 The Entente blockade of German shipping during the first war and the hunger and famine it caused throughout Germany was a visceral memory in the minds of many Germans; Hitler and Nazi leadership were no exceptions.

Lebensraum was born in this anger and insecurity tapped into by Hitler and the NSDAP. Even before Hitler and the Nazis came to power, a political term had been circulating in the Weimar Republic, “Volk ohne Raum”, a people without space.37 Coined by Hans Grimm in 1926, the term was largely used to describe the German people as having been stripped of territory as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.38 In their rise to power, Hitler and the NSDAP revised the term to “Raum ohne Volk”, a space without people, setting the stage for Lebensraum.39 033

Often referenced by Hitler as simply “living space” in an imprecise and indefinite capacity, the reality of Lebensraum was Germany ‘reclaiming’ Polish territory and taking, through armed conflict, territory away from the Soviet Union. The Nazis specifically eyed the vast prairies of Soviet Ukraine to free Germany from its dependency on food imports and allow space for colonization inside Europe. Eventually, this effort culminated in the complete destruction of the Soviet Union and the end, as Hitler coined it, of Judeo-Bolshevism in Europe.40 Following the hypothetical defeat of the Soviet Union, a series of vast plans and actions were to come into force. The first was the implementation of Nazi provincial systems of government called the Reichskommissariats, these eerily resembled the way Germany had run its colonial empire in Africa before the first world war. The Reichskommissariats, headed by Reichkommissars, wielded absolute power in the occupied territories, as they swept into Western Europe, Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belorussia, the Baltics and Poland. Portions of some of these states, that were deemed to be ‘German’ by Nazi leadership were integrated into the Reich. In the rest of the occupied territories, the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern France (Southern France being run by Vichy), the Baltics, Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belorussia and the rest of the USSR Reichskommissariats were enacted soon after the Wehrmacht had cleared the territory of enemy forces.41 The Reichskommissariats had absolute control over daily life in the occupied territories; they were also, critically, in charge of the implementation of Berlin’s racial policy and meeting labor and production quotas.42 The Reichskommissars worked hand in hand with the Waffen SS and its death squads, the Einsatzgruppen. Whether it was deportations for labor to the Reich, the in-place enslavement of whole towns and villages, summary executions or deportations to death camps, these hand-selected administrators were the realizers of the “final solution” in the occupied territories.43 The next step in the series of broad actions, planned to span several decades after the defeat of the Soviet Union, was the implementation of Generalplan Ost, the master plan for the East.44 Developed in secret by Heinrich Himmler, the Ostministerium, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern 034

Territories and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA), the Reich Main Security Office, Generalplan Ost was the foundational document to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing and enslavement of the entire Eastern European population. No copies of Generalplan Ost remain–they were destroyed to attempt to cover up Nazi war crimes–but enough corroborating documents exist to enable one to reassemble an almost complete picture. Generalplan Ost was split primarily into two main phases, the Kleine Planung, Small Plan which broadly encompassed actions taken during and immediately after the war; and the Grosse Planung, Big Plan, which was to cover actions encompassing the 20-30 year range after the fall of the Soviet Union.45 In total, over 100,000,000 people in the Eastern occupied territories were to be exterminated by bullet or by starvation; 40,000,000 were to be deported beyond the Ural mountains, a massive, desolate and completely uninhabited region of Russia, essentially condemning them to death.46 The remaining group, approximately 35,000,000 people, were to be “Germanized” into the Reich, for many, especially those deemed to be members of lesser races and ethnic groups, this meant slave labor.47 If they had successfully implemented Generalplan Ost, the Nazis would have had direct control over the largest pool of slave labor in the history of the world. These laborers were to be worked to death throughout Germany and the occupied territories. Even though the plan was never executed, Generalplan Ost was a cornerstone of many of the atrocities and deportations that took place during the course of the war.

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Reich Building Economics For the purposes of the Berlin rebuilding projects, the Reichskommissariats and Generalplan Ost were the source for the vast quantities of laborers and materials that Speer would need to fuel Hitler’s building programs. They would also provide the physical locations for the quarries, factories and industrial plants required to extract and process raw building materials. As the German forces swept through Western and Eastern Europe, the question arose of what was to become of occupied businesses and industry; what was proposed by the Reichsfinanzministerium and adopted by the ‘colonial’ administration was complete disregard for private enterprise and private ownership.48 Of course, this wasn’t a significant issue in the invasion of the Soviet Union since there was virtually no private business there anyways, but in occupying France, Poland and Cezchloslovakia, the Nazis absorbed all private industrial concerns into massive, state-run German industrial conglomerates.49 These conglomerates then became the owners of staterun industry in all occupied countries. These conglomerates were almost always run by high-ranking party officials or run by the Nazi industrialists who had financed the party’s rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. New industrial concerns, like the Reichswerke Herman Goring, were also busy consolidating existing German industries. In a 1942 report completed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA) it is noted that from fiscal year 1933 to 1942, the number of industrial corporations in Germany decreased by almost half, yet capital increased significantly.50

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As the war went on and the state had increasingly larger access to new populations of occupied peoples, this increasingly consolidated industry became intertwined with the slave labor empire that was beginning to take shape in the occupied territories. One of the first to take advantage of the economics of labor camps and deportations for labor were the Waffen SS themselves. In order to monopolize control and avoid paying taxes to the Reichfinanzministerium, the SS began creating a series of sub-agencies and shell companies to manage their finances and control over exploited camp labor.52 Formally established in 1942, the SS-Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA), the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, became the economic body of the SS, directly overseeing the exploitation of concentration camp labor for profit.53 Headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, who was later executed at the Nuremberg Trials, the SS-WVHA would create a vast network of shell companies and economic subsidiaries to have a hand in almost every significant industrial sector.

One of the sectors where the SS would devote tremendous amounts of time, at the direct expense of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of concentration camp inmates was raw and finished building materials.54 The manufacturing of these materials required brutal physical labor, such as brickmaking, granite quarrying and cement production. As they conquered, the SS would repurpose captured plants and facilities to fulfill state contracts for supplies, the SS-run facilities were almost exclusively staffed by inmates of concentration camps. Most of the facilities were built near existing concentration camps or subcamps of large concentration camps were built out near these facilities.55 Some of these companies, like Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke GmbH (DEST), German Earth and Stone Works eventually controlled entire industrial sectors across the entire concentration camp network.56 Headquartered in Sankt Georgen an der Gusen in Upper Austria, DEST was responsible for all SS-run quarrying and brick making operations. Its primary quarrying facility was based out of Konzentrationslager Mauthausen-Gusen, a subcamp of the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp. DEST maintained an exclusive relationship with Albert Speer’s office, the Generalbauinspektor für die 038

Reichshauptstadt, to provide colossal amounts of quarried granite for the Berlin projects.57 Living and working conditions at DEST-run facilities were horrific because the SS policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, Extermination Through Work, was the driving force of the reality inside the camps. Barbarity was not just encouraged by SS leadership, it was camp policy.58 Torture, humiliation and indescriminate executions were part of daily life, the least sign of defiance or non-conformity brought on instant reprisals by SS guards. Living conditions were abhorrent, prisoners hardly slept, hardly ate, had little to no medical care and were worked until exhaustion and death in order to produce as much material as possible. The average life expectancy of prisoners in SS run quarry and brickwork facilities was a little over three months.59 Those who became unable to work were executed on the spot. Although mortality rates are so varied across different economic sectors, in the brickmaking and quarrying sectors, the mortality rate of forced laborers ranges from 50-75 percent.60 These policies were also implemented across other DEST run subcamps, specifically the subcamps out of Konzentrationslager Flossenburg, and Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof. Additionally, DEST purpose-built what was, at that time, the largest brickworks in the world in Oranienburg, just outside of Berlin, run out of Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. This “Klinkerwerke” became a significant source of bricks for the Berlin reconstruction projects, and is, thus, a primary focus of study within the scope of this piece.61 In the same way the DEST would come to monopolize most German quarrying and brickwork operations, the Reichswerke Herman Goring would come to control most mining and steel production throughout the Reich, specifically that in the occupied territories. In comparison to other German mining and steel production corporations before the war, the Reichswerke was a small operation; however, when Germany annexed Austria, the Reichswerke Herman Goring absorbed almost all heavy industries in Austria.62 Germany repeated this absorption after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, when the Reichswerke Herman Goring took over the Czech Skoda Works.63 The direct absorption of captured private and state assets 039

into the Reichswerke Herman Goring continued in Poland, France and the Soviet Union. Eventually, the Reichswerke Herman Goring became the single largest company in Europe, with over half a million employees, throughout the Reich and occupied territories.64 Although armaments production was not the primary purpose of the Reichswerke, through the acquisition of Rheinmetall, and most of the Austrian and Czech military industrial complexes, the Reichswerke Herman Goring also came to be a major armaments manufacturer during the war. At its principal steel plant in Salzgitter, the Reichswerke Herman Goring began manufacturing large-format steel beams, intended for large infrastructure projects, like the autobahns. As Germany’s war effort faltered, Salzgitter switched over to producing war material.65

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Photo Taken by US Surveilance Aircraft of Reichswerke Herman Goring, Salzgitter, 1942 041

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Material, Infrastructure, & Labor Given the scale of his projects and the personal attachment Hitler had to the monumental building program, the extant documentation on project feasibility and planning is extensive. Critically, the usage of construction schedules and planning documents are important as they document the import of materials and labor for the site. Given the project’s size, railroads, roads and even canals were part of infrastructure built specifically for the monumental building projects, with special rail stations made for unloading materials and laborers. It is worth noting that this information is a planned projection completed by the Generalbauinspektor’s office, and does not necessarily reflect the true numbers of labor and materials that would have been used in final construction because construction never started. However, these documents can establish where the GBI and the SS planned on getting materials and laborers. Sourcing of labor and materials is critical to establishing the building project in a larger, nationwide system of infrastructure, labor and genocide.

It is no surprise that the two main building elements used in the Volkshalle were bricks and quarried granite because production of these materials was standardized across all concentration camps, even those that operated during the war.66 The Brickworks at Auschwitz were completely identical to the brickworks at Sachsenhausen and so on.67 Likewise, the layout for granite quarries at Mauthausen duplicated the quarrying operations at Natzweiler-Struthof. These brickworks and quarries were in fact designed by architects, under the direction of Albert Speer, who would come to have a monopoly of building material production throughout German private enterprise, as well as through the Nazi forced-labor empire.68 Most of the bricks that were to be produced for the Volkshalle were to be manufactured in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp right outside of Berlin in Oranienburg. Through a direct partnership between Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke and the Generalbauinspektor’s office, the satellite “Klinkerwerke-Oranienburg” 043

camp was constructed; the facility came online in mid 1938 and became a fully-independent satellite camp in 1941.69 For several years, Klinkerwerke-Oranienburg would produce bricks for the monumental building projects, mainly for the beginnings of construction and the stockpiling of bricks en masse as thousands of buildings in Berlin still needed to be demolished.70 Conditions in the Klinkerwerke were horrific; a survivor of the camp, Arnold Weiss-Ruthel stated in his memoirs, “[work] began at 5 in the morning with the march to the brick works, a large plant built by the SS, which was about 2 km away [...] Morning after morning, whatever the weather, 4,000 prisoners marched in long columns from the camp to their workplace [...] Men collapsed under the weight of iron rods”. rods”.71 As American and British strategic bombings of Berlin and other German citirs increased, the Klinkerwerke-Oranienburg bricks were increasingly used for rebuilding the homes of Germans made homeless by the allied raids.72 In late 1942, the camp ceased brick production and began, under Speer’s armaments ministry, to produce hand grenades and aircraft engines for Heinkel.73 As a result of the close partnership between Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke and the Generalbauinspektor’s office, DEST would become the sole supplier of granite for the monumental building projects.74 Granite was an especially important material for the Volkshalle and other Reichshauptstadt projects as it was intended as the main exterior cladding material. In the pursuit of a homogenous architectural vision, Speer demanded high levels of precision and color matching granite from the DEST quarries.75 To be clear, there were several DEST quarries that produced stone for GBI projects throughout Germany, but for the purposes of this essay, the focus will be on the granite quarries at Mauthausen. Beginning in 1938, DEST established a branch called Granitewerke Mauthausen, in charge of the four quarries at the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp.76 Initially, Mauthausen had its own granite quarry integrated into the main camp, dubbed Wienergraben. As Speer and the GBI’s demands for granite increased with the scope of the architectural projects, DEST established the Gusen subcamp, dedicated solely to granite production. Three new quarries, Kastenhof, Pierbauer and Gusen, 044

came online in 1940, their sole purpose being the fulfillment of GBI contracts for the Reichshauptstadt projects. As the war progressed and DEST began to diversify into armaments production, Gusen II and Gusen III were established to fulfill Messerschmitt contracts, the original camp being renamed to Gusen I.77 Conditions in the Granite quarries were barbaric as Adolf Gussak, a survivor, recalls, “In the quarry we had to carry heavy stones. With them on our backs we had to climb the 180 steps up. The SS beat us. As a result there often was some pushing: everybody wanted to escape the blows. If anyone fell down he was finished off by a bullet in the back of his neck”. neck”.78 By the war’s end, almost 75,000 people were killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen quarrying and armaments production efforts.

Another major building material that was vital to the Volkshalle was large format structural steel, which was composed of a specially created steel alloy, akin to metals used in aircraft production, by design extremely strong but also light, so it could support the monstrous dome of the Volkshalle.79 Structural steel was to be rolled at the Salzgitter steel plant, the largest steel plant in the industrial conglomerate of the Reichswerke Herman Goring.80 The principle plant at Salzgitter was tasked with rolling steel for the Volkshalle and other capital rebuilding projects. Given that the Generalbauinspektor’s Office only needed 124 beams, the decision was made to skip building a purpose-built facility just for the beams.81,82 Instead, the Salzgitter plant underwent minor modifications to accommodate the sheer size of the steel beams. Additionally, unlike other camps and industrial facilities that would become completely subservient to the GBI, the Salzgitter plant continued to service other clients for armaments production, as well as the continued manufacturing of smaller (compared to the GBI requirements) steel beams for infrastructure projects. It is difficult to identify in archival material at what point the Reichswerke started or stopped fulfilling contracts for the GBI, but, even though the facility was modified to accommodate the GBI, no steel was ever produced.

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The Volkshalle and other capitoline projects also called for thousands of tons of cement, to be produced, principally, by Golleschauer Portland-Zementfabrik A.G. which operated a massive cement works out of Arbeitslager Auschwitz-Golleschau, a subcamp of Auschwitz in occupied Poland.83 Following the German invasion of Poland, the existing company that ran the plant, Goleszow Portland-Zementfabrik SA, was dissolved, its assets, including the plant itself, were transferred to the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS-WVHA, which subordinated the camp under the Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke, the East German Building Material Work (East German referring, of course, to the eastern occupied territories, not the state created after the end of the war).84 Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke would be the branch of the SS-WVHA that would control building material production in all of the Eastern Occupied territories, the brick operations at Oranienburg and the granite quarries at Mauthausen would not fall under the purview of Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke because they were inside of the Reich itself. Golleschau was one of the most brutal of all the Auschwitz sub camps, described by Karel Adler, “the most terrible thing was the harsh treatment, partly from the SS guards and partly from the so-called Kapos and foremen. The SS guards had guns, also large sticks as did the Kapos that they beat us with. We were beaten for no reason”..85 One of the most dangerous parts of the Golleschau operation was the reason” onsite quarrying of lime, a primary material required in cement production. The price for slow work or exhaustion was death from the SS guards as a former prisoner, Gejza Rinder recalls, “I remember hearing in the camp about the workers in the quarry who had their hands broken or other wounds inflicted by the dogs set on them by the SS personnel. I myself only saw the covered bodies of such workers being brought back from the quarry”. quarry”.86 As the tide of the war turned, the Golleschau plant, like other camps, switched over to defensive fortification construction across the Eastern front. The remaining laborers were moved to Dachau, Flossenbürg and Sachenhausen to be executed. By the time the camp was liberated by the Red Army, around 23,000 people had died either through labor or execution by the SS. 046

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As defeat started to roll in on the Eastern front in 1942, civilian workers were inc increased deportations from the occupied eastern territories into the Reich for labor.87 As factories and laborers switched over to the production of war materials and defensive for tanks, aircraft and other armaments, and Sachenhausen-Klinkerwere started sending its b of building Hitler’s monuments.

Since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 by the allied powers, one observes a Albert Speer who would go on to write the infamous book Inside the Third Reich, to cr sive building projects. Speer and other designer have tried to claim that they had no kn was committing against occupied populations. Speer and other designers claimed they we idence to support their claims, in fact, quite the opposite. Hitler’s team of architects and these projects. They knew exactly how many laborers were coming and where they were ministerium and the RHSA, the agency in charge of the implementation of the Holocaust

Hitler’s obsession with the Volkshalle and the rebuilding projects for Berlin never ce around him in 1945 and the Soviet Red Army was only a few hundred yards away fro and models of the project, planning a building for a world which no longer existed.89 Fr liest war in human history, a war that took the lives of around 12,000,000 soldiers an of ideology, a war pitched as a Darwinian ideological struggle between Fascism, Commu on to rule Europe and challenge the Western powers. It was a war of race and culture, could be or what needed to be drawn from the past. It was a profoundly personal war concrete and masonry; a war ensanguined in steel and glass.

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creasingly conscripted, creating a shortage of laborers in factories; as a result, the state s defeats worsened still, the capital building projects were largely put on hold as these rtifications.88 The Reichswerke Herman Goring converted its facilities to produce artillery, brick exports to Berlin to rebuild German homes destroyed by allied bombings instead

concerted effort by former architects who worked under the Third Reich, specifically raft a myth about what happened during the war, specifically in relation to these masnowledge of the vast forced labor system and the mass killing actions the Nazi state ere nothing more than designers and artists not soldiers or politicians. There is no evd planners were acutely aware of where the labor and materials were coming from for e coming from, because they drew up the requisition forms that were sent to the Ostt.

eased, he was so obsessed in fact that when his empire was literally falling apart om the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin, Hitler spent hours upon hours with drawings rom 1939-1945, the Third Reich and the allied powers fought the largest and deadnd over 20,000,000 civilians. As much as it was a war against nations, it was a war unism, and Democracy, where there could only be one victor, the one who would go , a war between competing modernities, a war between speculation of what the future between Hitler and Allied leaders. It was a war fought in stone; a war built on timber,

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THE MODEL During a break day while researching in Berlin, I visited the museum which exhibits the original models that Hitler had commissioned of the Volkshalle. Walking into the room, I was greeted with flawless, pristine, white architectural models, as I walked the museum one thing became immediately apparent, everyone who was there thought the models were beautiful. Nobody in the audience understood the brutal reality that these buildings had unleashed on occupied Europe. Hitler and Speer had succesfully hidden the lives that their buildings were going to destroy under white paint, wood, and foam.

Therefore, I chose to use models for my project, I believe that my model of the Volkshalle showcases the truth that Hitler and Speer were so desperate to hide.

The Volkshalle itself has been exsanguinated, ripped apart and dirtied. The model is to be read as a physically assembled object and not as an imitation of Hitler and Speer’s work. The cut on the model reveals some of the individual building elements used in the project, for the sake of brevity I have chosen four materials, granite, brick, cement, and structural steel. Around the model of the building sit the facilities that these materials were produced in as well as indications of the infrastructural methods used to transport those materials to Berlin.

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Endnotes 1. Paul Bourquin Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2005).

2. Krier, Léon and Stern, Robert A M., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 (New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, 2013).

3. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 4. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 ; R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). ; R 43-II - 688, 1026b, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 5. Adolf Hitler and Ralph Manheim, Mein Kampf (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

6. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock u.a.: Overlook Press, 2009).

7. Albert Speer et al., Inside the Third Reich (New York: Touchstone, 1997).

8. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 9. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 10. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 11. Speer, Inside the Third Reich 12. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 13. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 14. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 15. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 16. R 43-II - 688, 1026b, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 17. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 18. NS 19 - 2046, 544, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 19. NS 19 - 2046, 544, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 20. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

21. Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis 22. Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis 23. Ulrich Volker and Jefferson Chase, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (New York, NY: Knopf, 2016).

24. Proclamation of the Reich Government to the German People, Adolf Hitler, (February 1, 1933).

25. Ulrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 26. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

27. Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis 28. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 29. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 30. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 31. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 32. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 33. Krier & Stern., Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942 34. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2012).

35. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 36. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 37. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 38. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lebensraum, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensraum.

39. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lebensraum 40. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 41. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 42. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 43. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 44. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 45. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 068

46. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 47. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 48. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 49. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 50. United States Office Of Strategic Services. A hundred major German industrial corporations. Washington, 1944. https://www.loc.gov/item/sd49000010/.

51. United States Office Of Strategic Services. A hundred major German industrial corporations 52. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 53. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 54. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 55. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 56. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 57. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 58. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 59. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 60. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 61. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 62. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 63. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 64. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 65. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 66. Vossoughian, Nader. “From A4 Paper to the Octametric Brick: Ernst Neufert and the Geo-Politics of Standardisation in Nazi Germany.” The Journal of Architecture 20, no. 4 (2015) 67. Vossoughian, Nader. “Standardization Reconsidered: ‘Normierung’ in and after Ernst Neuferts ‘Bauentwurfslehre’ (1936).” Grey Room, no. 54 (2014) 68. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 69. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy 70. NS 3 - 32, 1346, 1538, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 71. “Building Hitler’s Cities,” Home (Birkbeck University of London), http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents/041-building-hitlers-cities.html.

72. NS 3 - 32, 1346, 1538, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 73. “‘Klinkerwerk’ Satellite Camp,” Zur Gesamtbersicht (Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen), https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/exhibitions/klinkerwerk-satellite-camp/.

74. NS 3 - 32, 1346, 1538, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 75. NS 3 - 32, 1346, 1538, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 76. “Mauthausen,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mauthausen.

77. “Mauthausen,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mauthausen.

78. “Quarry Camps,” Home (Birkbeck University of London), http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents/042-quarry-camps. html.

79. R 4606 - 366, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 80. R 4606 - 366, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 81. R 4606 - 367, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 82. R 4606 - 367, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 83. R 4606 - 4826, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 84. R 43-II - 688, 1026b, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde 85. Arbeitslager Golleschau, Sub Camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum), https://subcamps-auschwitz.org/auschwitz-subcamps/arbeitslager-golleschau/.

86. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum, Arbeitslager Golleschau 87. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich 88. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics 89. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

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Works Cited Non Archival Primary Sources: Troost, Gerdy. Das Bauen Im Neuen Reich, Zweiter Band. Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayreuth, 1938.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Herausgegeben vom Cigaretten. Adolf Hitler: Bilder Aus Dem Leben Des führers. Hamburg, Deutsches Reich: NSDAP, 1936.

Zentralverlag Der NSDAP. Die Neue Reichskanzlei: Architekt Albert Speer. München, Deutches Reich: NSDAP, 1939.

Speer, Albert, and Rudolf Wolters. Neue Deutsche Baukunst: Moderne Tysk Arkitektur. Berlin, Deutsches Reich: Volk und Reich Verlag, 1941.

Archival Primary Sources: NS 3 - 32, 1346, 1538 Deutsche Erd-Und Steinwerke Financial Reporting for Fiscal Years 1939-1943, Includes Material quotas for Fuhrerstadt Projects NS 4 FL - 67 Reports on Deutsche Erd-Und Steinwerke at Flossenburg Concentration Camp NS 19 - 2046, 544 Ostministerium Labor Quotas, Transfer Information & Correspondence with SS officials and the Office of the Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt R 2 - 11068, 11902 Establishment of the Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt, Decrees and initial planning for the Fuhrerstadt projects R 3 - 1809 Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt R 13-XXXIV - 62 Deutsche Erd-Und Steinwerke - Planning Information for the Brick Production Division at Auschwitz-Birkenau R 43-I - 1587, 1596 Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt - Reich Chancellery Renovation Documentation and Financial Information R 43-II - 688, 1026b Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt - Contracts with SS Companies and other private enterprises for the Volkshalle Project R 50-I - 323 Organization Todt R 55 - 20252a Gottbegnadeten-Liste R 58 - 8031 Personnel Files of the Ostministerium, Correspondence between Reichskommissars, Overall Structural Planning, Security Planning, labor and Deportation Quotas R 3001 - 24288 Correspondence between Albert Speer and Reichsjustizministerium officials about the Reconstruction of Berlin 070

R 4606 - 4, 19, 82, 89, 91, 98, 101, 107, 5209, 4885, 1202, 4743, 4868, 4710, 4711, 4712, 4727, 179, 180, 181, 189, 3723, 4776, 535, 536, 538, 539, 1064, 366, 367, 3436, 3439, 3440, 3441, 3442, 3443, 3449, 3450, 3452, 4826, 4939 Internal Files of the Generalbauinspektors für die Reichshauptstadt - Contains Correspondences, Financial Information, Project information for Fuhrerstadt and Building projects, Personnel Files, Building Design and Documentation Data - Contains 213 Oversize Drawings Books: Hagen, Joshua, and Robert Clifford Ostergren. Building Nazi Germany: Place, Space, Architecture, and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Krier Léon, Stern Robert A M., and Lars Olof Larsson. Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942. New York: Monacelli Press, 2013.

Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Cohen, Jean-Louis. Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War. Montréal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2011.

Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York, NY: Overlook Press, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Jaskot, P. B. (2005). The Architecture of Oppression: The Ss, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. Routledge.

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Overy, R. J. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Volker, Ulrich, and Jefferson Chase. Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939. New York, NY: Knopf, 2016.

Journal Articles: Jaskot, Paul B. “Anti-Semitic Policy in Albert Speer’s Plans for the Rebuilding of Berlin.” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (1996): 622–32.

Roger Forsgren, “The Architecture of Evil,” The New Atlantis, Number 36, Summer 2012, pp. 44-62.

Welch, David. “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 213–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180722.

Meister, Anna-Maria. “Ernst Neufert’s ‘Lebensgestaltungslehre’: Formatting Life beyond the Built.” BJHS Themes 5 (2020): 167–85.

Vossoughian, Nader. “From A4 Paper to the Octametric Brick: Ernst Neufert and the Geo-Politics of Standardisation in Nazi Germany.” The Journal of Architecture 20, no. 4 (2015): 675–98.

“18. From Berlin to Germania” In Metropolis Berlin: 1880–1940 edited by Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby, 582-610.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Vossoughian, Nader. “Standardization Reconsidered: ‘Normierung’ in and after Ernst Neufert’s ‘Bauentwurfslehre’ (1936).”

Grey Room, no. 54 (2014): 34–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43832436.

Wilkinson-Cruddas, Alex. “The Future in Stone: Architecture as Expression of National Socialist Temporality.” Thesis, Carleton University, 2016.

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