Forbidden History - Nazi Megacities

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

In this episode we explore the Nazi regime’s radical urban planning ambitions, from Hitler’s vision for “Germania” - a colossal, totalitarian capital meant to eclipse all others, to the destruction of Warsaw. Cast List: Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy: Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London Terry Charman: Historian & Author  Frank McDonough: Author & Historian of the Third Reich Nigel Jones: Author & Historian  Wolfgang Schlecker: Historian  Alexander Kropp: Berlin Journalist & Historian  Dr. Alexander Schmidt: German Historian & Nuremberg resident  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. For Adolf Hitler, victory meant more than the opportunity of implementing his perverse racial views. European conquest and global domination would also enable him to redesign Germany and the occupied territories along the lines of his equally twisted architectural ambitions. His legacy would be a series of building projects

on a scale never before seen as he attempted to construct a truly Nazi world. In this episode, we'll examine how the Nazis began to stamp their mark on Germany and the nations that had fallen under their jackput, from Hitler's plan to redesign Berlin as the capital of the world To the destruction of Warsaw, which would make way for a Nazi model city, has an ever-expanding building program acted as a catalyst for the enslavement, extermination, and destruction of entire nations

and their histories and cultures. On the 28th of January, 1938, just two months after Hitler announced his intention to acquire living space for Germany, the world was presented with his plans for the complete redevelopment of the German capital Berlin. The designs that Hitler and his architects, including Albert Speer, had produced, were nothing short of monumental. But this was city planning on a truly biblical scale.

It would be known as Germania, and the city was intended to become nothing less than the capital of the entire world. Germania was a grand, I think some would say grand delinquent plan to rebuild. Berlin, not just as the new capital of Germany, but as the capital of the world, Welt Helpsstadt, as the Germans called it.

So it sort of grew up during the sort of wartime period that he was planning the future of Berlin and it was on an absolutely huge scale. Really the idea behind it is to imperialize Berlin. So it becomes a more imperial than any other imperial city in the world, more than Paris, more than London, more than Washington. becomes the ultimate imperial city. The key characteristic of the plan, which was pulled together by Hitler's chief architect,

Albert Speer, was to create these roads, east, west and north-south axes, which were massive roads, something like 120 metres wide, five, six kilometres long, and also to put up new buildings, which were completely out of proportion to the existing buildings that were there. In his early life, Hitler had wanted to become an artist

and had twice applied to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His application was denied on both occasions, and with the academy suggesting that he instead considered taking up architecture due to the accomplished way he had drawn the buildings in his paintings. He wasn't very good at drawing people, but he was pretty good at drawing buildings, and he said that if he couldn't be an artist, he'd like to be an architect. He really, what thought of himself as an artist and an architect, a builder rather than destroyer. I mean, that's so ironic, really.

Becoming dictator, of course, it gives him the chance now to indulge himself in architecture. But Hitler needed someone to make his architectural dreams a reality. And that person was Albert Speer. Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. A young and gifted architect, Speer soon rose through the political ranks to become a prominent member of Hitler's inner circle. Speer was an ordinary young architect. He did join the Nazi Party, but he joined quite late. He was a technocrat. He was a modern-minded man. He was from the upper middle class, so he's very unlike a lot of Hitler's early followers. And many people have said he was Hitler's unrequited love, because he was indulged to run.

But he was prepared to accede to Hitler's very strong ideas on what architecture should look like. Hitler was an anti-modernist. He didn't like modern ideas in art or in architecture. He liked classic designs based on ancient Greek and Roman designs. He liked domes. He liked columns. He liked buildings massive in their grandeur. And Speer was prepared to go along with this and design and design and be done. design and build buildings exactly in conformity with Hitler's wishes.

The original plans drawn up by Albert Speer himself are now held in the Landis Archive in Berlin. Historian Guy Walters is meeting with historian of German architecture, Professor Wolfgang Schacher, to get a better idea of the Nazi's vision for Berlin. What's this? That is the so-called triumph arc. And how big is this arch? In meters, how tall is that?

At least it was 120 meters high. At almost 400 feet high, the arch would have been almost 100 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York. There was a plan for a People's Hall of Ox Hall, which would have had a dome 16 times the size of the dome of St. Peter's in Rome. The People's Hall,

was to have had a staggering combined height of 950 feet, which is over twice as high as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Sitting on top of its enormous dome would have been an 80-foot-high golden eagle looming over the city. And inside this colossal structure, a giant arena with three tiers of seating, which would have allowed Hitler to address some 180,000 faithful listeners.

But Schpere had calculated that having all those people under one roof would have presented an unusual problem. I understand that the dome was so big it would have had its own atmosphere. Yeah, that is right. The engineer says to make sure that no clouds would come inside this big, big dome. It would have been impractical because all the breadth of those people would have built about rain clouds within the dome of the Great Congress Hall. I think there are probably two main reasons why they were conceived on such a large scale.

One was actually a sort of practical one that, you know, the Nazis wanted to choreograph great public events where they brought, you know, seriously large numbers of people. But I think there was another, you know, really important psychological, symbolic reason, which was the sense of demonstrating to the ordinary German, the magnitude and power of the Nazi state. Was it possible to have actually built the dome? Yes, it was. Some years ago I have really proved that and it was possible this dome to erect it in this way. I mean, it would have been entirely feasible. I mean, Speer was knocking down apartment blocks and houses to make way for these buildings.

And after all, the Germans did build these enormous flat towers, anti-aircraft towers, which also... have provided air raid shelters for thousands of Berliners, massive great construct. So, I mean, it would have been entirely possible. I think the Nazis suffer from an inferiority complex. And whereas we were Great Britain, they had to be greater Germany. And I think the same thing that, you know, they saw the wonderful buildings in New York,

the skyscrapers and that. We must outdo those wretched Americans. And we must show, by the size of our building, the power of the Reich. Germania was a lot more than just a building project or an architectural plan. Hitler dreamed it up when he was imprisoned in the 1920s, and that, of course, was when he was writing Mienkamp. So Germania and Mienkamp are twin projects.

Germania as an expression of Hitler's evil, and it's an evil that will lead the world to war. While the demands of war curtailed much of Hitler, building program, an Allied bombing destroyed most of the rest, there are still places in Berlin today where you can see his vision of Germania. When they were planning the rebuilding of Berlin, they realized that actually some of these structures might be simply so large and so heavy that they needed to test whether the rather unstable ground on which Berlin is built could actually hold them.

And they built a test tower, a heavy load-bearing test tower. was called, remarkably is still there. And this was built to test the load-bearing potential of the Berlin ground. Guy Walters is visiting Schwerbelastung's Kerber to find out just how colossal this building was. I have to say, it's a little nerve-wracking standing in here because above me is 12,650 tons of concrete, which is about the same as eight and a half a half-half thousand cars. And you've got to remember that this is an experiment. You feel a long way from

modern Berlin and you feel that you're just about in the Berlin of Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler. Not Berlin, but Gamania. It's fantasy world capital that he wanted to create. And in a way that this building is not so much a experimental piece of architecture. It's not a load-bearing stone. It's a foundation stone. Alexander Krop is a journalist and historian in Berlin. Guy Walters has come to meet him to get a better idea of what the landscape of the city would have looked like if Germania had been completed. We're standing in what would have been called Adolf Hitler Platts, Adolf Hitler Square. What would we have seen if we were standing here in 1950 and Gamania had been finished? Now we are in the front of the Rice Tags building and in the left over there there would be the new Rice Tag.

And then we will see the biggest building in the world, the so-called Great Hall. And that dome would have been five times higher than the Reichstag over there. I mean, that's enormous. That's correct. And on the top of the dome, there would be a lantern. And after this lantern, there was planned eagle sitting on a globe. The world? Yes, the world.

And that's the symbol of the sort of the symbol for Hitler's wishes. to be the master of the world. Yeah, it's obvious metaphor. And then what would have been next to the great hall as we work our way around here? What would be over there? Well, the chancellery is now located there was planned Hitler's Palace.

Really a huge and wide building only with one little hole in the middle and a balcony. And this was planned as the position of Hitler to speak to 1 million people here, at a other Hitlerplatz. So that would have been his personal little spot to address. A million people would have fitted into all this area. Yes, that's true, that's true.

But Germania wasn't just an idea that lived purely on architectural plans and drawings. It was a reality that was already well underway. Hitler wanted to outdo everyone. He literally wanted things to be bigger and better than everyone else. Impression is everything. Propaganda. is the religion of the regime. It's all about persuasion. It's all about imposing the regime's idea on you. But it's also all about empowering your imagination.

They want you to admire them. They want you to be in awe of their power, their splendor, their superhuman qualities, which meant superhuman buildings. I think there's no doubt that when you look at the architectural plans of the Nazis, that, you know, they were predicated on the idea that by the time the war started,

it was a war that Germany was going to win. In a way, I suppose, many historians would say that Hitler put an awful lot of effort into dreams, delusions, and perhaps not enough, into military strategy. Today, Berlin is a creative, vibrant and cosmopolitan city, where its citizens are free to lead their lives democratically and without constant threat from the state. Thankfully, it's a million miles away from what Hitler had in store for it.

The space tells you how much of the city that Hitler knocked down and how much labor he put into it. Germania was a key part of Nazi policy. A project the size of Germania was going to require vast resources, such as building materials, manpower, and a lot of money. But above all else, it was going to need space. Lots of it. During the time of the planning of Germania, Berlin was a city of over 4 million people, about 80,000 of whom were Jewish. This was a totalitarian state. When the government made a demand, you had to click your heels. It was pretty non-negotiable, and he would have flattened all kinds of

apartment buildings, all kinds of roads. A lot of the urban core of Berlin, in effect, People would have been moved. A lot of people being thrown out of their residences without any sort of form of compensation were Jewish residents of Berlin, who were subsequently, of course, deported east to their murder. There was no conception of the human cost that this would have been, and indeed no conception of the financial cost. The planned construction of Germania was a direct catalyst in the persecution of the Jewish people. and the subsequent evolution of the concentration camp system. This is Saxonhausen concentration camp,

and it's built just 22 miles north of Berlin. It was used by the Nazis to incarcerate enemies of the Third Reich from the nearby capital, but it also had another purpose. Between 1936 and 1945, over 200,000 prisoners passed through the gates here. They were made up of Russian captives, Jewish people, political disqualification,

and other so-called undesirables. The first concentration camps were established in March 1933 by Himmler and guarded by the SS and also by the stormtroopers, the SA. But of course Himmler thought, well, you know, it's all very well having these people being re-educated in Nazi terms to become good Germans, but also he must make these places economically viable

to pay for themselves. So that's why concentration camps had their own speciality at Saxenhausen. It was the making of bricks. The Nazis soon realized that the inmates that they had under their control were not just prisoners, but an untapped source of free labor. And during the summer of 1938, the inmates at Sachsenhausen were forced to work on the construction of the Klinkervik Oranenberg, the world's largest brickworks designed

specifically to supply the building materials for Hitler's new world capital. But it wasn't just Berlin that Hitler had plans for. He wanted new constructions to take place all over the Third Reich. Building all of these projects was going to require a massive amount of labor and materials, and such factors played a key role in the location and development of concentration camps. For example, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Flosser, and Flossenberg were all located next to natural deposits of quality stone, and prison labor worked to extract this stone from the earth

and ship it to the grand architectural projects throughout the whole of the Third Reich. It was quickly realized by the Nazis that they could serve a double purpose in the concentration camp. They could punish and detain their enemies there and eventually exterminate a lot of them, but they could also become an integral part of the Nazi economy, because you didn't have to pay people who were enslaved in your prisoners already, and you could work them and work them to death, in fact, at very, very little cost. The concentration camps now became something a little bit different. They weren't just against opponents anymore.

They were like for racial purity, and they were bringing people in who were going to do hard work and to make bricks or raw materials. So they were utilising the prisoner population to make money. There's something doubly inhumane about Saxon. The Jewish people who were sent there were forced out of their homes in Berlin, which were then flattened to prepare for Germania. And those who ended up there were then forced to make bricks, bricks which would then be used to build Germania over the site of their destroyed homes. In the plans to rebuild Berlin as the sort of world capital, and quite a lot of suffering happened for a lot of people to get to where they did get. So, you know, people were forced from their homes, including a lot of Jewish people who were forced out of parts of Berlin for land clearance.

It's not the case to say that some of these plans that never happened are somehow victimless. There were many, many victims. While concentration camp prisoners worked to provide the material for the projects, the Nazis swept through Europe. And occupied cities destined for redesign were treated brutally. The most infamous example was Warsaw, the historic capital of Poland, and in 1939 when it fell to the Nazis, it was a city of 1.5 million inhabitants. Plans for the remodeling of Warsaw were well underway even before the invasion of Poland. They were known as the Pabst Plan, after Friedrich Pabst, the Nazi chief architect for Warsaw. These plans detailed nothing less than the almost

total obliteration of the city, the liquidation of its entire population, and its rebuilding as the so-called new German city. The city of Warsaw, in a few weeks of the first campaign of the Second World War, was about 80% destroyed. It was a decapitation strategy. We will destroy the Polish elite. And in the first few months, the last months of 1939 is what they tried to do. murder, the lawyers, the judges, the professors, all of these people, they wanted to destroy Polish culture. The plans had one main objective, destroy the ancient city of Warsaw, including most of its historic buildings, then build a new city which would have had a much smaller population of about 130,000 people. Now the population would consist of just ethnically pure Germans, with the four.

labor settlement of non-Germans on the other side of the river. The Nazis wasted no time in making their terrifying vision a reality. Within a year, their plans were put into action. What ensued was one of the darkest periods in Poland's history. In 1940, the northern part of Warsaw was turned into a Jewish ghetto. It would go on to hold 400,000 people in an area barely larger than a square mile. It was surrounded by watchtowers and walls some 10 feet high, and from there, transit to extermination camps became routine. With the Jewish people under control, the next step for Hitler was the removal of the original population of the city,

either through deportation to the camps, such as the newly built Warsaw concentration camp, or to Germany to work as slave laborers. But two years later, in August 9th,000, in August 1944, the Polish fought back in an event now called the Warsaw Uprising. It failed, and the Nazis went into overdrive. Hitler ordered the total destruction of the city, and by January 1945, 85% of it had been destroyed. However, the changing fortunes of the war in the East meant that the Nazis' plans to rebuild the destroyed city in their image never came to fruition. And when they were finally forced to abandon the city in 1945, they simply left behind them utter devastation.

It's astounding to think what Warsaw went through, and what else it might have gone through had the Nazis actually achieved victory. Warsaw would have been the first Nazi model city. The historical buildings destroyed, the history wiped out, the population murdered, and it would have been the first of many places to have suffered. this fate. The Nazis never got to implement their redesign of Warsaw. But one place where you can get a good idea of the type of structures that would have stood there is Nuremberg in Germany. It was the center of the Nazi party from 1927, when the first Nuremberg rally was held there. And when the Nazis did come to power in 1933, it was decided that this was where all subsequent

rallies would take place. So Albert Speer said about creating a collection of buildings designed to help portray Hitler, not only as a leader of the party, but the leader of a mighty empire. The rally grounds were to be comprised of eight structures sprawling across a staggering four square miles, but only one part was ever completely finished. The Zeppelin Field, designed to resemble the Pergamon altar of Greece, consisting of an 1,100-foot-wide grandstand. It was one of Albert Spears' first creations for the Nazi Party,

and Hitler used it to full effect. There's no doubt that Hitler, I think, saw himself not just as the Fuhrer and the Chancellor of Germany, but as a modern-day emperor. I think at the time, Hitler and other leading Nazis, you know, believe their own propaganda. and they believed that what they were doing was creating a new German empire. Hitler wanted to replicate the might projected by the architecture of history's greatest empires. He had become inspired by the grand ancient buildings of Greece and Rome,

seeing them as great symbols of power. And just like the Emperor of Rome, he too wanted his own amphitheater. The largest surviving building is the Congress Hall. It was designed to accommodate some 50,000 to 60,000 people, and it was modeled on the Coliseum in Rome. Congress war was for having the great party congresses, the great party meetings and gatherings, so its function was entirely political. It was essentially the ultimate podium from which Hitler could perform. It would have been able to hold 50,000 people indoors. I think there's probably only one place.

in the world today which can actually hold that number of people. It was part of the rebuilding and the refashioning of this big space on the edge of Nuremberg to be the center of the Nazi Party rallies. There would have been permanent military parades on the concourse outside and so forth. He let his imagination run away with him, but essentially it was all about the Nazi party. Work stopped on it in 1939, so it was never finished. And if you go to it now, it's just rather really, sort of semi-circular building, so it was only sort of half-built.

Rather sort of forlorn relic and a reminder of, you know, the sheer scale, the frightening scale of what Speer and Hitler planned, you know, had the tide of history been different. Although it remains to this day as a huge structure, the Congress hall was never completed. And at 127 feet high, It's still over 98 feet short of its planned 230 feet height. And that would have been covered by an enormous self-supporting roof.

To find out more about what would have taken place here, Guy Walters is joined by German historian and Nuremberg resident, Dr. Alexander Schmidt. What was so important about Nuremberg? Why was this building built here? Nuremberg is a symbol of the old Germany, the medieval city, was a city who is seen as typical for the old ages. And so Nuremberg is a symbolic background for Germany. And they wanted to Berlin.

And Nuremberg was one step to Berlin. I see. So this is a very important stepping stone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this is a very big building, but were there plans to have an even bigger buildings in Nuremberg? Yeah, the biggest building was a big, stadium, the German Stadium, the biggest stadium of the world.

The first time Albert Speer tried to build the biggest of the world, and in the future, this was his concept. And how much bigger would that stadium have been than this building? More than two and a half. Four hundred thousand people should, can go in this stadium and see some kind of war games, games, not normal sports. They call it NS Kampfspele, so war games. Just like the Colosseum in Rome, spectators would have been treated to a gladiatorial display from Hitler's armed forces. Showcasing their strength and fighting skills would

have further impressed the might of the Nazi Empire on the German people. The greatest sportsman from across Germany would have competed in the proposed annual pan-Germanic athletics. Hitler also envisaged that every subsequent Olympic Games would now be held at the Deutsche Stadion. I think Hitler undoubtedly had a thing about the empires of the past. He was entranced by his visit to Rome in May 1938 to see all the surviving parts of Roman architecture which brought Mussolini stupid. I think that he saw, you know, that the Third Reich Empire were in thousands of years' time. be seen in the same light.

He loved classical buildings. So he did have this idea that buildings reflected the power of a regime. So he would go back to the classical buildings of Greece and Rome, and he would want to create buildings on that scale. So that's why we see Nazi architecture is very much influenced by Hitler himself. Hitler wants lavish buildings, not of the Gothic style. style, he wants them of the classical Romanesque style. The architecture reflected their belief that they were creating, you know, a new German

empire. And buildings like the Congress Haller in Nuremberg, had it ever been completed, would have been just part of, you know, a type of architecture which would have indeed been imperial. Guy Walters again. One of the hallmarks of Nazi architecture and the whole idea of Gamania is this sense of scale. Do you think that had history been very different, we would have seen more buildings like this around Europe and around maybe elsewhere? Surely because they had big plans for many cities, not only for Berlin or Nuremberg or Munich, for Lins, for many little towns. and in the other countries it's the same development.

Albert Speer and Hitler foresaw future generations marveling at the ruins of the great empires that once ruled the world. And alongside the decaying structures of Rome, Greece and Egypt, they hoped would also stand the buildings of the Third Reich. Hitler commissioned many of his architectural plans to show not only the buildings as they were intended to look, but also how they would have looked when they were in ruins. Clearly in a thousand years,

even Hitler realized that some of these buildings would not have been still standing. But he wanted their remains to continue to symbolize his ideology. Hitler and Speer often talked about what they called ruin value, and they espouse the idea of ruin value, which basically was the idea that when you build something, you should build it so that it achieves its purpose

and is architecturally pleasing for the present, you should build it so that it actually lasts a long time, but also you should build it that when it actually eventually does crumble, it will crumble in an aesthetically pleasing way. And again, there was an echo back to Roman and Greek remains, the idea that, you know, a thousand years on, I mean, they talked about the thousand-year Reich, but even beyond that, people would look back and look at these remains

from the Third Reich era, and this would reflect well on that era. But as we watch these buildings decay and rot through the years, many of them unfinished, it would be easy to see them as simply the follies of a megalomaniac dictator, and to separate the creation of Hitler's architecture from his war crimes. It was probably for that reason that at the Nuremberg trials, Albert Speer received a sentence of only 20 years of in prison, while other high-ranking Nazi members were sentenced to death. Maybe they hadn't yet realized that these grand building projects were a key driver to the

building of the concentration camp network, the persecution of Jewish people, and those of the occupied territories, all of which contributed to the start of the war. Had the plans been carried out in full, it would have meant the destruction of national histories and the realization of the Nazi dream of a thousand-year Reich.