Big hall
The Great Hall (also Hall of Fame or Hall of the People ) was an architectural project by Adolf Hitler and General Building Inspector Albert Speer , in which they developed gigantic architectural concepts for the conversion of Berlin based on the Roman model into the " World Capital Germania ". The interior of the hall was intended as a “cult space” and a congress hall and should offer space between 150,000 and 180,000 visitors. A wide variety of events should take place there. In addition, the hall was intended to demonstrate the power of the Greater German Reich .
Planning
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As the most important building in the planning, the hall should be located at the northern end of the north-south axis in the Berlin Spreebogen . The course of the river should have been changed slightly for this. As early as 1925, Hitler made a first draft sketch. After Speer received the order to redesign Berlin in 1937, there were still a few changes.
Hitler calculated the construction costs to be around one billion Reichsmarks , which he wanted to finance primarily from income from tourist entrance fees. The completion of the hall, like almost all other buildings in Germania , was planned for 1950. The demolition of the Alsenviertel and the diversion of the Spree had already begun in 1939–1941.
Hitler's 1925 sketch for the Great Hall was very much based on the Liberation Hall near Kelheim . It can be assumed that the other designs were also influenced by the Pantheon in Rome , which Hitler visited privately on May 7, 1938. For example, this building has an Opaion that was also intended for the Great Hall at the beginning of the planning.
execution
Hitler gave Speer the specially created title of “ General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital ” (GBI) and assigned an authority to him that also bore the abbreviation GBI as a name. Speer then carried out the reconstruction of Berlin in parts between 1937 and 1943 with the GBI. The general building inspector and his authority began using foreign forced laborers as early as 1939 . According to a planning by the GBI from 1940, the deployment of forced laborers and prisoners of war was to increase to over 180,000 people after the war. The GBI played a key role in the planning, approval and construction of the around 1,000 known forced labor camps in and around Berlin - their actual number is now estimated at over 3,000 - and operated many of them on its own. For example, one of the warehouses was located on Staakener Feldstrasse and was intended to be used for building the Great Hall. In the west of Spandau, on the site of today's Evangelical Forest Hospital Spandau , construction began in 1939 on a “workers' town 'Great Hall'” for 8,000 construction workers. Some of the preserved buildings are listed and can be seen today on the clinic premises.
Even the demolition work for a project like that of the Great Hall would have required an enormous amount of personnel at the time and the same would have applied to the planned construction work on this major project. In 1937 a law was enacted that enabled expropriation for the redesign of German cities ( law on the redesign of German cities of October 4, 1937, Reichsgesetzblatt I, pp. 1054-1055). This law initially only dealt with the most important cities of Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin, Hamburg and Linz, but was soon extended to all district capitals. On this basis, the General Building Inspector set about tearing down buildings in the Spreebogen and Tempelhof in 1938 , despite the great demand for apartments in Berlin of more than 100,000 units. The demolitions were intended to create space, including for the Great Hall. The GBI's 1941 plan also envisaged demolishing a total of 52,144 apartments in Berlin for the entire redesign. However, as part of Germania's overall planning , a total of 650,000 new apartments were to be built in Berlin by 1950. After the start of the Second World War in 1939, Speer ordered a general stop on apartment demolition.
architecture
Outward appearance
The design for the outer shape of the Great Hall followed entirely the architecture of National Socialism and urban planning in the Nazi era , as a German design of the neoclassicism style that was widespread at that time .
The building was to be made of granite and marble and consist of a square 315 × 315 meter wide and 74 meter high substructure and a dome rising above it. This should start 98 meters above the ground and have a base diameter of 250 meters. With 17 times the volume of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, it would have been by far the largest dome in the world. The main body supporting the dome had a corner tower with a quadriga at each corner .
According to the first drafts, there should be a 46-meter-wide light opening at its 290-meter-high apex . However, these plans were rejected. Instead, a decision was made in favor of a cylindrical roof lantern - supported by several pillars - as the end of the building, on the top of which, at a height of 320 meters above Berlin, the imperial symbol was to be enthroned: a huge eagle with a swastika in its claws - framed in a laurel wreath . In the middle of 1939, however, Hitler decreed that the bird of prey should encompass the globe .
The porch of the entrance area consisted of 17 double columns, 30 meters high and three meters in diameter, made of pink Swedish granite and bronze capitals, and would have been lined with two sculptures. On the one hand an atlas figure with the globe, on the other hand Tellus , who carries the vault of heaven. These 15 meter high figures would have been made by Arno Breker . The pillar porch would have been given an eagle figure on the left and right.
8000 workers and engineers worked permanently on the building. Completion was scheduled for 1950.
inner space
The planned Great Hall had only one huge interior space with a floor area of around 38,000 m². Albert Speer discovered in the course of his planning that the mutual “game” between “Führer” and “ Volksgemeinschaft ” could not work in such a vacuum. In his opinion, the interior should have been designed very simply. He later described him as follows:
“Around a circular area of one hundred and forty meters in diameter, grandstands rose in three tiers to a height of thirty meters, which rose in a circle around the inner surface. A wreath of a hundred rectangular marble pillars, twenty-four meters high and almost human-sized, was interrupted opposite the entrance by a niche fifty meters high and twenty-eight meters wide, the bottom of which was to be lined with gold mosaic. In front of her stood the only pictorial ornament on a marble base fourteen meters high, a gold-plated imperial eagle with a swastika crowned with oak leaves in its claws. The “Fuehrer's” lectern was located under this shrine , but it almost disappeared into the gigantic room. […] I tried to emphasize this place architecturally, but here the disadvantage of the excessive architecture became apparent. Hitler disappeared in it to an optical nothing. "
Outdoor area
In the south in front of the hall there was to be another square - framed by administration buildings (planned Adolf-Hitler-Platz ). The square redevelopment should consist of the following buildings: the Führerpalast , the Greater German Reichstag , the Reichstag building , the service building of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the new service building of the Reich Chancellery . In Albert Speer's plans, the square and its reconstruction were the northern climax of the north-south axis . Diagonally northwest behind the building, on the north side of the Spree , a 1200 meter × 400 meter large water basin was planned towards the Nordbahnhof , in which the domed structure was to be reflected, with a water surface 15 times larger than the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The similarity of the overall scenario of domed building, water basin and east-west axis to the Capitol in the US capital Washington was probably not purely coincidental, whereby its dimensions were exaggerated into the grotesque .
Possible construction-related problems
Even before construction projects of such dimensions as the Great Hall could even begin, a test facility had to be created to check the load-bearing capacity of the sandy Berlin soil with the help of a heavy load body. This construction consists of a concrete cylinder 18 meters high and weighing 12,650 tons, which rests on a narrow base and thus simulates the high pressure on the ground, as would have been created, for example, by the triumphal arch planned in Berlin. Possible subsidence should be determined through long-term data acquisition on the base. The Degebo measurements began during the concreting process and continued until June 1, 1944. Due to the consequences of the Second World War and the post-war years , the results were not evaluated until 1948. It turned out that the Great Hall, like the triumphal arch, could only have been built under the conditions set by Speer with the previous consolidation of the ground. In two and a half years from 1941, the cylinder had sunk by 19.3 cm and had already got a 3.5 cm overhang during the concreting work. The long-term subsidence can be traced back to a natural consolidation in the 5.2-meter-thick layer of glacial till.
Speer later expressed the fear that the breath of the 180,000 people could condense and fall back as drops of water, which would have amounted to light rain in the building. Similar concerns later emerged with the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in the USA .
Todays situation
Today, the Federal Chancellery and the Spreebogenpark are located at the point where the Great Hall was to be built .
Quote
“The great hall should be designed so that St. Peter's Church and the square in front of it can disappear into it. We use granite as a building block . Even the oldest erratic boulders in the north German plain hardly show any signs of weathering. If the sea does not flood the north German plain again, these buildings will remain unchanged in ten thousand years! [...] "
Hitler was wrong in what he said about granite. Granite, as a coarse crystalline plutonite made of minerals that are weather-resistant to varying degrees, is not necessarily particularly durable - see also wool sack weathering . In principle, the smaller the crystals and the higher the quartz content , the more weather-resistant a granite is.
Granite would not have been the building material of the Great Hall, but only used for the cladding. The architecture under National Socialism - as a German embodiment of the style of neoclassicism - used concrete and steel, then clad with clinker brick and granite, more for visual reasons than for questionable durability.
See also
- Architecture under National Socialism
- List of the largest domes of their time
- Great Hall of the People
- Unfinished structures
literature
- Albert Speer: Memories. Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1969 (numerous editions).
- EW Heine: New York is in the Neandertal. Buildings as fate. Provocative thoughts on the cultural history of mankind. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-01672-7 (further editions under the title: New York lies in the Neandertal. The adventurous story of man from the cave to the skyscraper ), the chapter on the Reich Chancellery illuminates the architectural one very impressively National Socialist plans.
- Günter Peters: Brief Berlin building history. From the founding of the city to the federal capital. Stapp Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-87776-035-X .
- Helmut Weihsmann: Building under the swastika. Architecture of doom. Promedia, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-85371-113-8 .
Web links
- Domed Hall. ( JPEG ) (interior view of the hall). (No longer available online.) In: northwestern.edu . Otto Karl Werckmeister , April 15, 1999, archived from the original on June 28, 2015 ; accessed on January 27, 2017 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Albert Speer: Memories . Ullstein Verlag , new edition 2005, p. 88.
- ^ German Reich Law Gazette 1937
- ↑ Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the English language Wikipedia
- ↑ In 50 Years of Degebo (p. 40), Weiss states that the settlement was 20 cm until 1951 (of which 12 cm took place in the boulder clay ) and in the years thereafter up to 1969 another 2.2 cm
- ↑ Christian Fuhrmeister: Concrete, clinker brick, granite - material, power, politics. A material iconography Berlin , Verlag Bauwesen, 2001, ISBN 3-345-00715-0 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 14 ″ N , 13 ° 22 ′ 19 ″ E