Kieran Drake traces Hitler’s megalomaniac plans for Berlin as capital of the Third Reich…
In an otherwise unremarkable corner of Schöneberg, surrounded by allotments and ageing housing estates stands a vast concrete drum. Twenty one metres across and four storeys high, it looms above its surroundings, resembling a decaying post-industrial relic. Yet this strange structure is in fact the most visible legacy of the city that Berlin might have become had Hitler triumphed in World War Two.
The Schwerbelastungskörper, or “Heavy Load-Bearing Body,” was built in 1941 to test whether Berlin’s sandy and marshy soil would withstand the weight of a monumental Triumphal Arch, large enough to carry the names of all 1.8 million German soldiers killed in World War One. Based on sketches drawn by Hitler himself in the 1920s, it was to have been one of the centrepieces of Germania, the planned capital of the Third Reich.
In the end the Arch, like most of Germania, was never built due to the war and the Nazi’s ultimate defeat. Instead, the Schwerbelastungskörper is all that remains: disliked, but too large to destroy, it is now a memorial both to the monumental scale of their plans to recreate this city and to the inhumane and criminal methods they employed to realise them.
I sought out the Schwerbelastungskörper after becoming increasingly intrigued by Germania since moving to Berlin last summer. I had been looking forward to getting to know the city and its history and thought I knew the history I would find: the legacy of Prussia, the impact of the Second World War, and the scars of a city ripped apart during the Cold War and then made whole again, the creative heart of mainland Europe.
Yet, moving between my home in West End and my work in Mitte, I kept coming across traces of another, uncomfortable and unsettling history: of a city conceived of by Hitler and devised by his architect Albert Speer between 1935 and 1943 as a new Welthaupstadt (World Capital), about which I’d known nothing.
To learn more about Germania I headed to Berliner Unterwelten’s Myth of Germania exhibition in Gesundbrunnen Station (open Saturdays, 11am-5pm) which provides a fascinating overview of this enormous, dystopian planned city.
Speer’s plans were centred on two grand avenues running North-South and East-West, modelled on Haussmann’s Paris boulevards but at a greater scale: the North-South Axis was to have been 125 metres wide and would have run from the Sü…