Designed by Albert Speer and built for Adolf Hitler in record time between January 1938 and January 1939, the Reichskanzlei was the representational epicenter of Hitler’s power, and, as one of the very few Speer designs actually completed, it enjoyed a particular preeminence among the architectural initiatives of the Nazi Party. Lavish, full-color photographs of its marbled halls were widely published in the architectural and popular press of the day.

The core of the Reichskanzlei was a Baroque Stadtpalais, built by Graf von der Schulenberg in the late 1730s. It was subsequently sold to the Radiziwill family in 1796 and then to the newly formed German state in 1875, at which time it became the official residence of the first chancellor of the new German Reich, Otto von Bismarck. Among its obvious attractions were its location, adjacent to the Foreign Ministry, and its ample garden, which stretched westward to the edge of the Tiergarten. Remodeled and modernized in 1878, the Reichskanzlei enjoyed a life of shabby gentility well into the Weimar Republic, before the demands of government made an extension desirable.

Speer was brought in at first to work with Paul Ludwig Troost, who had been summoned by Hitler in the autumn of 1933 to redesign the interiors of the existing Reichskanzlei. Later that year, however, Hitler gave Speer his first independent commissions for the Reichskanzlei: the conversion of a hall overlooking the garden into a new office for Hitler, who wanted to escape the mob that thronged the street in the early days of National Socialism, hoping to view the Führer. In compensation, however, Speer was also asked to insert the “historic balcony”—as it is called in his memoirs—working from Hitler’s own sketch. This was a brilliant device; the smallest of interventions transformed the Wilhelmsplatz into a theater, in which the masses could pay homage to the leader.

The “historic balcony” was used to promote Hitler’s self-presentation to an adoring German public. The major redevelopment of the Reichskanzlei was intended to promote the selling of the new Nazi Reich to the wider world. Indeed, in his account of the rebuilding published in Die Kunst im dritten Reich, Hitler linked the two issues: “In December 1937 and January 1938 I decided to resolve the Austrian question, thus establishing a Greater German Reich. Under no circumstances could either the purely administrative tasks or the representative functions that were necessarily connected with this be satisfied any longer by the old Reichskanzlei. I therefore commissioned Generalbauinspektor Professor Speer with the rebuilding of the Reichskanzlei in Voßstraße on 11 January 1938, setting as the completion date 10 January 1939.”

This account of the commission, which finds support in Speer’s memoirs, is entirely fictitious. For detailed planning had begun in 1935, the year in which Hitler himself made a sketch setting out the axial ordering of the interior and the broadening of the street to form a court of honor on the Voßstraße. Indeed, the state began to buy houses on Voßstraße in 1935, and their demolition was under way by 1936. The submission by Speer in June 1936 of a cost estimate for the design of the new extension along Voßstraße shows how advanced the project was by that time. Why, then, the great disparity between the official history and the actual, documentable history of the Reichskanzlei’s gestation and planning? The answer is simple: in Hitler’s scheme of things, the grand new extension to the Reichskanzlei symbolized the Greater German Reich, and could only be revealed as such after Austria had been absorbed into the Greater Germany.

Albert Speer’s extension to the Reichskanzlei was complete in 1939. As the plan reveals, the largest part of the newly enclosed volume was empty space: reception areas, strangely empty halls with no function whatsoever, and long, long corridors. Offices were squeezed in along the Voßstraße front, again with excessive corridor space and poor vertical circulation. Even along the central axis, the planning is entirely one-directional. Having walked the ceremonial route from Wilhelmsplatz to Hitler’s inner sanctum, the visitor has no obvious way to return, and simply retracing one’s steps is a slightly risible option. In this design, as in Speer’s unbuilt set pieces for the National Socialists, the haptic and tectonic qualities of architecture were made entirely subservient to the visual and thus the reproducible. The process of transmission is more important than the building itself

Speer’s Reichskanzlei received much publicity. Besides the predictably lavish coverage in the popular press, dedicated books and journal articles appeared, aimed at every level of consumption. At one end of the market were paperback collections of photographs. At the other end were luxurious folios with reproductions of paintings and drawings of the Reichskanzlei under construction and completed. There was even a collection of dry-point engravings in a leather-bound case, presumably intended to impress visiting dignitaries. The same descriptive texts do the rounds in these publications, detailing not only the structure, but also the furnishings and fittings, and the sculptural contributions of Arno Breker and Josef Thorak.

The power struggle to which Giesler refers is the scene that occurred in the New Reichskanzlei on 14 March 1939, when the aged and infirm President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hácha, was bullied into placing the fate of the Czechs in Hitler’s hands. As Hitler reported to Speer: “At last I had so belabored the old man that his nerves gave way completely, and he was on the point of signing. Then he had a heart attack. In the adjoining room Dr. Morrell gave him an injection, but in this case it was too effective. Hácha regained too much of his strength, revived, and was no longer prepared to sign, until I finally wore him down again.” The German army marched into Prague the next day.

Hácha’s fateful interview was held in Hitler’s study. To get there he drove into the courtyard at the eastern end of Speer’s addition and climbed the steps to the main portal, flanked by Arno Breker’s two massive bronze figures, both over four meters tall, representing the Party and the Army. In a speech delivered at Stettin in June 1938, Hitler identified these two institutions as the pillars of Nazi society. “I am increasingly convinced of the necessity to secure on foundations which cannot be shaken two pillars in the state: on the one side the undying National Socialist Party sustaining the political life of the State, and on the other side the German Army. To the extent that these two pillars unite to sustain the whole destiny of Germany, to that extent can the German nation face the future with calm confidence.” A year later the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung adopted Breker’s giant figures to illustrate the point, in a drawing entitled “Party and Army Defend the Peace of the Reich.”

Mosaic hall	Mosaic hall door to Ehrenhof

Peace was far from Hitler’s mind, however, as Hácha ascended the steps and entered a vestibule that led into the Mosaic Hall, a top-lit space whose awesome emptiness is articulated in both plane and volume by the geometry of the marble panels and inlays.

Following the imperative of a line of inlaid marble stretching from door to door, President Hácha would have found himself in a small circular room, again top lit. Pragmatically, Speer used this transitional space to correct the clumsy shift in his axis and to negotiate a substantial change in floor levels. Emotionally, the visitor is plunged here into a space both dark and disorienting, with the guidelines on the floor perversely abandoning the ritual path. With this almost subterranean chamber, Speer created the desired sense of tension and compression necessary for the coup de théâtre to follow.

Round hall with view to Mosaic hall

For on leaving the dark, claustrophobic drum, Hácha entered the vast Marble Gallery, nearly 150 meters long but only twelve meters wide, a space whose extraordinary dimensions conspired to create an almost sublime impression of immeasurability and thus incomprehension.

Marble gallery

Speer records Hitler’s delight that the Marble Gallery was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. This recalls a comment by Gerdy Troost, the widow of Hitler’s first official architect, Paul Troost, when asked by Hitler at a dinner in the Reichskanzlei what she thought of Albert Speer. Had Hitler asked her husband for a building one hundred meters long, she said, he might have concluded that structural and aesthetic factors demanded that it be only ninety-six meters long. But if Hitler were to ask Speer, she continued, for a building one hundred meters long, he would instantly say: “Mein Führer, two hundred meters!” Speer’s penchant for the overblown and overdimensioned was shared by Hitler, however, who gloated over the distances foreign dignitaries would have to walk: “On the long walk from the entrance to the Reception Hall they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!”. But while Speer worried about the safety of polished marble floors, Hitler was perversely delighted: “That’s exactly right,” he insisted, “diplomats should have practice in moving on a slippery surface

The formal intentions of Speer’s design are easily listed: powerful, cubic massing, flat wall planes, deep window reveals, hard-edged moldings, vigorous repetition, and an insistence on axiality and symmetry. Speer himself characterized the “new way of thinking about architecture” as “austere and severe, but never monotonous. Simple and clear, and without false ornamentation.

Marble gallery with door leading to Hitlers office	Hitlers office

At night, under the more biddable conditions of artificial lighting, these qualities could be stressed even more strongly. Recalling her first meeting with Hitler at a preview of the New Reichskanzlei, Speer’s personal secretary, Annemarie Kempf, described the lighting as having a magical quality: “A huge celebration was planned for the opening, but Hitler came to meet us the night before. We all went around the building with him and Speer, we walking behind them. I thought it was beautiful, I don’t care what people say now. I was very proud that night.

Cabinet room

One has to imagine—well, it’s almost impossible to imagine—the lights, the flowers everywhere, the excitement of it.”. As in a theater set, the impact of the mise-en-scène derives from the framing power of the proscenium and the selective intensity of the stage lighting. Indeed, the Reichskanzlei looks especially convincing in night-time photographs, when the aperture of the sky, which punctures a hole in the framed-off world, is closed off.