AN OLYMPIAN plan to revamp China’s capital with a 16-mile boulevard connecting the Olympic Park with the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square has provoked a stormy public debate in Germany.

The project, commissioned by Chinese officials ahead of the 2008 Olympics, has sparked controversy because the renowned urban planner whose design is being used is also the son of Hitler’s personal architect, Albert Speer.

Albert Speer Jr, 68, has become reluctantly embroiled in a public debate over his master plan after comparisons were made between his father’s plans for Nazi Berlin and modern Beijing.

From historians to architects, the road which will connect north and south Beijing, has stirred up Germany.

A taste of the debate was reflected in the pages of Die Weltearlier this week: “His Beijing axis is re-awakening old memories. Wasn’t there a legendary . . . north-south axis, planned by the elder Speer for Hitler’s new Berlin, which was to be called ‘world capital Germania’? Is his son to copy him or rather outdo him?” Herr Speer told The Times: “The comparisons with my father are unfortunately unavoidable.” Berlin also hosted the Olympics in 1936, but he says he gets angry when he reads the comparisons with his father. My plans cannot be mistaken for his. What I am trying to do in Beijing is to transport a 2,000-year-old city into the future. Berlin in the 1930s; that was just megalomania.”

The historical broadside has been rebuffed by Germans and Chinese alike. Axel Busch, who teaches at a Berlin university and runs his own urban planning consultancy, said: “The concept of a central urban axis is much older than the Nazis and this man should not be discredited on the basis of family ties. He has distanced himself from his father’s work and is by no means an ideologue.”

The Chinese are full of praise. A spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Committee said: “Speer’s plans are very similar to what the Beijing city government had wanted. The ‘feng shui’ of the central axis is very good. We don’t mind who Speer is, but we worry a little that other people could misunderstand this.”

The elder Speer was labelled “architect of the devil” by the historian Golo Mann. In the late 1930s, as Germany launched itself into war, Hitler personally gave Speer the job of remodelling the capital to fit his ambitions.

Berlin’s first tenements were bulldozed to make room for a grand axis through the centre, before the Allies occupied the city and imprisoned Hitler’s architect, armaments minister and possibly closest friend for two decades. Heiderose Kilper, a professor at Hanover Technical University, said: “Few children of top Nazis have followed so closely in the paths of their fathers. Those who did have usually suffered terribly under the burden imposed.”

In her biography, the British historian Gitta Sereny depicts Hitler’s architect as unique in the Nazi elite.

He was recognisably human: young, intelligent, educated, lacking (as far as the evidence suggests) any racist views, a gifted architect rather than a political thug. And yet he followed Hitler zealously.

His son, who barely knew his father, has worked as an urban planner for more than 30 years, and his 100-strong office in Frankfurt has advised governments in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Yemen.

He follows in the footsteps not only of his father, but also of his grandfather and great-grandfather, builders from southern Germany. Of his plans for Beijing, he said: “I want to make a leap into the future but at the same time preserve old structures in the city centre.

“We propose the building of a central train station, a new transport gateway, in the city’s south as well as an ecological model city.”

The plan covers more than 36 square miles and is supposed to be finished before the 2008 Olympics. Herr Speer also envisages a new enterprise zone with shopping streets, residential blocks and office towers a few minutes from Chairman Mao’s mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

Perhaps the salient point in the current controversy is that Beijing — once isolationist and xenophobic — has chosen a foreigner to revamp its capital.

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