Adolf Hitler called it Germania, his vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world. “Berlin will only be comparable with the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians or Romans,” the Nazi leader said. “What is London, what is Paris by comparison?”

For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.

Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, unveiled a scale model of Germania, the Führer’s supersized city. Centrepiece of the display was the domed Great Hall, planned by Albert Speer, Hitler’s master architect, to accommodate a crowd of 150,000.

“We wanted to avoid this exhibition being seen by the wrong people,” said Karl Dettmaer, deputy director of the regional picture archives, which first tried to deal with the sensitive Germania issue in the 1980s.

The positioning of the exhibition, in a pavilion next to the Holocaust Memorial and two minutes’ walk from Hitler’s bunker, has made it easier to open it to the public without seeming to glorify the Nazi’s aesthetic vision.

“The proximity to the memorial reminds us that Germania was built at the expense of the Jews who were the first to be thrown out of their houses, which were then smashed to make way for this act of gigantomania,” Mr Steinbrück said. “Their so-called resettlement was the first step on a path that led to certain death, either in ghettos or in concentration camps.” Although space was cleared and the architects’ plans carefully drawn up by Speer, not much work had been done on Germania by the time the tide of war turned against the Nazis. Speer had built a chancellery for Hitler, 420m (1,400ft) long, a labyrinth of corridors, with an office of 390sq m for the Nazi leader.

This was deemed to be too small for the Führer in the new Germania and Speer was developing a “Führer-Palace” when the war ended. The new chancellery, due for completion in 1950, was supposed to have a 500m gallery leading to Hitler’s 900sq m (10,000sq ft) study. The equivalent of €1 billion (£750 million) had been earmarked for the project that was going to be built on the land where the German Chancellery now stands. Angela Merkel’s office is a more modest 142sq m.

Hitler’s first chancellery largely survived the bombardment of the war but was bulldozed five years later. The marble was used in the construction of an underground railway station, the concrete helped to build the monkey compound in East Berlin Zoo.

Other traces of Germania can be spotted almost by accident in present-day Berlin: gas lamps erected along the broad straight road that runs from West to East Berlin, or a massive forlorn chunk of concrete used to test the foundations of a giant triumphal arch.

The Nazis had three fundamental problems in building Germania: a shortage of labour, a shortage of building material and the houses that stood in the way. Slave labourers were used for the heavy work. “In all of the quarries of occupied Europe there wasn’t enough building material for the façades along the planned north-south axis road,” Sven Felix Kellerhof, the historian, said. “So Speer discussed with Heinrich Himmler establishing new quarries at concentration camps.”

Speer also appears to have been quietly satisfied by the Allied bombardment of Berlin – it smashed houses that he would have to have cleared for Germania.

Speer, once seen as a morally ambiguous figure, clearly emerges as a villain in the exhibition. He was willing to exploit the persecution of the Jews to construct a massive new capital for Hitler. Imprisoned by the Allies after the war, he wrote a diary distancing himself from Hitler. “Germania,” he said, “turned out not to be a city for Hitler but a sarcophagus.”

The exhibition will be open to the public from Saturday and will stay open until the end of the year.

Gargantuan dream that died with dictator

— The official title of the Nazi project to redevelop Berlin was Welthauptstadt Germania, or World Capital Germania, reflecting Hitler’s ambition to make it the centre of gravity of his global Third Reich

— The centrepiece of Albert Speer’s plans was to be the great north-south road, lined with theatres, shops and government buildings

— To build the road, which at 120 metres wide would have been broader than the Champs Elysées, Hitler authorised the destruction of tens of thousands of buildings

— The planned road linked two grand stations and passed under an arch more than twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe

— Nazi party rallies were to be held in a square that would have been among the world’s greatest. Königsplatz would hold a million people

Source: Times research

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