∼ ∼ ∼ This article is part of a series — History Bites — which explores U.S. and world history, politics, pop culture, and the arts to illustrate how the past illuminates the present. ∼ ∼ ∼
Near the end of his gripping 1978 book about the collapse of the Nazi regime, The Bunker, journalist James P. O’Donnell relates a 1976 discussion he had with Adolf Hitler’s one-time Minister of Industry and Production, Albert Speer. Known for his carefully worded apologies for the horrors of Nazism, Speer had been convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg for using slave labor, but was spared hanging due to lack of evidence that he had knowledge of the death camps.
As the two were walking along the banks of the Spree River, in Berlin, they discussed a 1925 sketch that Hitler — who was then 36 years old and had already been convicted of attempting to overthrow Germany’s government, and whose political prospects seemed bleak — had made of a gargantuan triumphal arch. O’Donnell writes about how he was amazed that “this malignant dreamer was planning war even then,” adding wryly, “One does not build triumphal arches in anticipation of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”
But Hitler’s grandiosity was such that, years before coming to ultimate power, in 1933, he had long envisioned a new Berlin, to be renamed “Germania,” as a city that would blossom with concrete-and-steel behemoths unlike anything the world had seen before. In fact, he was already imagining a mammoth dome to face his colossal arch. The problem was that the dome, planned to be on the order of seven times larger than St. Peter’s in Rome and with the capacity to hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 standing, saluting, squawking Nazis, would have problems with indoor precipitation.
“Indoor rain clouds in the middle of a speech by Adolf Hitler?” O’Donnell asked incredulously. “Mr Speer, you must be joking.”
The former lord of the Third Reich’s munitions and armaments manufacturing replied that he was dead serious:
I came to calculate that body moisture and the throaty exhalations rising from such a massed Nazi audience, packed in so close together like sheep, would have slowly risen. Warmed air always does. Then, on a wintry day, up there under the cold, patined copper of the cupola, the steadily rising mass of warmed air would have met up with a compact, static layer of chilled air. This, in turn, would have led to small floating cloud formations and, ultimately, to precipitation.
And thus, it would’ve rained on Adolf Hitler’s parade.
Thrashing forward in time, Donald Trump is hoping to build a 250-foot-tall arch near the Potomac River in honor of the coming July 4th celebration of 250 years of American democracy. When he unveiled models of the proposed monument recently, Trump stated, “Small, medium, and large — whichever one, they look good,” adding, “I happen to think the larger one looks, by far, the best.”
Our POTUS shares that bigger-is-better sentiment not only with Hitler, who wanted to roughly triple the size of Napoleon’s 164-foot-tall Arc de Triomphe, in Paris (which commemorates French soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and sits atop the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a service member killed fighting for France in World War I), but also with North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, who had a 197-foot-tall arch built to honor Koreans who resisted Japanese occupation from 1925 to 1945.
“Nothing beside remains.”
While Trump’s arch — and the super-sized White House ballroom supposedly going to rise from the rubble of the old East Wing — still has bureaucratic hurdles to overcome (though stacking various oversight commissions with toadies beholden to the president rather than taxpayers will no doubt grease the architectural skids), the design itself aims to achieve what autocratic architectonics always seek: to reduce the average citizen to a cipher dwarfed by the state.
Last century, little of Germania was ever built, and there remain only a few remnants of Hitler’s vastly truncated Thousand-Year Reich. One, a Brobdingnagian concrete column, stands as a sort of one-limbed version of Shelley’s timeless sonnet:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In fact, it was Berlin’s sandy soil that led to this rare survivor of Hitler’s building megalomania, the Schwerbelastungskörper, or, in English, a “heavy load-bearing structure.” Built by French forced laborers in 1941 — when the materials and expenditures would no doubt have been better employed in Germany’s war effort, never mind in providing for its civilian population — this rebar-studded cylinder was designed to test the German capital’s marshy ground’s capacity to withstand the pressures of the proposed arch, and other of the Führer’s pharaonic follies. As useful to the populace as the phallus of some ersatz god, the structure — which consists of 12,650 metric tons (over 27 million pounds) of solid concrete — remains in place only because using explosives for demolition would destabilize neighboring buildings and infrastructure.
World War II and Hitler’s ever-deepening spiral into delusions of grandeur and paranoia put paid to his building projects. We can only hope that Trump’s unauthorized war and plunging poll numbers will finally put the brakes on his own grand illusions. ❖
