A new exhibition displays Hitler's plans to redesign Berlin as the capital for a Nazi-ruled world, as created by his architect, Albert Speer.
BERLIN HAS two lists of tourist attractions. The official one lists the Brandenburg Gate and the Holocaust Memorial. Topping the unofficial list is the remains of Hitler's chancellery and bunker, a scrappy site near Potsdamer Platz that, even with nothing to see, attracts walking tours every 15 minutes. Berlin's newest tourist attraction straddles the grey area - and the site - between the two.
The Mythos Germania exhibition displays, for the first time in public, Hitler's plans and models for the capital of his 1,000-year Reich.
The general thrust of Albert Speer, Hitler's in-house architect and armaments minister, is well known: to flatten Berlin for Welthauptstadt Germania (World Capital Germania). Seeing the models, however, makes apparent the megalomaniac scale of the plan - arid avenues and bombastic buildings interpolated with fascist fountains - and the terrible cost.
"The new German Reich is neither a boarder nor a lodger in the royal chambers of bygone days," said Hitler after taking power in 1933. "Germania must be a true European capital that shall be the capital for everyone." Behind this not-so-veiled threat, was a dictator plagued by doubts and insecurity.
Berlin was too Prussian and too provincial, he thought, and, judging by Speer's designs, the same insecurity characterised Hitler's commission for Germania: make everything bigger than everything else.
The main axis through the phantom city is bookended with supersized knock-offs of existing European landmarks. At one end stands a Triumph Bogen (Victory Arch), 100m high, inside which could fit the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. At the other other end of the model is the Volkshalle (People's Hall), 200m high and 16 times larger than St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Novelist Robert Harris memorably used Germania as the setting for his 1992 what-if thriller, Fatherland.
"The People's Hall has a capacity of 180,000 people," intones a fictional tour guide. "One interesting and unforeseen phenomenon: the breath from this number of humans rises into the cupola and forms clouds, which condense and fall as light rain. The People's Hall is the only building in the world that generates its own climate."
The capital for a Nazi-ruled world was to be completed by 1950, plundering the mines of occupied Europe for building materials and emptying Berlin's Jewish quarter to relocate other Berliners whose homes stood in the way of the bulldozers.
"As we all know, this so-called relocation was the first step on a terrible path that lead to certain death, either in ghettos or in concentration camps," says Dominic Ponce, spokesman for the exhibition.
Albert Speer's plan involved redirecting the River Spree, removing seven cemeteries and completely sidelining existing landmarks. In the model, the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag look like shacks beside their fascist neighbours.
With his plan, Speer proved that he, like no other, knew how to please his boss.
"Hitler would always come over after lunch or late at night," remembered Speer's secretary, after the war.
"Whenever he came - and this went on into the middle of the war - he would stay for a long time. However tense he was when he arrived, he would visibly change when he looked at this vision of the future."
Speer told Playboy magazine, 10 years before his death in 1981, that, in hindsight, Hitler had commissioned him to construct "not a city, but a sarcophagus".
"Like the ancient pharaohs, he planned to use stone to ensure his own immortality," he said.
But the immortality project fell victim to mortal concerns - a lack of materials and manpower - and was put on the back-burner by Hitler after the war turned.
The organisers of the new exhibition, conscious that the subject treads a fine line between education and glorifying Nazi aesthetics, have carefully framed the materials between explanations of Germania's context and consequences.
"We're confident there can be no misunderstanding of our intentions," says Ponce.
But the reaction of exhibition visitors is something no curator can fully control and, six decades later, it's clear that even these tiny scale models still make their mark. "It's really fascinating, impressive," says Lasse, a middle-aged Berliner, before quickly correcting himself. "Impressive in an awful way."
Mythos Germania runs until December at the Pavilion beside Berlin's Holocuast Memorial