Stay Connected with Us:


Between 1934 and 1941, the one man responsible for bringing the National Socialist party's thirst for domination into physical form was a gangly German with a side part.

Albert Speer's work has come to define national socialist architecture. Though many of his plans never made it past the drafting table, those that reached completion influenced everyone in Italy's Benito Mussolini.

The style is instantly recognizable: big, imposing, concrete.

Here are some of his most iconic works.




That includes a Congress Hall, several deployment fields, a "great road" for NS parades, and a stadium that never rose from its foundation.

New Reich Chancellery: Hitler's foreign policy headquarters that Speer produced in less than a year.


Speer was revered both for the speed of his construction and the magnificence of the building itself.

The Marble Gallery was particularly striking. It was covered in richly detailed textures and colors, not to mention 480 feet long — twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.


Despite heated resistance from Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's top NS leaders, Hitler borrowed the searchlights from the German air force.






Speer adorned his with NS symbols and perched an eagle on top, making the pavilion slightly taller than the Soviet one.

Prachtstrasse: The "street of magnificence," which would act as the backbone of Hitler's redesign of Berlin.

Ultimately, the individual buildings Hitler had Speer build were nothing compared to Germania, a model of Berlin imagined by Hitler as a National Socialist utopia.

Speer created plans for a sprawling city that included a 400,000-capacity stadium, a 5-kilometer-long street known as the street of magnificence, a massive open forum measuring nearly 4 million square feet, and an enlarged replica of France's Arc de Triomph.

The German arch would have been large enough, in fact, to fit the entire original structure within its passageway.

Volkshalle: Speer's "people's hall," which would have been the largest indoor structure in the world if completed, seven times larger than St. Peter's Basilica.


In an interview with Playboy in 1971, Speer stated that Hitler believed the holiness of the structure would grow as centuries passed, eventually becoming a shrine to national socialism — in the same way St. Peter's Basilica serves Roman Catholicism.


One of the earliest and largest projects Hitler ordered was a tourist resort capable of holding more than 20,000 people at a single time.

Construction began in 1936 and lasted for the next few years, until Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and Prora grounded to a halt.


Stay Connected with Us:

Stay Connected with Us: