The Nazi Block

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the Tempelhof Schoenberg district of Berlin, there's an enormous concrete structure that sits across the street from a supermarket. It's obscured by trees, surrounded by residential apartments, and gently flecked with German graffiti. Okay, check 1212. It is 8.34 a.m. I am quite possibly the most jet-lagged I've ever been in my entire life, and I'm waiting for my Uber. or as they say here in Germany, my UBA. We sent 99PI producer Vivian Leigh there to check it out. Jet lag be damned, I met up with Hanna Fischer and Vincent Brookman. Hanna is the curator and deputy director for the Tempelhof Schoeneberg Museums and Vincent is a journalist and tour guide.

0:50They were there to show me around a curious neighborhood landmark. From afar, it kind of looks like a derelict, brutalist grain silo. Is it a popular site for people to visit? This one? Yes, from Schöneberg, it's the most popular. And it is the least aesthetically pleasing. Yeah, that is true. This structure is a bit hard to describe because there's literally nothing else like it in the world. On the surface, it's a very, very big, very, very heavy cylindrical block of solid concrete about the height of a four-story building. This concrete, 12 ,650, I think, tons of concrete. And sitting underneath those 12 ,650 tons of concrete is a narrow chamber about eight feet in diameter that descends 60 feet into the ground.

1:44There's a ladder here that we can't use now, unfortunately, and then it goes, I think, 18 meters into the ground. Have you guys ever crawled down there? No. This entire structure was designed to test the soil in this area of Berlin. That chamber was once an observation area where researchers measured how the soil below was responding to the pressure exerted by the weight of the cylinder on top of it. Whether the cylinder itself was shifting, sinking into the ground, exciting stuff like that. People from all over the world come to Berlin to see what is essentially an abandoned soil testing research tool.

2:22And the name of this unusual tourist site is just about as easy to pronounce as it is to describe. In German it's Schwerbelastungskörper, and in English it's the heavy load bearing body. Does it make sense in English even? Not entirely. The Schwerbelastungskörper is kind of a tongue twister, but luckily there's a few other simpler nicknames for it. The cylinder, the concrete cylinder, the concrete mushroom, because it sort of looks like a mushroom. But locals in the area have referred to it by a much more nefarious nickname. It used to be the nickname Nazi klotz. A klotz is like a heavy kind of stone that you put onto something, and Nazis, so it's kind of like Nazi block.

3:05The Nazi block. The Schwerbelastungskörper is not famous for what it does, but who built it. This big, crumbling piece of concrete was actually the first step in a monstrous urban planning scheme dreamed up by Adolf Hitler. Thankfully, that plan never materialized. Now this Nazi bloc is one of the only remaining monuments to the Third Reich's most colossal architectural failure.

3:38There was a phrase that leaders in the Third Reich said about architecture, that it was Worte aus Stein, or words in stone. It means that architecture has a specific ability to bypass language and reasoning, to have a direct impact on a person's emotions. If you've ever walked into a family friend's farmhouse-style home and immediately felt a sense of coziness, or had your breath taken away while standing at the top of the Empire State Building, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Architecture can move you and shape your actions in ways that you aren't even aware of. Hitler not only understood this innate power about architecture, he weaponized it.

4:18When we think about architecture and weaponization, especially around the Third Reich, you know, you might think about the Atlantic Wall or bomb shelters. This is Despina Stradigakis, an architectural historian at the University at Buffalo. But there are a lot of ways in which architecture can be instrumentalized for ideological purposes that are not maybe as obvious, but that can be very powerful. Hitler was infatuated with art and architecture, enough that he was famously rejected from art school a couple of times. Even early on, he spoke openly about the ways architecture and power are intertwined.

5:05If you look at Mein Kampf, and I hope you won't, but if you want to torture yourself, in Mein Kampf, he writes about the importance of architecture and particularly the importance of architecture to create the Volksgemeinschaft. And the Volksgemeinschaft is this absolutely central concept in national socialism. It is the racially unified community. The Volksgemeinschaft literally translates to people's community, and the concept was central to Hitler's racist and anti-Semitic ideology. It claimed that there was a, quote, racial hierarchy, which there isn't, and a, quote, ideal way of German life, again, which there isn't.

5:52Look, Hitler was an ahistorical idiot who made a number of false assertions. One of them was that the ancient Roman Empire represented the peak of human civilization and that Germans were, quote, racial ancestors of the Romans and therefore at the top of that hierarchy. Which they aren't. Hitler's looking in particular at ancient Rome and more specifically at the public buildings, the state buildings of ancient Rome, the temples, the baths, the Colosseum. And he says that in its great monuments, a culture expresses its most profound values. It shapes the Volksgemeinschaft. And also he's thinking about the things that will remain when everything else fades away.

6:39And he says wars come and go, but it is the art and the architecture of a civilization that remains. So he's thinking about this long before he gets into power. In 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and finally had the political power he needed to create these monuments. He just needed an architect to actually build them. Could you tell me a little bit about Albert Speer? How many hours would you like? This is Magnus Brechtgen, Deputy Director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Albert Speer was a highly ambitious young architect. He was the son of an architect. His father made a lot of money.

7:32His mother had a lot of money. So Albert Speer was completely financially independent. He could do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was the resources and backing of the Nazi party. Speer was sufficiently talented as an architect, but it was his charm and ruthless ambition that landed him in Hitler's orbit. Albert Speer would magically appear whenever Hitler was coming to do a tour of the construction site. You know, a few minutes beforehand, there was Speer. And he would join, you know, the architects and the patron, and they would walk around the site. And, you know, the workmen would just kind of make jokes about this young hanger-on.

8:18but Speer was there to learn. Like, he was there to learn and to figure out what it was that Hitler wanted, what he liked, what he didn't like, and to be noticed. Speer was still a relatively young man when he had a streak of good luck. Hitler's top architect suddenly dropped dead. At 28 years old, Speer was launched into the position of chief architect for the Third Reich. Hitler apparently loved pageantry, and Speer was more than happy to cater to his theatrical whims. He was tasked with staging the notorious Cathedral of Light display at the Nuremberg Rally Grounds and designing a new Reich chancellery.

8:58Soon after, Hitler entrusted Speer with his most ambitious design project yet. He wants a capital that is architecturally worthy of being the center of a global empire. In 1937, Hitler declared five cities as, quote, fewer cities, which meant that five cities, Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, and Linz, would all become cultural capitals in a future Nazi-dominated Europe. Each city would offer its own special contribution towards the Third Reich. Linz, Hitler's favorite city, would become the center of culture. Munich would be the Nazi party headquarters. Nuremberg would be the city of Nazi party rallies.

9:42Hamburg would be the capital of putting a piece of meat between two pieces of bread. Berlin would hold the highest title of them all. Hitler believed that Berlin would become the capital of his, quote, Greater Germanic Reich and the Nazi seat of power to the rest of the world. But there was one glaring problem with Berlin carrying that particular title. Hitler did not like Berlin at all. This is Paul Keurig, assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Hitler understood that Berlin was an important city to the cause of national socialism. It was the capital city of Germany and a cultural center populated by millions of people.

10:20But for Hitler, that culture was all wrong. Berlin was, in the Weimar Republic, became known in the 1920s as this kind of really progressive city with a lot of cabaret. and people were kind of experimenting with different identities and sexualities and it was very decadent. So he did not like that at all, this kind of progressive environment. I don't know, it sounds pretty cool to me. And outside of its politics, Hitler also hated the city on an aesthetic level. Berlin was kind of all over the place. It was the kind of epitome of modernism. You know, there was Bauhaus and all of these styles that Hitler despised.

11:05Hitler's disdain for progressive, modernist Berlin meant that the entire city would have to be rebuilt from scratch. Hitler even proposed that once the complete urban redesign was finished, the city would be renamed Germania, a name that he believed evoked unity of the German people. In 1937, Hitler gave Speer near-complete control over all building projects throughout the city. And he was granted essentially unlimited budget and resources. Speer, as a matter of fact, had more power than anyone else when it came to building. So he always wanted more and more and more and bigger and bigger and bigger.

11:41This Berlin 2.0 was planned to be everything that the city was not. Rigidly symmetrical, ordered, devoid of color. And given Hitler's obsession with ancient Rome, the buildings would need to be stylistically reminiscent of imperial Roman architecture. But these buildings wouldn't just be neoclassical. They would be monumental, meaning that the city would be built on a massive scale never before seen. I mean, it's just huge. It's no sophistication. Magnus Brechtgen again. I mean, if we talk about architectural history and how architects think buildings, It's always about size to form, to function, to human dimension and so on.

12:28So it's a combination of finding the best formula when you build something. And this is just to make people quiet, to impress them and to push with violent might away every kind of obstacle against your own ideological conviction. When it came to architecture, Speer did not put much thought into creating a satisfying user experience for those living there. Instead, he focused on how these buildings would propagandize Hitler's beliefs, how they would intimidate, and surprisingly, how they would eventually die. Yeah, it's the famous Ruinenwerttheorie or Theorie des Ruinenwerts. He said the way he designed his buildings was with the foresight that in thousands of years they will just be ruins.

13:24Speer claimed to have conceived of a design principle that he called ruin value. Hitler and Speer believed that every empire comes to an end and the Third Reich would be no exception. Hitler used to marvel at the ancient Roman ruins, and he wanted civilizations of the future to do the same at his buildings. By avoiding materials like steel rebar and concrete facades, which tend to erode in an ugly way as they break down, he thought their monuments could decay more gracefully. That way, even after the Third Reich ended, their pretty, pretty ruins would pass on their racist ideology long after they were gone.

14:03So a kind of antiquity was coming together with the past, the present and the future. We're all becoming one. And that captures what the Nazis really believed.

14:21So we're basically now on top of this platform, which is built next to the Schwerbelastungskörper. And we're basically on the same height as the top of the heavy load bearing body. So we can kind of have the panoramic view of Berlin and also what the National Socialists were planning to do. Back in the Tempelhof Schoeneberg district of Berlin, I followed Vincent Brookman of a platform about 14 meters above street level. This weird concrete cylinder I'd come to Berlin to see was marked as the starting point of Speer's proposed redesign for the city. It's really important to understand that everything or most of what the National Socialists were planning was not constructed.

15:03Vincent showed me how Speer and Hitler planned for this Nazi megacity to be framed by two long intersecting axes, one of which would be a, quote, avenue of splendors that ran 4.3 miles from south to north. It would serve as a celebratory parade route. and looming at the end of this avenue would sit a structure that would define the city. This is basically where you can imagine, or the direction where you can imagine, this hall, Volkshalle, Great Hall, Hall of the People, which was kind of the center of the plans. Years before he became leader of the Nazi party, Hitler sketched two architectural drawings that he one day wanted to build.

15:46The first was a colossal Volkshalle, or People's Hall. It would have been a massive neoclassical assembly space, inspired by the Pantheon, only, you know, bigger. The Volkshalle featured a copper dome that towered nearly 88 stories high, and would have fit up to 180 ,000 spectators inside. For reference, that's nine times more people than can fit in the crypto.com arena. And they thought that even there was kind of a microclimate within the hall. If there were, I don't know, 150, 180 ,000 people within there, they were even thinking if there were, I don't know, condensation clouds, because there were just so many people in there.

16:27And you must imagine it was supposed to fit like almost 200 ,000 people, which is huge. It's just rain made of like sweat and spit and breath. Yeah. Yeah.

16:42At the beginning of the parade route would be the other monument that Hitler sketched. It was a triumphal arch commemorating the German soldiers killed in World War I. Structurally, he wanted it to be reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, only, you guessed it, bigger. This triumphal arch was planned as the southern gate to Germania, the new Berlin. And so all the tourists, international tourists, would have arrived at this train station in the south. and then walked up to the arch. And then they would have seen in the distance on the other side of town this huge congregation hall. The buildings would be built on a scale never before seen in human history, which came with one very obvious structural engineering problem.

17:27There was no data supporting the fact, will the ground even carry these monstrous monuments? The ground in Berlin is very difficult to build on. The city sits on swampland, so it has mushy, cushy soil. You know what doesn't pair well with all that mushy, gushy soil? The weight of the largest buildings ever conceived. The Triumphal Arch in particular was exponentially more complicated because all of the weight of the entire monument would be concentrated onto narrow pillars. This meant that the ground pressure exerted by the arch would be incredibly intense. And if you want to build the biggest of everything, well, you need technological solutions for that.

18:08And Speer's technological solution was to build Schwer-Belastungs-Körper. Schwer-Belastungs-Körper. It's Schwer-Belastungs-Körper. So Schwer-Belastungs-Körper. In 1938, Speer was assigned to carry out any testing necessary to construct Hitler's mega-monuments. And part of that testing was the construction of the Schwerbelastingskorper, that heavy concrete cylinder. The reason why it was so big and so heavy was because the weight of all that concrete was supposed to simulate the pressure of one of the arches pillars pushing down onto the ground. Those 12 ,650 tons weigh more than the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Christ the Redeemer statue combined.

18:58And also in terms of soil pressure, it even puts more pressure on the ground than the Cheops pyramid in Egypt. So it is really extraordinarily heavy. Not much is known about the actual construction process of the cylinder. The Nazi party kept details of this megacity project under a tight lid, mainly because the complete reconstruction of Berlin would have demolished somewhere between 50 to 100 ,000 homes in the middle of a housing crisis. That was, of course, not even close to the worst consequence of Berlin's urban redesign. It was Jewish Berliners who were targeted first for deportation, and the labor and materials for the project would be supplied at a horrifically inhumane cost.

19:46There were a lot of people who suffered from it. for example, the Jewish population of Berlin, but also the forced laborers who had to build these projects, and also the inmates of the concentration camps who were responsible for bringing the building material, for example, like the stones and the bricks. In 1941, the concrete cylinder was completed. But by that time, it didn't even matter anymore. The problem for the, air quotes, problem air quotes for the National Socialist was that the war started. And then there was the question of how to proceed. By this point, the U.S. had entered World War II, and Hitler's makeover for Berlin would have to be tabled.

20:33Soon after, Speer was promoted from general building inspector to minister of armaments and munitions. He was responsible for maximizing war production. So rather than using slave laborers to build Germania, he used them to produce weapons and war material for the German war effort. Speer was no longer an architect. It was his job to make sure the Third Reich could maintain its military operations. And it was a role that he was unfortunately very good at. He is responsible for keeping the war going for months on end when the war was lost. and he knew that the war was lost. In the last year of the war, more people died than in the previous five years combined.

21:17Every day the war was prolonged. On average, more than 16 ,000 people died per day on every single day. So every day the war went on, another 16 ,000 people were killed. Speer knew this, and he went on regardless.

21:45The tribunal is of the opinion that Speer's activities do not amount to initiating, planning, or preparing wars of aggression, or of conspiring to that end. He became the head of the arm and industry well after all the wars had been... In 1945, after the war ended, Albert Speer appeared before the court at Nuremberg, along with 20 other National Socialist leaders. But over the course of his trial, Speer once again used his charm and charisma to get his way. He condemned Hitler and offered the Allied Council valuable details about how he achieved such a productive war economy for Germany. In the end, he was only sentenced to 20 years in prison.

22:27I mean, he did spend 20 years in prison. that he was found guilty, but do you, in your opinion, did he get away with it? Yes, of course, of course. I think most people who knew what Speer had done, and he himself knew what he had done, you see his reaction. There's a film and it's a reaction, and he, so this kind of instinctive knew, I'll survive. Yes, sure, he got away with it, you know. While serving out his 20-year sentence, Speer authored a best-selling memoir about his time as, quote, Hitler's architect. He filled it with claims of remorse and left out the extent of the part he played in the war.

23:10By the time he was released from prison in 1966, some historians even referred to him as, quote, the good Nazi. Hitler said it to me, you are my architect and you will do it for me. I was on the way to be one of the most famous architect in Europe with other technologies in the world.

23:36Speer and Hitler's monumental world capital was a city that never came to be. Almost no piece of architecture from this grand urban redesign of Berlin survived. Except one thing. It wasn't even possible to tear it down after the Second World War because it's too big. Albert Speer's concrete cylinder. What would it take to tear it down? A lot of... Was? Sprengstoff? A lot of dynamite, yeah. The Schwerbelastungscorpor was a 12 ,650 ton block of solid concrete in the middle of a city surrounded by residential buildings and train tracks. So blowing it up with explosives after the war was out of the question.

24:23Berlin was sort of stuck with it.

24:30It wasn't really used by anybody and also except the scientists, the engineers, no one really had any interest in it.

24:41This is Michael Richter, an architect and one of the leading historians of the Schwer-Belastungsgauber. So it was more of a pragmatic approach to this building. Richter says that within just a few years of World War II ending, the German Society for Soil Mechanics picked up the geological research where the fascist structural engineers left off, only minus the fascism. For decades after the war, civilian scientists quietly used the cylinder to generate lots of data on how to build very big buildings on top of really squishy soil. It's actually been helpful for structural engineers all over the world.

25:26It also has a high scientific significance because a lot of the information that we know today about building in this kind of soil, we actually have from the research that has been done on this cylinder. So between 1948 and up until the mid-80s, the experiments that the engineers did on this specific structure is where a lot of the information today comes from. Why is it that in the 1980s it stopped being used? No one had any questions left.

26:06In 1983, having run out its use, the concrete cylinder was pretty much abandoned by researchers and fell into disrepair. It sat neglected for about a decade until the district realized that this space could be of some use to teach people about what almost came of Berlin. The cylinder was listed as a protected monument in 1995, and today it's the only tangible relic of the National Socialists' master plan for Berlin. Even though it's a protected monument, the Schwerbelastungskörper was never built to last. It wasn't constructed with the best materials, since it wasn't even supposed to be seen. So now the concrete is crumbling.