The Buildings of the Third Reich

Abstract

This short text by Adolf Hitler encapsulates his vision of architecture as a powerful polemical and political force for the new Germany of the Third Reich. He argues that monumental architecture has the power the bring the German people together into a strong and unified national community and to express in tangible form the ideology and goals of the National Socialist Party.

Keywords:

• Adolf Hitler
• National Socialism
• Mein Kampf
• architecture
• monumentalism
• Albert Speer
• rebuilding of Berlin
• Volkshalle
• community
• Neue Sachlichkeit

Notes

1 Translator’s note: “Neue Sachlichkeit” was the generic term favored by modernists in the 1920s to express the qualities of objectivity, practicality, and function in art, architecture, literature, and the broader society.

2 Translator’s note: “this city” refers to Nuremberg, location of the 1937 “Reichsparteitag” (National Party Rally, commonly known in English as the Nuremberg Rally).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adolf Hitler

Translated from German by Iain Boyd Whyte

Originally published as “Die Bauten des Dritten Reiches. (Auszug aus der Kulturrede des Führers auf dem Reichsparteitag 1937),” Baugilde, 19, no. 26 (15 September 1937): 877–878. Republished in and translated from Anna Teut, Architektur im Dritten Reich 1933-1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1967), 188–190.