Former Nazi Congress Hall; the shame of Adolf Hitler's Germany explored

By NZAU MUSAU

The purpose of Nazi architecture and technology should be to create ruins that would last a thousand years and thereby overcome the transience of the market - Adolf Hitler


TOWERING, forbidding and quaint are perhaps the best adjectives to describe the oval shell of the unfinished 1930’s former Nazi Congress Hall which still stands at Nuremberg city in Germany.

Behind this sensory description however is an underlying significance of the building’s sordid testimony to the megalomania of the National Socialist regime which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 when it was routed during the 2nd World War.
The enormity and roughness of this 1935 monumental edifice is not appreciated from outside where a facade of granite panels conceals the clinker which makes the most of the building.

Not until one goes through the entrance to “Fascination and Terror”exhibition on one of the two head-buildings closing the U shaped hall and walks up through to a suspended platform at the very end that one gets a dramatic view.
Perhaps this is why our guide Vanessa Lattich of International Nuremberg Principles Academy founding office ensured that this would be our last stop of the exhibition before a scheduled lecture upstairs by historian Eckart Dietzfelbinger. “As you can see, it was never finished and it now stands as the largest remaining monumental Nazi building in Germany. It was modelled along the fashion of ancient Coliseum of Rome and was meant to host a maximum of 50,000 people,” Lattich told us from the platform.

Designs of the edifice now stored at the centre shows that a vast roof with no underpinning was to stretch over the interior of the court. The hall was to reach a height of 70 metres and a diameter of 250 metres. It only reached 39 metres.

And yet this congress, as Lattich told us, was just one of the ten such public structures straddling an 11 square kilometres area dubbed Nazi Party Rally Grounds commissioned by the self-appointed “Supreme Master Builder” of Germany himself, Adolf Hitler.
These, besides the congress hall, were the 150,000 people capacity Lutpold Arena, the 100,000 capacity Zeppelin Field, the municipal stadium (now easyCredit stadion), the 2 km long and 60 metres wide Great Road and the 400,000 capacity Germany stadium which never took off.
It also included the March Field complex where 11 of planned 24 towers had been erected, SS barracks, KdF town of folklore and funfair and the infamous Camp Zone which started off as housing camp for rally organizers but became a prison for prisoners of war from 1939.

“This is where the Nazi movement celebrated itself in an almost obscene fashion, presenting an appealing but false picture of their regime to the world. As they openly geared people to war, they sowed the seed that would yield a hideous harvest in the above-named sites,” Nuremberg Museums writes of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds complex.

The area has since been reduced to about four square kilometres with majority of them destroyed during the second world war by the allied powers (US, UK, France, Russia and China).

Information available at the Documentation Centre now open to the public shows that the buildings were fashioned to project Hitler’s socialist power both to the world and to the Germans. The gigantic dimensions of the structures were meant to both impress and intimidate a rally attendant. “Every year and for one week during the third riech (Hitler’s state), more than 500,000 participants attended these rallies which the Fuhrer (Hitler) himself opened and addressed,” Lattich told us. Hitler had in 1933 upon coming to power declared Nuremberg the “city of the Nazi Party Rallies.”

Nuremberg was the city of traditions in Germany boasting a rich imperial history, splendid scenery, enough space and good infrastructure. The super fast and well-connected rail system in the city is as good now as it was in Fuhrer’s reign.

Moreover, the Nazi’s were well established in this part of Germany with a strong regional leader in Julius Streitcher, also the publisher of Der Sturmer newspaper famed for its strong anti-semitic stance and who would later be hanged after the Nuremberg trials of 1945/46.
The exhibition “fascination and terror” which is located in the north wing of the Congress Hall tells it all; the causes, the context and consequences of the national socialist reign of terror; all in sequential manner.

At the first stop on the rise of the NSDAP, a huge picture which bespeaks of fanatical support for the party welcomes you. Together with a larger one juxtaposed with it of military men loading canons with volleys, they sound the drum beats of war.

The next stop is “seizing of power” where all aspects of Hitler’s attempted coup together with the photos are displayed. Among them is a photo showing Hitler and his co-conspirators storming Berlin on the night of the ill-fated coup in 1923 during which a number of Nazis were killed and Hitler arrested.

Hitler used his trial and subsequent imprisonment to his own advantage. Because every word he said was reported in the media, he used this opportunity to raise the prominence of Nazism and spread its ideals. Although sentenced five years, he ended up serving less than a year.
Whiling his time in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, the anti-semitic book which also outlined his political theory embedded in hatred for communism and Judaism and rooted in his desire to conquer more land for Germany.

The third stop at the exhibition is “the beginnings of dictatorship” which details Hitler’s early days in power which started with the famous “Reich stag fire” which burned down German parliament in Berlin on February 1933 and a few weeks after Hitler had been sworn in as a chancellor. “The arson attack was used to mount a major crackdown on opponents of Hitler and essentially the installation of a totalitarian regime led by Hitler,” Lattich said. Some historians have considered the arson a Nazi sanctioned operation.

Thereafter followed deliberate moves to persecute Jews whom the system blamed for everything starting with boycott of Jewish businesses and culminating in the “Nuremberg Racial Laws” of 1935 which formally reduced the Jews to second class citizens.
The next two stops at the exhibitions are dedicated to the two myths of the time and which Hitler’s propped and his propaganda machinery advanced; the Fuhrer myth and the Volksgmeinschaft (social solidarity) myth.

The various aspects of idolization of Hitler are displayed here from adulatory head-figures of his likeness, triumphal pictures and self-embossed medals which were hung all over. A series of pictures that struck me is one that captured Hitler arriving in Nuremberg for the Nazi rallies taking from both the skyline and another on the ground.

Going side by side this adulation of Hitler as savior and super-human was the elevation of the German race and its separation from other lesser races, especially the Jews.

Yet other sections deal with the building of the Nazi Party Rallies by war prisoners, rituals conducted at the rallies, organization of the rallies, racism and antisemitism, path to war, war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, Germany resistance and finally and most inevitably, the Nuremberg trials.

The most moving aspect for me at the exhibition was the ascending/descending walkway exhibition of little paper cuttings bearing names of holocaust victims ranked according to the concentration camps where the met their fate.

Coming down from the suspended platform atop the building and looking at the victims’ names enclosed in glass lit up by parallel running streams of light, one feels like he’s descending down to hell. This is the purest testimony to the wickedness of man.
Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka- coming down in that order, read like hell-stations with all the background information I had on them in mind.“It can repeat itself in any place even now, if structures within a state are not controlled properly by those entities which are supposed to play that role in a democracy or any other system,” Dietzfelbinger told us with benefit of history on its side.

By the time we were done with the tour and the lectures, all of us were tired having flown from Netherlands via Hamburg and to Nuremberg earlier in the day but there was no way I was going to leave the centre. I slipped away into the dimly lit halls alone and engrossed myself into watching Nazi rally videos and speeches of the Fuhrer.

I was studying the Nazi rally grounds design maps when the bell for closing up the exhibition rang and I realized I was all alone. It took me quite a while to find the exit route and when I did, I found my grumpy colleagues waiting downstairs.
As we walked out of the centre, I recalled ethnic profiling happening in our country and the lamentations of Jesus in Luke 19: 41-43 came to mind. “And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.”

I wished, if only our leadership and all those who significantly shape the course of our country’s history would visit the ‘Fascination and Terror’ exhibition and know of the things that cause strife and war.