Nazi Architecture - Labour and Plunder

Labour and Plunder

The number of skilled and unskilled workers required to erect Hitler's increasingly gigantic buildings created a labour problem. When he assumed power in 1933, there were still many unemployed workers in Germany, some of whom were given work on public building schemes that Hitler thought would stimulate a sluggish German economy and at the same time provided him with popular propaganda "Hitler Creates Jobs" (Gr Hitler schafft Arbeit). The majority of the unemployed were quickly absorbed by the armaments factories and not by the construction industry, as Nazi propaganda suggested.

However, the unemployed did not always thank Hitler for their employment; German workers employed on the building of the autobahns repeatedly went on strike from 1934 onward because of their atrocious working conditions, which led to graffiti such as "Adolf Hitler's roads are built with the blood of German workers". The Gestapo was ruthlessly used for strike-breaking and recalcitrant workers were sent to concentration camps on the assumption that they were communists.

As preparations for war and later as the demands of war absorbed increasingly larger quantities of steel, concrete and manpower, the state building program slowed down to the point where in 1943 all work virtually came to a halt at the Nuremberg rally grounds.

New quarries within Germany and Austria were established by the SS, who set up concentration camps such as Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Natzweiler and Gross-Rosen, where inmates were forced to quarry stone for Hitler's buildings. The inmates were to be given minimal, low-cost diets, in which Himmler took a special interest. On March 23, 1942, Himmler asked Oswald Pohl "to gradually develop a diet which, like that of Roman soldiers or Egyptian slaves, contains all the vitamins and is simple and cheap".

Plans were also made to import three million slavic peoples into Germany to work for twenty years on the Reich's building sites. By May 1941 more than three million people were being forced to work in Germany and of these a third were prisoners of war and the rest of the people forcibly removed from conquered territories.

This use of forced slave labour and the massive expenditure of funds on buildings commissioned by an autocrat under no constraint to disclose or justify such an expenditure, invites comparison with Roman methods of paying for and erecting the opera publica.

Rome's vast state buildings, admired and envied by Hitler, could be built only because Roman imperialism over a period of centuries generated the wealth and made available the manpower to pay for and erect the structures that enhanced the "sovereign power of the Roman people or the emperor" (Lt Maiestas) and spread the propaganda of the emperor. In Rome public buildings were customarily paid for out of plunder (Lt Manubiae) derived from foreign wars. For example, Trajan's vast forum was financed from booty derived from his Dacian wars. Julius Caesar's grandiose building plans, partly put into effect after his death by Augustus, were made possible thanks to the plunder he had gained from his wars in Gaul. The acquisition of works of art for the embellishment of private and public buildings was also frequently based on plunder. Here one can point to the aftermath of the sack of Corinth by Lucius Mummius Achaicus in 146 B.C., when shiploads of art treasures were sent to Rome. So too Hitler "collected" works of art from all conquered territories for eventual exhibition in the vast gallery that was to have been built in Linz.

The use of forced labour on building sites both in Rome and in the provinces was a normal Roman practice. Thus, buildings like the Congress Hall in Nuremberg and the Volkshalle in Berlin, inspired by the Colosseum and the Pantheon, respectively, were not merely symbols of tradition, order and reliability, but signaled a far more sinister intention on the part of the autocrat who commissioned them: a return to Roman ethics, which recognized the natural right of a conqueror to enslave conquered peoples in the most literal sense of the word, a right already made manifest even within the sphere of architecture by the creation of concentration camps, whose inmates were forced to quarry the stone for the Reich's buildings.

Thus, it seems clear that Hitler's grandiose plans for the architectural embellishment of Berlin and Germany's regional capitals could have been achieved only by using the same methods as those employed by the Romans: forcible acquisition of funds and forced labour.