Nazi architecture

Nazi ideology took a pluralist attitude to architecture; however, Hitler himself believed that form follows function and wrote against "stupid imitations of the past".

Hitler commissioned Ferdinand Porsche[3] to design a "people's car" that was supposed to be affordable and accessible to all Germans, which resulted in the creation of the Volkswagen Beetle.

In Flossenbürg and elsewhere, the Schutzstaffel built forced-labor camps where prisoners of the Third Reich were forced to mine stone and make bricks, much of which went directly to Albert Speer for use in his rebuilding of Berlin and other projects in Germany.

[5] Hitler was fascinated by the Roman empire and its architecture, which he imitated with a stripped-down style called "starved neo-Classicism."

[7] The crowning achievement of this movement was to be Welthauptstadt Germania, the projected renewal of the German capital Berlin following the Nazis' presumed victory of World War II.

The plan's core features included the creation of a great neoclassical city based on an east–west axis with the Berlin Victory Column at its centre.

Major Nazi buildings like the Reichstag or the Große Halle (never built) would adjoin wide boulevards.

[9][10] Three pairs of concrete flak towers were constructed between 1942 and 1944; one of them is known as Haus des Meeres, another one, Contemporary Art Depot (currently closed).

[12] The Nazis constructed many apartments, 100,000 of them in Berlin alone, mostly as housing estates e.g. in Grüne Stadt (Green Town) in Prenzlauer Berg.

The Nazis associated modern art with democracy and pacifism and labeled it "degenerate" due to supposed Jewish and communist influences.

The aim of the exhibition was to encourage a negative reaction and portray it as a symptom of an evil plot against the German people.