Nazi Architecture

Nazi architecture was promoted across Germany and its occupied territories from 1933 to 1945, chiefly through Albert Speer, whom Hitler appointed in 1934 to oversee major building projects, alongside other architects including Paul Troost, Hermann Giesler, Werner March and Ernst Sagebiel. The style took three principal forms: Speer's stripped neoclassicism for state and party buildings, a vernacular idiom drawing on traditional rural and alpine building for housing and regional structures, and a plainer utilitarian approach for infrastructure. Its formal vocabulary of flat roofs, horizontal massing, uniformity and an absence of ornament was intended to convey simplicity, monumentality, solidity and permanence, drawing on ancient Greek and Roman precedent to project power, in deliberate contrast to the modernist functionalism of the Bauhaus movement, which the regime condemned.