Hitler's Chancellery

Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the most iconic building of the Third Reich. Hitler's New State Chancellery was designed by Albert Speer specifically to embody the power and arrogance of the new Nazi regime. The dimensions and decoration of its state apartments were devised to instill awe in the visitor, and it was intended to be the first working model for Germania - a whole new capital city for the Thousand-Year Reich. But this book is much more than a catalogue of concrete, glass and marble. It tells the extraordinary story of the Nazi state, for which the Chancellery provided the ceremonial headquarters and the stage for some of its most dramatic moments. Albert Speer deliberately designed Hitler's palace to have 'ruin appeal', foreseeing future centuries when it remains would make as great an impression on the visitor to Germania as the Coliseum in Rome. Instead, it was completely destroyed after barely ten years that today the tourist can locate its very site only with difficulty. Ronald Pawly's book carries the reader on a time-machine trip into a grim past, within living memory, but utterly erased from the physical record.