After this state visit, Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg again and turned his attention to putting into action his idea of “Lebensraum”[9] in the east and his specific battle plans against Czechoslovakia. He gave the orders for war to Ribbentrop, Göring, and the highest generals of the army and their adjutants in Berlin, on May 28, 1938, and thereby caused the destruction of the European order that had been established in the Peace of Paris treaties of 1919. Hitler’s path to war, and his statement that it was his “unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia disappear from the map,” met with no fundamental objections.260
While Hitler was personally pushing ahead to war in the summer of 1938, drawing up operational plans and busying himself with the details of the Siegfried Line (a defensive structure 390 miles long on the western border of the Reich), he was simultaneously relieving his mental strain by fantasizing about retreating into private life. Linz, the capital of the state of Upper Austria—the city he envisioned as a European art capital, “a kind of German Rome,” and which he styled as his “hometown” even though he had spent only two years of his youth there—was where he planned to retire after achieving all of his political goals.261 Linz’s renovation, including a giant industrial and port district, was planned to last until 1950, and Hitler wanted to spend his twilight years there and eventually be buried there. Speer recalls that the construction of a residence “on a height,” with a view over the city, was planned. Even before the war, Hitler had occasionally described his imagined farewell from politics to the assembled company at table on the Obersalzberg, for example by saying: “Aside from Fräulein Braun, I’ll take no one with me. Fräulein Braun and my dog. I’ll be lonely. For why should anyone voluntarily stay with me for any length of time? Nobody will take notice of me anymore. They’ll all go running after my successor!”262
At the high point of his power, in other words, Hitler began to think about taking his leave of politics. The reason for such reflections may have been his health problems, but possibly also, in secret, the fear that his military ambitions would fail. Speer thought such talk might have been an attempt to call forth the loyalty of his colleagues in the large group, but this latter speculation is doubtful. The extensive plans for Linz were a sensitive subject for Speer in any case, since, as he told Joachim Fest in the autumn of 1974, he had not been asked for advice about them despite having offered his “cooperation.”263 It was primarily other architects who drew up the plans, even if it remained Speer’s responsibility to authorize the plans in consultation with Hitler.
Thus the Linz city planning office under the Austrian architect Anton Estermann, which had submitted a design plan, became the central planning site for the project in July 1938. Then, in March 1939, came Roderich Fick, a professor at the Munich Technical College whom Hitler named “Reich Construction Adviser for the Redesigning of the City of Linz.” Fick had already designed several buildings on the Obersalzberg, including Villa Bormann and the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf. On May 9, not long after being appointed, Fick presented a model of Linz on the Berghof terrace, in Speer’s presence.264
Around fall 1940, Hitler appointed the architect Hermann Giesler to assist Fick. Giesler, the “Master Builder of the Capital City of the Movement,” came from an architect’s family in Siegen; his brother, Paul, rose in the NSDAP to be the Gauleiter of Munich–Upper Bavaria, while he himself was also a member of the Party and attended Hitler’s dinner parties in Munich. Until his death in 1987, Hermann Giesler would remain an avowed supporter of Hitler.265
It is thus no wonder that Giesler managed, in the end, to win the unavoidable power struggle between himself and Fick, in which August Eigruber, the Gauleiter of Oberdonau Linz, played a role as well. Until the end of the war, all the monumental construction plans of what was now called the “Führer Capital” of Linz, including the “Danube Riverbank Development” and Hitler’s house on the Freinberg, were assigned to Giesler. The residence, sited on a “rocky plateau above the Danube,” was designed in the “strictly cubicform structure typical of the Austrian country house—the Vierkanthof, built around a square courtyard.” According to Giesler’s apologia, Hitler apparently compared it to Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen’s mystical Castel del Monte in southeast Italy.266 In fact, the Castel del Monte, built in the thirteenth-century and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, is similarly situated on a small hill and is not only a symbol of power but also, due to its eight-sided ground plan with eight octagonal towers at the corners, a symbol of eternity. Friedrich II designed the “Hohenstaufen Acropolis” himself, immortalizing himself as architect and city founder. He used architecture as a way to recuperate from politics and his numerous military campaigns; wherever he stayed, his master builder was required to report to him.267
The National Socialists had projected themselves onto Friedrich II’s life and works for a long time and in many ways. They used the legendary emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a legitimating figure for their own “Third Empire” by reinterpreting him as a German hero and manufacturing a historical connection with his “First Empire,” which in fact never existed. Hitler also sought out personal points of connection with Friedrich II and cast himself as a renewer of the Empire along the same lines as his historical forebearer. For example, in 1942 he had Oskar Hugo Gugg—a professor of landscape painting in Weimar and friend of Paul Schultze-Naumberg, the architect working with Hitler—execute an oil painting of Castel del Monte for the planned residence in Linz. The previous year in Rome, at Ribbentrop’s instigation, a model of the Friedrich’s building was made and given to Hitler in Berlin in late 1941.268 This fantasy of a link between his place of retirement and the “castle of castles” of the Hohenstaufer emperor suggests the role that “Linz” played in Hitler’s imagination and how he saw himself there. Courtly ceremonies, such as those that took place during the state visit in Italy, always called forth feelings of inferiority in him, and now he dreamed of an old-European, princely existence for himself in the middle of the future economic and cultural center of the “Third Reich.”
During the next few years, Hermann Giesler traveled to the Berghof or to Hitler’s various other headquarters again and again to discuss blueprints and models of the project with him. Sometimes, according to Giesler, he stayed “for weeks.”269 In fall 1942, he even traveled to Hitler’s headquarters, which had temporarily shifted east. Named “Wehrwolf” (a pun on the German for “werewolf” and “Wehr,” meaning “defense”), the headquarters was near the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where he discussed “further details of his house” with Hitler. When he asked the Nazi leader for details about the “kitchen area” and the “garden,” Giesler recalled three decades later, Hitler told him that this was “Miss Braun’s affair”: he should discuss the matter “with her first,” since she would be “lady of the house.” Once he had “installed his successor and stepped down,” Giesler reported, Hitler was planning to “marry Miss Braun.”270
9
Literally, “living space.” This concept of Hitler’s was a major component in the Nazi ideology, referring to the German population’s need for land and raw materials and the availability of this land in the east after the Slavic peoples were killed or deported.