Glorified Berlin

Large building models, elaborate city maps, complicated street plans, fill a few small rooms of Berlin's Reich Chancellery. In these rooms a young architect-engineer and a middle-aged ruler frequently stay up until 4 a. m. discussing changes, poring over designs. The two conferees are 33-year-old Professor Albert Speer and Chancellor Adolf Hitler. They determine in these all-night conferences the details of mystic, dreamy Adolf Hitler's pet building project--the reconstruction of Berlin, the remaking of a not-too-beautiful city into a worthy, magnificent capital of Greater Germany.

Last week, Fuehrer Hitler inaugurated Berlin's gigantic face-lifting by laying the cornerstone of a House of German Tourist Traffic in Potsdamerstrasse. At the same time work started in 15 other Berlin spots--jobs that will eventually cost an estimated 25,000,000,000 marks ($625,000,000), that will take 25 years to complete. Determined to make Germany the world's premier tourist attraction and the centre of European culture, Fuhrer Hitler declared that under his reconstruction plan the city was being rebuilt for 300 years to come, that traffic problems would be solved through the year 2500.

By last week the main outlines of the Fuehrer's and professor's plans had been divulged. One of Europe's newest capitals, Berlin's history even as an insignificant village dates back only 700 years as compared to London's 2,000, Paris' 2,050 years. Development of Berlin began seriously only with the Great Elector of Brandenburg, who before his death in 1688 had raised the city's population from 8,000 to 20,000 mainly by offering asylum to political and religious refugees. In the early 18th Century, Soldier-King Friedrich Wilhelm I put heart and soul into making Berlin a fitting capital of Prussia, but not until after the victorious war with France in 1871--when Bismarck founded the Second Reich, had King Wilhelm I proclaimed Emperor at Versailles--did Berlin assume world importance. Her population is now 4,250,000.

With her short history, her few landmarks, Berlin gave Herr Hitler ample room and freedom to develop his project. As a working model, he followed in broad, but greatly augmented outline, plans drawn up for and approved by Kaiser Wilhelm II shortly before the World War.

Main characteristics of the plan are the creation of two wide axes cutting Berlin into four parts, a series of four concentric rings of boulevards around the axes' intersection. The 30-mile East-West axis will run from the Lustgarten, connecting Unter den Linden, Charlottenburger Chaussee, the Heerstrasse. Crossing the East-West axis in the Tiergarten will be the North-South axis, which will run for 24 miles from suburban Wedding, past the old Lehrter station and the Reichstag, to the west of the famed Brandenburg Tor, over the Potsdam Bridge, out toward Schoeneberg. The four circular boulevards --whose radii from the Tiergarten intersection will be respectively two, four, six and eight miles--will follow streets largely in existence now.

Greatest job will be the North-South axis. Almost no existing thoroughfare will be followed here. Four main railway stations--Potsdamer and Anhalter for trains to South Germany, Stettiner and Lehrter for North Germany--will be torn down. Two new stations, one at each end of the North-South axis, will take their place. Berlin's university, now in the city's heart --will be moved out near the Olympic Field, where the first faculty to be established will be a College for the Scientific Study of War. The great Tempelhof Airport is being expanded to three times its present area, will become the finest in Europe. The River Spree will be widened and deepened, its great bend at the Reichstag straightened.

Whole blocks of houses are to be razed, new underground railways, ministries, libraries, hospitals, theatres, postoffices will be erected. The Berlin Zoo will be moved westward. A part of the "Tiergarten Quarter" will be set aside for embassies, legations, consulates. Near the eastern edge of the Tiergarten will rise a new Government quarter, the crowning glory of which is to be a gigantic meeting hall at the Koenigsplatz, Berlin's greatest square. Around that hall, facing the Reichstag, 1,000,000 persons will be able to assemble in future Nazi demonstrations.

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