He did not come, but in October 1942 he was the great protagonist of Franco's Barcelona. At the age of 37, he had been in the Armament and Production portfolio in Adolf Hitler's cabinet for eight months. Joining the Nazi Party in 1931, just two years later he had already captivated the failed artist who was the Fürher and his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.
The designs of the Camp Zeppelin —the complex to host large parades in Nuremberg immortalized by Leni Riefensthal in The Triumph of the Will— or the Reich Chancellery led an impressed Hitler to commission him to redefine the urban planning of Berlin to erect it in Welthauptstadt Germania, the capital of Europe. By the end of the 1930s, he was already part of the inner circle of the Nazi chancellor and was considered "the first architect" of the Third Reich.
At the beginning of the Second World War, as the minister in charge of war production, he exploited the war industry in his favor and, with falsified statistics and thanks to the exploitation of thousands of forced workers, presented himself as the person responsible for the German arms miracle. . Yes, Albert Speer was on everyone's lips. For the Francoist hierarchs, hosting the Exhibition of Modern German Architecture directed by him was a blessing.
The Nazi presence in Catalonia, however, as Heinrich Himmler's visit two years earlier had made clear and as historians Mireia Capdevila and Francesc Vilanova documented in the profusely illustrated volume Nazis a Barcelona (2017), was not exceptional. On this occasion, the exhibition was not intended to make Berlin or Germany known, but rather to act as a metaphor for what the new urban Europe had to be. In May 1942, Franco had hosted the exhibition in Madrid, striving to equate his regime with Nazism.
In Barcelona, the day before its inauguration, on October 19, a select group of journalists and local authorities passed under the three giant swastikas that adorned the façade of the building that until January 1939 housed the Parliament of Catalonia. The doors of the hemicycle where Lluís Companys, Joan Comorera or Pau Romeva were debating had been sealed and boarded up. The spaces on the ground floor had been converted into exhibition halls of the Palau de Arte Moderno de la Ciutadella.
The secretary of the Provincial Press Office, Bernabé Oliva, the president of the Press Association, Diego Ramírez Pastor, and representatives of news agencies and newspaper directors were able to see models of buildings representative of National Socialism, such as the Plaza Real de Munich, the Reich Chancellery, the city Herman Goering, the Camp Zeppelin, the Nuremberg Conference Center or the great Round Square in Berlin. Also the Germanía project which, according to ABC, “causes extraordinary admiration”.
The Franco regime had a special interest in the presence of journalists because, as Francesc Vilanova expressed in the article Under the sign of the swastika in the academic journal Diacronie (2014), “they acted as organic intellectuals and were the first line of cultural and ideological combat ”. It was not just about informing, but about transferring its deep meaning to the population.
As shown in the review of the Falangist art critic and curator of the Defense of National Artistic Heritage, Luis Monreal Tejada. The exhibition "in these moments of struggle in defense of a millenary Civilization, constitutes a symbol and a reality", he reviewed in National Solidarity. “The Hitlerian Neoclassical is of maximum sobriety. It can be said that it has a philosophical rigor in the simple composition of lines and masses. Sometimes reliefs or statues animate the architectural complex. But this is always the one that prevails and triumphs as a symbol of the constructive thought of the captains of the new Europe”.
The following day, October 20, they made an appearance at the inauguration of the captain general of the IV region, Alfredo Kindelán; the civil governor and provincial head of the Movement, Antonio de Correa; the military governor, General Fernando Moreno Calderón; the accidental mayor of Barcelona and veteran member of the extreme monarchist right, Aurelio Joaniquet, and the highest representatives of political, military and police power, as well as the new academic and intellectual establishment. The cream of the crop in Barcelona.
Acting as hosts, they were accompanied by the German ambassador to Spain, Eberhard von Stohrer; Bern Hettlage, who represented Speer; the consul general of Germany, Rolf Jaeger; and the leaders of the Nazi Party in Barcelona and in Spain. “The confluence of Falangist and Nazi officers, Spanish and German political and military leaders and officials, revealed the image of false Spanish neutrality in the framework of the Second World War”, says Vilanova.
In his speech, Hettlage stressed the importance of architecture "as the most immediate and lasting manifestation of a nation's history" because a building "often offers more indications of the events of an entire century than a million printed documents." While the Nazi exhibition intended to fascinate Europe with its urban and architectural projects, Joaniquet, unable to gain muscle in this field, forgot the exhibition and presented the Civil War as a precursor to the universal struggle against communism.
Architecture and urbanism were one of the main legs of the new order projected by Nazism. Hitler presented himself as a great builder at all levels. Speer, from his position as inspector general of buildings in Berlin, just before becoming a minister, helped him to specify what his lack of training and talent prevented him from doing. Destruction, through the production of weapons, and construction or remodeling, through architecture, were thus synthesized in the same figure. It was destroyed to build.
The journalist Manuel Brunet had been able to see it. One year earlier, in Destino, he had asked a rhetorical question. “Isn't it a paradox that the two greatest promoters that architecture has had in our time, Hitler and Mussolini, should use this weapon [aviation] against architecture? Do not doubt that these two men are horrified by the destructive action of the bombing planes. To suppose that each of these two men embodies a genius of destruction would be grotesque. Both have created or promoted the construction of great monuments”.
The exhibition was accompanied by a German-Spanish bilingual book, The New German Architecture, prepared by Speer and very well illustrated to bring together the architectural and urban developments since Hitler had acceded to the chancellorship, in 1933. The architect's collaborator, Rudolf Wolters, made the intention clear in the prologue. “The aims that are pursued are order and clarity. He goes to work radically. For now, it's not about the style, about the form. It is, rather, the fundamental thing: the new architectural art must emanate from the new life. The cities and the landscape take on a special meaning within the whole”.
Until November 4, according to the regime, 30,000 visitors passed through the Ciutadella, from high school and university students to members of the Youth Front, soldiers and ordinary citizens. Local regime intellectuals spared no praise. One of the reference architects of Barcelona's Franco regime, Buenaventura Bassegoda, stated that the exhibition manifested an "architectural miracle" product of the triumph of the "national revolution" led by Hitler. Albert Speer triumphed in Franco's Barcelona without setting foot. Three years later he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials. During the twenty years he spent in prison he had much time to think about his achievements. Upon leaving it in 1966 he noted how his architectural legacy had almost disappeared. The historian Martin Kitchen in L' arquitecte de Hitler (2017) denied the profile of a technocrat that had been fabricated and his ignorance of the Reich's war crimes. In 1942, however, he was a shining star in the totalitarian dream of Francoism.
