Volkshalle

The Volkshalle, also called Große Halle or Ruhmeshalle, was a huge domed monumental building planned by Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer for Germania in Berlin. The project was never realized.The word Volk had a particular resonance in Nazi thinking. The term völkisch movement, which can be translated to English as "the people's movement" or "the folkish movement", derives from Volk but also implies a particularly racial undertone. Before the First World War, völkisch thought had developed an attitude to the arts as the German Volk; that is, from an organically linked Aryan or Nordic community, racially unpolluted and with its roots in the German soil of the Heimat .Hitler and Hadrian's PantheonJust as Augustus's house on the Palatine was connected to the temple of Apollo, so Hitler's palace was to have been connected by a cryptoporticus to the Volkshalle, which filled the entire north side of the forum. This truly enormous building was, according to Albert Speer, inspired by Hadrian's Pantheon, which Hitler visited privately on May 7, 1938. But Hitler's interest in and admiration for the Pantheon predated this visit, since his sketch of the Volkshalle dates from about 1925. Hermann Giesler records a conversation he had with Hitler in the winter of 1939/40, when Hitler was recalling his “Roman Impressions” (Römische Impressionen):