Adolf Hitler made a quick three-hour surprise visit to Nazi-occupied Paris on June 23, 1940, shortly after France signed an armistice. Accompanied by architect Albert Speer, sculptor Arno Breker, and architect Hermann Giesler, he toured landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Napoleon’s tomb, calling it the “greatest and finest moment of my life”.
Arno Breker was a German sculptor who is best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, where he was endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art. He was made official state sculptor and exempted from military service. One of his better known statues is Die Partei, representing the spirit of the Nazi Party, which flanked one side of the carriage entrance to Albert Speer’s new Reich Chancellery. Ninety percent of Breker’s public works were destroyed during the bombings of Germany toward the end of the war.
Arno Breker’s sculpting career flourished after WWII. Breker was offered a commission by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but Arno refused, saying “One dictatorship is sufficient for me”. He continued to receive commissions for sculptures, producing a number of works in his familiar classical style, working for businesses and individual patrons. He also produced many portrait busts.
Albert Speer was a German architect who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct structures, including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg.
In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. Speer became a close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and served 20 years in prison.
After the war, Speer was among the 24 major war criminal defendants charged by the International Military Tribunal for Nazi atrocities. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor, narrowly avoiding a death sentence. Having served his full term, Speer was released in 1966. Speer was intimately aware of and involved in the Final Solution, evidence of which has been conclusively shown in the decades following the Nuremberg trials.
Kristallnacht accelerated Speer’s ongoing efforts to dispossess Berlin’s Jews from their homes. From 1939 on, Speer’s Department used the Nuremberg Laws to evict Jewish tenants of non-Jewish landlords in Berlin, to make way for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. Eventually, 75,000 Jews were displaced by these measures. Speer denied he knew they were being put on Holocaust trains and claimed that those displaced were, “Completely free and their families were still in their apartments”. He also said: ” … en route to my ministry on the city highway, I could see … crowds of people on the platform of nearby Nikolassee Railroad Station. I knew that these must be Berlin Jews who were being evacuated. I am sure that an oppressive feeling struck me as I drove past. I presumably had a sense of somber events.” Matthias Schmidt said Speer had personally inspected concentration camps and described his comments as an “outright farce”. Martin Kitchen described Speer’s often repeated line that he knew nothing of the “dreadful things” as hollow—not only was he fully aware of the fate of the Jews, he actively participated in their persecution.
Also with Hitler on this day was architect Hermann Giesler and a few Military officers. Giesler was entrusted by Hitler with the reorganization of the entire city of Linz. Beginning from 1942, he worked on plans and a large model for the Danube Development of the Banks. In August 1943, Giesler was appointed as a deputy to the Reichstag for electoral constituency. Starting from 1944, he also worked on designs for the cultural center, which Hitler regarded with particular interest.
In 1945, Giesler initially was arrested by the U.S. military and interned as a Nazi, and charged in 1946. In 1947, he was indicted by a U.S. military court for war crimes in the concentration camp Mühldorf, a subcamp of Dachau. Giesler was sentenced to life imprisonment, but on May 6, 1948 his sentence was reduced to 25 years imprisonment. On July 7, 1951, it was lowered once again to twelve years. Giesler was freed on October 18, 1952.