Nazi Party Rally Grounds

Until 1933, the land around the two Dutzendteich lakes was where Nuremberg went to relax. Swimming baths and a lakeside café appeared in the late nineteenth century, the Bavarian Jubilee Exhibition of 1906 filled the shore with pavilions to mark a century of Nuremberg belonging to Bavaria, and the city zoo opened its gates here in 1912. Next door, Luitpoldhain park was a popular place for political gatherings. In August 1923, around 50,000 people joined the Social Democrats there to pledge loyalty to the Weimar Constitution. The Nazi Party had already held rallies in Nuremberg in 1927 and 1929, and once in power it made the city a permanent stage. Nuremberg suited the purpose for several reasons. It sat near the middle of Germany, it had an enthusiastic local following, and it carried the prestige of the medieval imperial diets that the Nazis liked to present as the first German Reich. The city was named the City of the Party Rallies, an association representing the party, the state, Bavaria and the city was set up to run the project, and Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect, supplied the master plan for an area of roughly 16.5 square kilometres. What followed was less a park than a film set. Every September from 1933 to 1938, hundreds of thousands of party members and spectators filled the grounds for a week of marches, speeches and carefully lit evenings, all designed to dissolve the individual into the crowd. Cameras were part of the plan. Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will, turned the choreography into propaganda that travelled far beyond Franconia. The 1935 rally also brought the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship rights, and the city's name has been tied to that moment ever since. The buildings were meant to outlast the regime by thousands of years, and the plans grew accordingly: a Congress Hall for 50,000, a parade road, a field of towers, and a stadium for over 400,000 spectators. History cut in first. The outbreak of war in September 1939 cancelled that year's rally and stopped construction, leaving the Congress Hall without its roof and the stadium as little more than a pit in the ground. The area was used as a camp for prisoners of war and forced labourers until 1945. In April 1945, after fierce fighting, American troops took Nuremberg, whose medieval old town had been largely destroyed by air raids that winter. The rally grounds, by contrast, came through almost undamaged. The US Army held a victory parade at the Zeppelin Grandstand and blew up the giant swastika on top of it, an image that was filmed and shown around the world. Within months, the same city was chosen to host the Nuremberg Trials, partly for its symbolism. Nuremberg then had to decide what to do with a set of monuments nobody wanted. Some voices called for demolition, others for letting the stone crumble quietly, and for decades the grounds were used for sport, parking, motor racing and fairs while the question stayed open. A different approach took hold from the 1980s, when an exhibition inside the Zeppelin Grandstand began to tell the story honestly. It was formalised in 2001, when the Documentation Centre opened in the Congress Hall's north wing with a glass and steel spike driven right through the old masonry. The city had chosen to keep the ruins and explain them, rather than hide them. That decision shapes the place today. The same grounds that were built for obedience now host festivals, school visits and ordinary weekend life, and the information panels are as much a part of the landscape as the stone. On a summer afternoon, rowing boats drift across Dutzendteich in full view of the Congress Hall's curved flank.