Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin

The first laws against Jewish rental rights attempted to separate Jews from dwellings that also housed "Aryans." As Raul Hilberg points out, the practical application of this policy was hardly possible before 1938 since, once evicted, there were few places available in the tight housing market for the displaced person to go. However, in 1938, the courts were extremely broad in their interpretation of tenant law, and those Jews who had the means chose to emigrate, thus allowing for some flexibility in evictions and the availability of replacement housing. Still, though the first eviction law was enacted on July 25, 1938, allowing landlords to end office lease arrangements with Jewish doctors, the year saw no major decree legislating the overall rights of Jews as tenants and property owners.(19)

During this period, when it served their pursuit of substitute housing, Speer and his staff took not only a supportive but also a leading role in formulating and enacting laws that deprived Jews of residential rights.(20) Even before the pogrom, many administrations attempted to serve their own interests by changing state policy concerning Jewish tenant rights. Speer and the GBI were at the forefront of these attempts to both justify and formulate regulations pertaining to Jewish tenants and landlords in Berlin. With the massive scale of the Berlin plans and Speer's authority through Hitler to carry out his project, GBI interests effectively intersected with those of others promoting anti-Jewish policy.

How the GBI planned to formulate and take advantage of anti-Semitic policy became clear in a meeting called by Speer's office on September 14, 1938, between representatives of the GBI and Berlin city officials (Stadtplanungsamt). Speer began by asking those in attendance what problems had been created by the lack of substitute housing for those displaced by rebuilding projects. The city administration suggested, for example, that new site-clearing dates needed to be set before construction could begin, as the earlier ones could not be met; this was conditionally approved by Speer. The site-clearing dates for the "most pressing spheres" along the north-south axis were postponed from October 1938 to January 1939. In addition, Speer stated that the area for the Great Hall, the northern focal point of the axis, could not be cleared before May 1939 specifically because of the need for large substitute dwellings.(21)

The next item on the agenda provided a solution for these administrative and temporal difficulties. In a proposal that must have originated in its planning significantly earlier than the date of the meeting, Speer suggested the new idea of displacing the Berlin Jews from their homes as a means of acquiring substitute housing. This proposal would not only allow for the pursuit of architectural plans but would also avoid any demand on the materially pressed prewar German building economy caused by a need to construct new replacement housing. The centrality of Speer's function as a creator of anti-Semitic policy in the interest of his architectural goals is evidenced in the text: