Standing on Hitler's Grandstand

...Nearby, the 1.2 mile great road, where soldiers once paraded in close formation, is used as a parking lot...

...But Hitler's podium remains the centerpiece, and it drew me like a magnet...

...Only the grandstand was fully completed...

...The blank stone facade, cracked and stained by water, looms starkly above a lumpy field and an asphalted parking area...

...Hitler would stand on a lofty podium amid flaring torches and powerful spotlights, bathed in the adulation of ecstatic crowds raising their arms in the Nazi salute to thundering drum rolls...

...We will focus on Nuremberg and its part of the story," he said, "but it will also be essential to tell people the consequences of the process...

...Photographs and newsreels of the frenzied occasions, epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl's documentary film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will, have etched themselves into our consciousness as among the most disturbing pictures of the early Nazi years...

...These "windows," he explained, would include interactive links to other museums, inside and outside Germany, as well as possible cooperation with a new Jewish museum under construction in Fuerth, on the opposite side of the Rhine...

...It was here that Hitler, in 1934, ordered Albert Speer to oversee the construction of an awesome complex that would express Nazi ideology in stone...

...There he pointed out where the rain comes in...

...We sought out a table in a quiet corner of the room so we could talk...

...We are a little ashamed of it—that's one reason why we need to replace it," he continued...

...I had no idea Hitler's grandstand, or anything else associated with the rallies, still existed...

...Sonnenberger wants to locate the new museum in the congress hall...

...The immense colonnaded grandstand, draped with swastika banners and topped by an enormous swastika insignia, formed a monumental backdrop...

...The grandstand was used for concerts and even religious revivals—I remember Billy Graham preaching there when I was a child...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber, a past NL contributor, is working on a book about Jewish culture without the Jews in Europe...

...What remained of the complex was finally put under protection as a historic monument in 1973...

...In the decades following the War the site was initially treated with embarrassment and, seemingly, amnesia by a city that preferred to focus on more comfortable aspects of its existence...

...That, of course, is a question that has haunted Germany...

...There was no discussion of the Nazi past...

...Yet so powerful and familiar are my lifelong mental images that it was almost a shock to come across the enormous structure standing not far from the prosaic bustle of today's modern city...

...Purin wanted to take me to a typical Gasthaus where we could get local beer and sausages...

...It showed a column of helmeted Nazi troops, wide as a river, marching in close formation right through the medieval gate outside...

...In addition to the grandstand, the complex was to include a stadium that would seat more than 400,000 people, a congress hall that would seat 50,000, and several massive parade grounds and camps...

...For us it is essential to make clear how this process of transformation took place...

...At present the partially completed congress hall, a U-shaped building modeled on the Roman Colosseum but much larger, stands not far from the grandstand, alongside a lake...

...The atmosphere, wrote the French ambassador at the time, was "amazing and indescribable," a "peculiar state of euphoria in which hundreds of thousands of men and women are gripped by the romantic excitement, the mystic ecstasy, a kind of holy mania they have become slaves to...

...Close columns of troops goose-stepped below...

...We have to find out how the Nazis got people to do things which, as we know, were horrible...

...In the town itself, more soldiers paraded through the ancient streets...

...In the late '70s and early '80s debate over the use and function of the buildings became part of the new questioning and examining of the Nazi era by younger Germans...

...A key component of the Nazi propaganda machine, the rallies drew hundreds of thousands of people each year to ritualistic celebrations of the Hitler cult...

...As we sat down, I noticed a dim, framed photograph hanging on the wall behind me...

...The opening of the Fascination and Violence exhibition in 1985 was part of this reassessment...

...We want to create an exhibition that gives insights into the machinery of motivation, so we can study and analyze how the Nazis brought people to the point where they acted not as individuals but as small parts of a mass...

...its towers and massive colonnade were demolished in the 1960s...

...It was cold as he walked me through the various rooms, showing me the exhibits that detailed Nuremberg's particular involvement in the history of the Reich: the rallies, the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, the activities of local Nazi leader Julius Streicher and his anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, the postwar Nuremberg Trials that punished the Nazi leadership...

...Various structures were pulled down, and a new housing development was built on one part of the grounds...

...The history of the rally grounds since the end of the War is an illustration of the ambivalent responses to it...

...I stood gingerly behind a metal railing on the spot where he had stood, and looked out over parked cars to the field where the troops once marched and the crowds once went wild...

...We ended up in one, a dark, wood-paneled establishment in the old section of town, right across the street from the Albrecht Dürer house and one of the gates to the city...

...Dietzfelbinger, a historian who works for the Nuremberg Municipal Museums, was taking me on a tour of one of the most potent and enduring icons of the Third Reich—the so-called Zeppelin Grandstand where Hitler stood spotlighted in glory during the annual Nazi Party rallies from 1933 to 193 8. Those week-long events were held every September at the huge, specially built grounds to the south of the city called Reichsparteitagsgelände...

...Hitler's grandstand and other dramatic buildings were calculated to intimidate the individual and signal the need for unquestioning submission to the state...

...Scarcely signposted, it was nonetheless perfectly recognizable as Dietzfelbinger and I drove up in a cab: an architectural symbol as forceful in its way as the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at Auschwitz...

...The day after my visit to the grandstand, I went to lunch with the director of the Jewish Museum, Bernhard Purin, who was in Nuremberg...

...Concentration camp prisoners carried out much of the labor...

...Windows will open to tell the bigger story—how Germany went to war, the Holocaust...

...I shivered and felt slightly sick for a moment...

...It was a wave of emotion, a sense of acute physical discomfort, very similar to what I have felt on the half dozen occasions I've visited Auschwitz...

...10 years ago there was an abortive attempt to turn it into a shopping center...

...It is used as office and warehouse space...

...Today, as Nuremberg heads toward its 950th anniversary celebration in the year 2000, city officials are grappling with the future of the rally grounds...

...Dietzfelbinger is one of the organizers of Fascination and Violence, a small, rather makeshift display of photographs and text panels set up on a shoestring budget inside the grandstand in 1985 to document the Nazis' rise to power...

...On one of the walls behind the podium there were graffiti: a swastika and the words, "Those who forget their past are condemned to repeat it...

...For years the Nazi history of the place was a blank spot," Dietzfelbinger observed...

...The present exhibition is very limited and hard to find," Municipal Museums Director Franz Sonnenberger told me over coffee in his office...

...The Municipal Museums Department, administrator of the site, has drawn up a detailed plan for integrating the remaining structures and grounds into a new state-of-the-art museum and educational center that will replace Fascination and Violence...

...He opened the building—usually closed in winter for lack of heat—and led me into an imposing hall with a mosaic ceiling, the "Hall of Honor," used as a reception area for high-ranking guests...

...Weeds grow out of the crevices now, and the stone bleachers around the field— named Zeppelin Field because Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin landed an airship here in 1909—are similarly overgrown with shrubs...

...The grounds originally occupied a stretch of land considerably larger than downtown Nuremberg itself...

...Only the grandstand's central section remains...

...The Nazis claimed they would build for 1,000 years, but they couldn't even put something up for 50 years without the roof leaking...