Chapter 25
The Third Reich: A New Rome?
A New Rome?
Though Hitler much admired the Greeks and their civilization, his veneration for the Roman Empire waxed far greater. The ancient Romans’ grandeur and imperial might deeply impressed Hitler, in particular their monumental architecture as witnessed by Rome’s Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Pantheon, and Hadrian’s tomb.
Perhaps there was more to Hitler’s reverence for the magnificence of Rome than its famed culture and architecture. Hitler vaunted his Reich as a thousand-year empire. Some three hundred years after the fall of the thousand-year Roman Empire, Charlemagne was selected and crowned by Pope Leo III as the successor of Roman Emperor Constantine VI. The “transfer of rule,” as it was named, implied jurisdiction of the “Holy Roman” Emperor Charlemagne over greater parts of Europe as the revival of the Western Roman Empire, with this time around Jesus Christ as its patron. Like its Roman predecessor, Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire lasted, in principle, a thousand years (800–1806), and according to Hitler’s concept, the Third Reich was to emulate the two preceding ones, both in might and in duration.
Antiquity’s Lessons
The ruins of two-thousand-year-old structures eventually gave rise to the term “ruin value,” coined by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer in a 1936 publication, Ruinenwert (The Value of Ruins).1 The basic concept was to showcase the greatness of a culture long after its decline. Hitler deplored the Roman Empire’s fall and stated, “The Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts . . . we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture.”2
Though it is commonly accepted that fascist movements are inclined to glorify the national past of the country in which they develop, fascist regimes occasionally attempt to resurrect an even older and more illustrious past, seeking their ideological foundations in ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is clearly discernible in the case of two of the most powerful and indisputably fascist regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.3
The legitimization of a dictatorial or fascist leadership was also a concern for Hitler’s Italian counterpart, known as Il Duce, who for propaganda purposes made use of ancient Rome as the historical foundation stone on which his regime could be built. The Duce (from the Latin dux, meaning “leader”) spawned a propaganda campaign of romanità (an admiration of ancient Rome’s culture and institutions) and made use of the designation “The Third Rome”—his era being touted as third to the ancient Roman Empire as well as to the Holy Roman Empire.
According to British historian Helen Roche, the similar trends toward classicism in Italy and Germany can be partially attributed to the difficulties faced in establishing stable national identities in both countries.4 These difficulties were caused by the fragmented nature of their geography and administration and the delayed process of unification. Italy, for instance, did not attain its full unification as a kingdom until 1870, while the German states only united as components of Otto von Bismarck’s German Empire in 1871. In both cases, the aftermath of World War I led to the downfall of their respective regimes, followed by the rise of a dictator in each country amid the chaos.
Roche maintains that, once fascism had gained power in Italy, the glorification of ancient Rome was part and parcel of Mussolini’s rhetoric. This exaltation of antique culture assumed many forms, from the declaration of Rome’s “birthday” as a national holiday (replacing the socialist May Day celebrations) to the pronouncement of a resurrection of the Roman Empire following Italy’s victorious colonial exploits in Ethiopia. As time passed, Mussolini’s persona was shaped into the majestic gravitas of a Roman emperor and the savior of Italy. In Tripoli he even posed on horseback, surrounded by Libyan lictors (magisterial attendants) in antique Roman costume and bearing fasces (Roman axe-shaped symbols of power).5
Augustus Caesar, later deified, was seen as an inspiration for Mussolini, who was often portrayed in propaganda images as a godlike figure rather than a mere mortal. Mussolini adopted what he believed were suitable “Roman” poses, such as jutting his chin forward and holding his back ramrod straight, in order to create an image of himself as a statuesque figure, much like Augustus.6
Il Duce’s plans included the architectural transformation of the city of Rome, a huge project that required gutting entire neighborhoods to better showcase ancient Roman monuments. Further efforts in fanning the flames of ancient Rome were seen in reintroducing Latin through schoolteachers, intellectuals, and academics as “the perfect expression of the new spirit of Italian Fascism.” Much pomp and ceremony were deployed in celebrating the Roman emperor’s bimillenary, which represented a resolute endeavor to conflate the Age of Augustus and the Age of Mussolini in the eyes of the public.7
Hitler rarely traveled abroad, but he made a point of seeing Rome in May 1938 on a six-day visit. According to cultural historian Frederic Spotts, Rome was, in fact, the only city that Hitler truly admired and felt challenged to outshine. Though Mussolini was eager to display Italy’s growing military might, Hitler only had eyes for the ancient sights: the Roman forum, the Circus Maximus, the Arch of Constantine, the Colosseum, and above all the Pantheon, which he considered to be the most perfect structure ever built. Hitler viewed these sites from the perspective of an architect, planning his own reproductions for Germany. Both the interior and exterior of the Pantheon would serve as examples for his Great Hall in Berlin, and Rome’s Colosseum would provide a blueprint for his Nuremberg Congress Hall.8
Models of Intimidation Architecture for the Reich
Hitler’s visit to Rome left him overwhelmed. In his speeches, a recurrent theme was the long-lasting splendor of the Reich’s future architecture. Hitler spoke of the “timeless significance,” the “eternal value,” and the “millennial legacy” of his projected structures. During the Russian campaign, he stated that “military battles are eventually forgotten. Our buildings, however, will stand. The Colosseum in Rome lasted over the ages.” Wishing to emulate, or exceed, the builders of antiquity, he vowed, “I want German buildings to be viewed in a thousand years as we view Greece and Rome.” Projecting the Reich’s capital as the standard-bearer of imperial greatness, he was set on transforming Berlin into the world’s most magnificent city. “As capital of the world,” he flaunted, “Berlin will be comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome!”9
For Hitler, in like measure to Mussolini, Roman history provided an ideal outline for procuring and eternalizing imperial dominion, an element that unquestionably exercised a significant influence on the Führer’s own self-perception, both as an architect and as a military commander in chief. In Hitler’s mind, Rome represented the perfect model for acquiring and securing the modern accoutrements and infrastructure of imperial power: untiring parading legions (SS), a straight and efficiently designed road network for commerce and military transport (autobahns), the colonization of Europe and Africa (the Third Reich’s same intentions), and above all monumental architecture on a scale that was deliberately intended to dwarf Mussolini’s “puny efforts.”10
To Hitler, however, who also harbored a deep admiration for ancient Greece, the National Socialist image of the Aryan man generally took the form of a young Greek Adonis, as exemplified in stone in the heroic neo-Greek nudes of Third Reich sculptors such as Arno Breker or Josef Thorak.11 This idealized demigod would reach its apogee by competing in a new Olympic Games, a direct tie between the glories of the ancient Greeks and present-day German “Aryan” athletes.
The Famous, but False, “Roman Salute”
Though many assume that the Roman salute—raising an outstretched right arm in deference and loyalty to superiors—was adopted as the National Socialist salute, the origin is incorrect. The salute used by both German National Socialists and Italian Fascists is, surprisingly, unknown in Roman literature and was never mentioned by ancient historians of Rome: no Roman work of art exhibits a salute of this kind. The only similar, but not exact, reproduction of such a gesture in Roman and other ancient cultures generally had a significantly different function and was never identical with the modernly disseminated straight-arm salute.12
The culprit for this misreading of Roman ritual can probably be attributed to the French artist Jacques-Louis David. Starting with The Oath of the Horatii (1784), an association of the now-recognizable gesture with Roman republican and imperial culture was born.13 The painting depicts Horatius’s three sons who swear on their swords, held by their father, that they will defend Rome to the death.14 However, the event depicted in David’s painting is his own creation,15 and during the French revolutionary period, David continued to produce paintings depicting this same gesture. In Mussolini’s Italy, the symbolic value of the gesture grew in popularity, and the salute was seen to demonstrate the Fascists’ “decisive spirit, firmness, seriousness, and acknowledgment and acceptance of the regime’s hierarchical structure.”16
Parallels
The models that characterize the Roman Empire are undisputedly mirrored in Hitler’s Third “Empire”: totalitarianism, quasi-deification of the leader, military conquests, detailed administrative structures, abhorrent racism, the enslavement of Jews and conquered peoples, the construction of straight long-distance roads, as well as the erection of monumental arenas for the entertainment of the masses and to pay tribute to the state’s leaders.
One fundamental difference between the two regimes is that, unlike the Third Reich, the Roman Empire did not engage in a policy of genocide but rather in the assimilation and romanization of conquered peoples. Was this one of the major factors that determined the Romans’ influence throughout Europe for over a millennium, whereas Hitler’s Third Reich collapsed after only twelve years of terror?
Notes
1. Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
2. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 94.
3. Helen Roche, “Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome,’ Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 8, no. 2 (2019): 127–52.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 322–24.
9. Ibid., 322.
10. Roche, “Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome.’”
11. Ibid.
12. Martin M. Winkler, The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 2.
13. Ibid., 55.
14. Thomas Crow, “Facing the Patriarch in Early Davidian Painting,” in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael Roth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 308.
15. Winkler, Roman Salute, 44.
16. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 110–13.