Architecture of Doom

The Architecture of Doom provides both within two hours and presents Nazi documentary and propaganda films never before shown. The original film 1989 "Undergångens arkitektur" was made in Sweden by Peter Cohen and presents a history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Nazism from the perspective of art and design.

ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM opens with an overhead pan of the peaceful autumn forests over Linz, Austria, boyhood home of artist, designer and draftsman Adolf Hitler. The film shares with the viewer in pictures, music and words the early influences on that mind: in fact, Richard Wagner's music and writings are shown to have had the most profound effects on Hitler's development of the Nazi culture and its ethos. It is in Linz that the design for a new Germany with its Master Race evolved in the head of its designer. The narrator points out, virtually all leaders of Nazi Germany were failed artists, poets and writers. They organized the Nazi movement and promoted its central aesthetics for both the parade ground and museums. Then they recruited the entire German medical profession to aid them in perfecting the Aryan Race by weeding out for destruction those characterized as inferior.

Newly presented in ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM are the most complete collections of original drawings and paintings by Hitler, and documentary footage of his opening Nazi art shows where often he purchased most of the works. Hitler's 3 hour tour of the art museums of German occupied Paris is most interesting. Also shown are the early medical propaganda films seen in theaters all over Nazi Germany at the beginning of the 1940s. Their purpose was to prepare the German people for social cleansing of the "inferiors" in their midst. This Nazi project backfired because, as the narrator points out it made the people worry that soldiers wounded in battle would suffer a similar fate. The medical propaganda programs in public movie houses had to be discontinued. But the so-called euthenasia programs continued and grew.

Also novel in this film was presentation of Hitler's concept that the "other" pure race competing with the Aryan is the Jew. This explained why Hitler was willing to sacrifice his own soldiers in order to facilitate the Final Solution to the the Jewish Question. Faced with the virtual certainty by 1943 that Germany would lose its two front war, Hitler decided that exterminating the world's Jewry was a higher priority than winning battles. Indeed, he had a vision of Nazi Germany as the Phoenix that would rise out of the ashes of its World War II destruction. As ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM points out with archival examples, Hitler and Speer had designed many of their most ambitious public arenas and citadels for such inevitable destruction .... complete with drawings of weeds growing out of the rubble!

The Holocaust was part of Hitler's grand art and design. The viewer will come away from this film with horrified fascination and a better appreciation for what happens when artists and physicians collaborate to produce a Hell on Earth in the name of human progress!

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