110 - Otto in Ireland v: Seed Capital

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Albert Speer, Inside The Third Reich. Quote, in normal circumstances, people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them. In The Third Reich, there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirming picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim world outside. In those mirrors, I could see nothing but my own face, reproduced many times over.

So I'm going to tell you about one of the biggest bank heists in history. Some people say it's the biggest of all time, but first we need to talk about architecture.

Nazi architecture. You can find surviving examples of it all over Germany, especially in Berlin and Munich and Nuremberg. And most of it was designed in what you can think of as the intimidation style. And you find the same adjectives used to describe almost all of them when you read around. Blunt, monumental, looming, strict, austere, rigid, hierarchical, foreboding, you know. Hitler supervised the construction of Nazi buildings focused on posterity, right? He wasn't just thinking in decades, he was thinking in centuries and millennia. And he told Albert Speer, one of his favorite architects, that each building should be designed in such a way that they would have an inbuilt ruin value. They didn't have to be aesthetically beautiful in the here and now, at least not traditionally. But they had to crumble away in an aesthetically beautiful manner. And he was thinking here of ancient Rome and ancient Greece and how beautifully their architecture had fallen apart over thousands of years. And they even had a term for the vibe that Hitler was going for, starved neo-classicalism. See, he was envious of the way that Mussolini could galvanize his supporters just by pointing towards the Colosseum, or the Pantheon, or the Forum, and immediately connect his rule to a glorious and triumphant past. In Hitler's imagination, Aryans a thousand years in the future going about their day-to-day lives in the Nazi utopia of 2938 would be able to do the same whenever they were looking for inspiration.

Obviously, that never happened. And you can find Nazi ruins a plenty in Germany, but none of them are especially pretty. Some of the buildings designed by guys like Speer, and Trost, and Geisler, and so on, were eventually repurposed and they remain in use right up to today. The Tempelhof Airport, which was reconstructed by the Nazis in the 1930s. Well, that was closed in 2008, but now it's a public park and event space. Plenty of Wehrmacht's barracks were taken over as outposts for NATO, which, you know. And one of Albert Speer's own designs, which was a power station next to the site of an old Nuremberg rally spot, that has now become a Burger King, which is absolutely perfect. The air ministry building, which was once the largest office in Europe, well, that's now home to the German finance ministry. And part of the Werder market house is occupied by the German foreign office today. Once upon a time, this was the headquarters of the Reichsbank.

Hitler personally overruled the committee that awarded the commission to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. I think I'm saying that right. And instead, he gave it to Heinrich Wolff. The reason he did this, Hitler, is because he had ideological differences with Ludwig owing to the fact that he was of the Bauhaus school. Now, the finished building, the Reichsbank, it occupied an entire city block with an exterior clad primarily in light limestone with granite at the lower levels. It was monumental, but restrained. It avoided excessive ornamentation. And the strong symmetry and repetitive window bays created this impression of bureaucratic order. And its massive rusticated base suggested impregnability. And there were these large bronze entrance doors that reinforced ideas of security and authority. And the internal corridors were wide and incredibly rationalized for administrative efficiency.

And as the Nazis rampaged around Europe, the massive vault in the basement began to fill up with stolen bullion, currency, precious stones, artwork, and whatever else the Germans could grab and funnel back to Berlin.

By the 3rd of February, 1945, the vault held about $3.5 billion in today's money. That day, about 1,000 planes from the US 8th Air Force launched a saturation bombing attack on Berlin that triggered a four-day firestorm and leveled downtown. The Reichsbank was hit 21 times and its vault was left badly exposed. The Nazis decided to begin moving as much loot as they could before the fire or the Americans got to it first. Wagon loads of gold and money were moved all over Germany and Austria and buried deep below ground in mines and bomb shelters. 100 tons of gold were hidden in the Merckers potassium mine alone. Other loads were sent to the Alps. This effectively created a kind of contingency fund for the Nazis. The thinking may have been that all this bread could be used to finance a behind-the-lines insurgency as it became increasingly obvious that Germany was about to fall. The Germans continued clearing out the vault as the Soviets advanced on Berlin and by April, they'd hidden almost 3 billion in paper money in the Bavarian mountains. And with the Red Army at the gates, the SS High Command chose Colonel Josef Spezl to put together what amounted to a heist crew to empty out whatever remained in the Reichsbank before the Soviets took the city. Spezl had remained in Berlin to coordinate the last desperate defences of the dream, and he was supposed to have been glad to be of service one more time before it all turned to shit.