The Architecture of doom

Archival film, photographs and propaganda footage are co-mingled to present an essay on the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture and its relationship to the Reich's sinister political programs. Ironically, the leadership of the Third Reich was peopled with a number of failed artists, including Hitler himself, an unsuccessful painter who dreamt of becoming an architect. His obsession with Linz (his Austrian hometown), antiquity and the music of Wagner fueled his megalomaniac aim to create a more beautiful world through purity and sacrifice. Massive structures that would age into pleasing ruins and sentimental paintings and sculpture in the social realist genre were de rigueur during the Nazi regime. An exhibit of degenerate art excoriated the avant garde or modernist movement as symptomatic of mental illness and the defilements resulting from miscegnation. Hitler's self-invented myth of the body of the German Volk, a healthy, organic and invincible unity, would not admit any he considered defective. In this way, the Führer's twisted cultural ambitions were conjoined to scientific procedures to preserve the Aryan race. Euthanasia of the mentally and physically handicapped were a dark prelude to the genocidal Final Solution of the Jewish people.