Victory Column Berlin: Albert Speer's East-West Axis and the Germania project

At the Platz des 18. März or 18th of March square, you can see the Germania project’s largest traffic measure: Albert Speer’s expansion of the east-west axis. The construction work involved reshaping the historic route from the city palace, across Unter den Linden, through Brandenburg Gate, into the Tiergarten park and on towards the district of Charlottenburg. What had been previously shaped by the imperial age, was now converted into a modern thoroughfare. An example is the section in front of us, heading towards Ernst-Reuter-Platz, which was completed between 1938/39. After being widened by 53 metres, the street had a more spacious, urban feeling and, also very importantly, now offered more room for mass parades.
The Victory Column, which you can see in the middle of Tiergarten park around 2 kilometres from where you are standing, served as a clearly visible landmark for the newly designed east-west axis. Adorned with captured cannons, it originally stood in front of the Reichstag building and commemorated the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Due to construction plans for the north-south axis, the National Socialists relocated it to the Großer Stern square. To make room, the diameter of the square, originally 80 metres, was expanded to 200. The Victory Column was made taller by a base as well as a fourth drum added beneath the gilded sculpture of Victoria. Since then, the goddess of victory, nicknamed Golden Lizzy by Berliners, peers down onto the street from a height of 67 metres. Statues of the first Reich Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, as well as the generals Moltke and Roon were erected next to it, turning the Großer Stern into a memorial for the lost empire. Four neo-classical pavilions allow access to the Victory Column through underground tunnels. It is almost ironic that these small buildings are the only remaining buildings in Berlin designed by Hitler’s General Building Inspector Albert Speer, who wished to recreate the city with a grand scale architectural vision like no other before him.