Gone in three minutes:
Berlin's Deutschlandhalle in 1939
(Source: wiki)

IT WAS THE LARGEST multi-purpose hall of its kind when it opened in 1935 after just nine months of construction, but that was nothing out of the ordinary in the Berlin of those days. The capital was already home to one of the world’s largest stadiums and the world’s largest building of any kind, Tempelhof Airport, with greater things yet to come - or so people thought. But if there was ever an example of the law of unintended consequences in action, it was Berlin's Deutschlandhalle, which met its end today.

Inaugurated by Adolf Hitler personally on November 29 on the edge of the city’s trade fair grounds, the 117 meter long Deutschlandhalle seated up to 16,000 spectators. During the Olympic Games of 1936 it was the venue of the weightlifting and boxing competitions. It later saw use as a site for sporting and musical events along with political rallies. In 1938 star pilot Hanna Reitsch ascended to the hall’s ceiling in one of the world’s first helicopters – the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 prototype – in a choking cloud of dust during the spectacular “Ki sua heli” colonial revue of that year. Both the building, and the events it accommodated, symbolized the brave new world of excitement and progress the new regime promised to create.

 
Aviatrix Hanna Reitsch demonstrates the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61
helicopter in the Deutschlandhalle, February 1938

The building also witnessed tragedy: In 1940, high wire virtuoso Camilla Mayer plunged to her death during a circus performance when one of the support masts broke. An Allied bomb attack put an end to the Deutschlandhalle’s first incarnation in January, 1943.  

In 1957 it was reopened as the staging point for some of West Berlin’s most celebrated shows, gradually displacing the war-damaged Sportpalast as Berlin’s premier event venue. The Deutschlandhalle had a definite advantage over its older downtown rival. Even today, it is impossible to think of the Sportpalast, the scene of some of Hitler’s most spectacular appearances, without hearing Goebbels’ infamous words “Do you want total war?”, and the roaring response from the crowd, from 1943. The Sportpalast was finally torn down in 1973 and replaced with a housing project, taking most – but not all – of the echo with it. By contrast, the Deutschlandhalle, while nominally a “Nazi building,” had no such connotations. Over the next fifty years it would remain the central showcase of the West Berlin entertainment scene, a culture so far removed from that of the building's original planners as to be unrecognizable. “Holiday on Ice” regularly appeared here, as did circuses, a legendary boxing match pitting Mohammad Ali against German champion Georg Butzbach in 1979, and such musical acts as the Beatles, the Who, Abba, Queen, Tina Turner, Johnny Cash, and Jimi Hendrix.

 
Knowing me, knowing you...
ABBA takes the Deutschlandhalle by storm in 1977

Although it had been almost entirely rebuilt during the 1950s, the Deutschlandhalle was in desperate need of renovation by the 1990s. The building that Mayor Willy Brandt had called "the symbol of our divided city's will to live" at its rededication in 1957 was now a mere nuisance, the West Berlin equivalent of the East's doomed "Palace of the Republic." The Berlin government classified it as an historical monument in 1995, but investors started putting the screws on the city to tear it down and replace it either with a parking ramp or else an entirely new event structure. The city closed it in 1998.

It was reopened in 2001 for ice skating and other events but its doors were finally shut for good due to safety reasons in 2009. The city approved its demolition in November 2010. After all, the new Berlin has no shortage of event sites, and the vast 02 World arena that was opened in eastern Berlin in 2008 has long since assumed most of the Deutschlandhalle’s functions.

This morning at ten, a series of explosive charges brought the roof down in less than three minutes. The walls and foundations will be removed over the coming weeks and months.

 
End of an era.
The Deutschlandhalle was demolished on the morning
of December 3, 2011