page_title: Paul Troost
section_title: Hitler
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Troost / Life / Hitler
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: München, Haus der Kunst
context_page_description: Paul Ludwig Troost, was a German architect. A favourite master builder of Adolf Hitler from 1930, his Neoclassical designs for the Führerbau and the Haus der Kunst in Munich influenced the style of Nazi architecture.
context_section_description: Troost and Hitler first met in 1930, through the agency of the Nazi publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife Elsa. Although, before 1933 he did not belong to the leading group of German architects, Troost became Hitler's foremost architect whose neo-classical style became for a time the official architecture of the Third Reich. His work filled Hitler with enthusiasm, and he planned and built state and municipal edifices throughout Germany.
  In the autumn of 1933, he was commissioned to rebuild and refurnish Hitler's dwellings in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Along with other architects like Ludwig Ruff, Troost planned and built State and municipal edifices throughout the country, including new administrative offices, social buildings for workers and bridges across the main highways. One of the many structures he planned before his death was the Haus der Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich, modeled on Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin and intended to be a great temple for a "true, eternal art of the German people". It was a good example of the imitation of classical forms in monumental public buildings during the Third Reich, though subsequently Hitler moved away from the more restrained style of Troost, reverting to the more elaborate imperial grandeur that he had admired in the 19th century Vienna Ring Road (Ringstraße) boulevard of his youth.
  Hitler's relationship to Troost was that of a pupil to an admired teacher. According to Albert Speer, who later became Hitler's favorite architect, the Führer would impatiently greet Troost with the words: "I can't wait, Herr Professor. Is there anything new? Let's see it!" Troost would then lay out his latest plans and sketches. Hitler frequently declared, according to Speer, that "he first learned what architecture was from Troost"'. The architect's death on 21 January 1934, after a severe illness, was a painful blow, but Hitler remained close to his widow Gerdy Troost, whose architectural taste frequently coincided with his own, which made her (in Speer's words) "a kind of arbiter of art in Munich." He was buried in the Munich Nordfriedhof (Northern Cemetery). The gravestone still survives although the family name has been removed.
  Hitler posthumously awarded Troost the German National Prize for Art and Science in 1937.
caption: Haus der Kunst in 2009
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