Albert Speer and Walter Brugmann picnicking and drinking on their way to Toledo, Spain, 1941
Rudolf Wolters, Reise nach Lissabon, (Berlin, 1942), Lars Olof Larsson Collection, Kiel Albert Speer and Walter Brugmann picnicking and drinking on their way to Toledo, Spain, 1941

Bro culture is no joke. Letting boorish, reckless, and harassing behaviors run wild in corporate offices has cost CEOs like Uber’s Travis Kalanick their positions and harmed company reputations and profits. Even more damagingly, bro culture creates toxic workplaces for women and others. As controversies recently exposed by the #MeToo movement reveal, architecture has its own bro problem. Yet in the eyes of its adherents and in popular culture more broadly, bro culture is just a bit of innocent fun, simply “boys being boys.”

I had considered bro culture to be mainly a postwar phenomenon, with the red Solo cup and Animal House as its emblems. Then a research trip turned up a disturbing precedent.

Confronting this example is worthwhile because it brings home in a more visceral way the dangers of such behaviors. To be clear, this case study is extreme, occurring in a dystopian world far removed from our workplaces today. But when we recognize bro culture thriving in a context that reeks of evil, the sense of familiarity lands with a sickening thud.


In a private collection in Germany are three obscure books by architects who worked for Albert Speer during the Third Reich. These historical documents shed light on the culture of Speer’s architecture office in Berlin and the attitudes of Speer and his young male colleagues, who saw themselves as audacious builders of a new world. Written in the early 1940s, the books are travelogues to Western and Northern Europe. They chronicle trips that Speer and his team took in the service of spreading National Socialist architectural and planning principles, either by persuasion or force. The cavalier tone of the writing is telling, reflecting the culture of the most powerful architectural firm in Europe at the time.

In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as general building inspector (GBI) for the Reich Capital, giving the then-31-year-old architect authoritarian powers to transform Berlin into a capital worthy of a world empire. To staff his office, Speer recruited other young men, including his former architecture school classmates, for top positions that paid inflated salaries. Establishing a culture of youth was an intentional strategy on Speer’s part, meant to ward off the pompous staleness that he believed inevitably arrived with success and age. Joachim Fest, a German journalist who helped Speer compile his postwar memoirs, wrote that Speer had a rule that senior managers could be no more than 55 years old and deputies at most only 40. The young staff, known as “Speer’s boys,” enjoyed pranking their coworkers. Speer contributed to the teasing, writing captions for caricatures of employees affixed to the office bulletin board.

Speer’s GBI office did not operate as a typical architecture and planning organization. Its budget was essentially limitless. Speer was accountable only to Hitler, meaning that he faced few legal or bureaucratic restrictions. He also had tens of thousands of workers at his disposal, including Jewish forced laborers and prisoners of war. When he needed apartments to house “Aryan” residents displaced by Allied bombs or his own building programs, his office assisted in the eviction and deportation of Berlin’s Jews. To meet his architecture projects’ enormous demand for construction materials, Speer collaborated with the Schutzstaffel (SS) to use concentration camp inmates to quarry stone and make bricks.

The GBI office also served as an important propaganda source about Third Reich architecture and planning. Speer exerted control over media coverage not only of his office’s work, but also of state building projects in general, shaping public perceptions of the relationship between architecture and politics. From 1940 to 1943, hundreds of thousands of people viewed the large GBI-organized exhibition Neue Deutsche Baukunst [New German Architecture], which toured cities in neutral and occupied European countries and throughout Turkey. GBI representatives also traveled as missionaries for National Socialist urbanism ideals, speaking in venues across Europe.

German paratroopers above The Hague neighborhood of Bezuidenhout, Netherlands, on May 10, 1940
Nationaal Archief / Wikimedia Commons German paratroopers above The Hague neighborhood of Bezuidenhout, Netherlands, on May 10, 1940

On one such business trip, Speer’s friend and close associate Hans Stephan unexpectedly found himself on the frontlines of war, an account he would later publish as Niederländisches Tagebuch [Dutch Diary]. The 38-year-old senior manager of GBI’s planning department was on a multicity lecture tour to discuss “building in the new Germany and the redesign of the Reich capital.” He delivered his first talk on May 9, 1940, at the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam to a large, mostly Dutch audience. Early next morning, German armed forces invaded the Netherlands and unleashed a blitzkrieg.

Written in the tone of a bemused observer, Stephan’s account of the Battle of the Netherlands reveals the author’s social privilege and alienation. He is detained by Dutch police in a luxury hotel surrounded by gunfire and explosions. Under lockdown, he spends his time fussing about the hotel’s spotty meal service and a pair of missing shoes. In his eyes, the attack ends well, more caper than war. Stephan chooses to believe that the defeated are really on the Germans’ side and that the invasion had barely ruffled their brotherly feelings. After the hostilities cease and he emerges from his hotel, he describes German and Dutch soldiers palling around. Not a hateful word had been directed at him, he writes, not even amid the fighting.

In fact, the Battle of the Netherlands had left Rotterdam devastated, thousands dead and wounded, and many more individuals homeless. From his hotel room, Stephan had a front-row seat to the impact of war on everyday civilians. And yet the horror left no discernable impact on him and certainly no sense of accountability. Or perhaps Stephan tailored his account to its primary reader, the individual to whom he dedicated his book: Speer. It was Speer who suggested that Stephan publish the diary in a small run of about 100 copies for “an inner circle,” which presumably included not just GBI colleagues but also an influential group of patrons and politicians.

The second travelogue memorializes an alcohol-fueled business trip with “the boss,” as Speer’s employees called him. Reise nach Lissabon [Journey to Lisbon] chronicles the nearly 3,600-mile road trip Speer took with Rudolf Wolters, an architecture school buddy who was another senior manager of the GBI planning department; and Walter Brugmann, an older man who headed the construction department. The three architects along with two drivers traveled from Berlin to Lisbon via Paris and Madrid for the November 1941 launch of Neue Deutsche Baukunst, which Wolters curated.

The driving route between Berlin and Lisbon taken by Albert Speer and his friends
Rudolf Wolters, Reise nach Lissabon, (Berlin, 1942), Lars Olof Larsson Collection, Kiel The driving route between Berlin and Lisbon taken by Albert Speer and his friends
Hans Stephan’s rendition of car trouble in Spain, with Rudolf Wolters depicted behind the wheel. Note the “GBI” license plate. The donkey on the left is saddled with exhibition goods. Stephan did not go on the trip, but contributed his caricaturist skills to the book.
Hans Stephan, “Panne in Spanien,” 1941, in Rudolf Wolters, Reise nach Lissabon, (Berlin, 1942), Lars Olof Larsson Collection, Kiel Hans Stephan’s rendition of car trouble in Spain, with Rudolf Wolters depicted behind the wheel. Note the “GBI” license plate. The donkey on the left is saddled with exhibition goods. Stephan did not go on the trip, but contributed his caricaturist skills to the book.

Penned by Wolters, the travelogue is light on official exhibition business, focusing instead on the friends’ holiday escapades, which included drinking, gambling, and a serious car accident that the bruised travelers laughed off. The book also features Speer’s photographs of the Roman and medieval sites they visited. (After the war, Speer, then imprisoned, would enlist the loyal Wolters to expunge GBI office records to hide his complicity with war crimes in order to present himself as the “good” Nazi.)

The third book derived from a missed guys’ adventure. In the summer of 1941, Speer and Stephan planned to hike in occupied Norway while undertaking a top-secret mission: scouting the location of a new Germans-only city commissioned by Hitler. Then, fearing for the safety of his first architect, Hitler forbade Speer from going. Continuing alone, Stephan documented his travels, which took him above the Arctic Circle, in Reise nach Norwegen [Journey to Norway], a typed and bound diary. Essentially a Nazi armchair travel guide to Norway, the book appears to have been a personal gift to Speer from Stephan, as the latter’s way of sharing his experiences of this vast northern land, which the GBI was actively reshaping into a model Aryan society. As in Niederländisches Tagebuch, Stephan’s narrative reveals his inability to see how his power and privilege distorted his perception. Though he does notice the Norwegians’ hostility to the German occupiers, he blithely dismisses its importance by observing, “Every [German] soldier and every sailor has, after all, his [Norwegian] girl.”

In 1941, Hans Stephan and another young German architect, Edgar Luther (left), traveled to northern Norway by car. They stopped to talk to two Sámi women walking on the road near the village of Kvesmenes in the Lyngen Fjord. Stephan asked the younger one her name, which she refused to say.
Hans Stephan, Reise nach Norwegen, 1941, Lars Olof Larsson Collection, Kiel In 1941, Hans Stephan and another young German architect, Edgar Luther (left), traveled to northern Norway by car. They stopped to talk to two Sámi women walking on the road near the village of Kvesmenes in the Lyngen Fjord. Stephan asked the younger one her name, which she refused to say.
A German sailor and Norwegian woman sitting above war-damaged Narvik, Norway, 1941
Hans Stephan, Reise nach Norwegen A German sailor and Norwegian woman sitting above war-damaged Narvik, Norway, 1941


Removed from its context, the brash entitlement that emerges from these travelogues may strike some readers as relatively harmless—just “bros being bros.” The rich young men speed recklessly in their BMWs and Mercedes, drink excessively, and wake with hangovers. They stay at the Ritz and eat at Maxim’s in Paris. They make fun of the poky locals.

But these architecture bros had the support of Hitler and his armies. The German military was at their disposal and they did not hesitate to call the local commander when their cars broke down or when they wanted to bypass border controls. They did not question their mission to redesign the world according to Nazi ideology, regardless of whether it required throwing out Jews from their homes or creating cities of docile Aryan subjects. And, for all their jesting, they were dead serious about asserting their own authority and power.

Ultimately, bro culture protects and cultivates the privilege of rich, white, straight men—defended in our own era less by armies, than by corporations, human resources departments, and CEOs. The image of amiable, partying bros, found in everything from beer commercials to Hollywood movies, obfuscates abusive behaviors. Precisely because we have no illusions about the Nazis and their ruthless ambition, we can clearly see how the power dynamics at play in Speer’s office shaped the “rules don’t apply” attitudes of these young men. This example from history can help us understand why all companies today must take seriously the toxicity and impact of bro culture. Discard the flip-flops and add a Nazi uniform, and suddenly nobody is laughing.

Read the author's previous articles in ARCHITECT: "The Invasion of Memory: Hitler’s Attempt to Rewrite the History of World War I" and "Hitler’s Building Plans for a World Under the Swastika."