Detail

Place of Propaganda – The Nazi Party Rally Grounds 1933 to 1939

The former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in southeast Nuremberg are the largest surviving ensemble of Nazi state and party architecture in the Federal Republic of Germany. Its buildings still bear witness to the great power pretensions of the Third Reich.

Construction began as early as 1933. The Nazi Party Rally Grounds were to provide the architectural framework for the enactment and orchestration of the staged Nazi social and state order. The building sites were largely abandoned after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. By this time, only two buildings had been completed and used for major events – the Zeppelin Field and the Luitpold Arena.

From 1933 to 1938, the Nuremberg rallies were annual events organised by the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the City of Nuremberg. Attended by hundreds of thousands of party members and onlookers, they were the annual climax of Nazi self-promotion both in Germany and abroad. The exclusionary Nazi society was staged as a – supposedly – united Volksgemeinschaft (“community of the People”), indispensable for the resurgence of Germany, and the broad approval of Germans for the Nazi regime was made publicly visible. Political messages were also delivered in a calculated way at these Nazi Party rallies, most notably the so-called Nuremberg Laws, announced by Hermann Göring on 15 September 1935, the starting signal for the now state-sponsored and legitimised persecution of Jews and other minorities in the German Reich.

Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. The 1939 Nuremberg rally was cancelled at short notice. Instead, between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of people from Eastern, Southern and Western Europe, as well as the United States, came to the Nazi Party Rally Grounds against their will – as prisoners of war and deported civilians who were held there by the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the SS and private companies in a vast camp complex using the existing infrastructure.

Most were used as forced labourers in Nuremberg and northern Bavaria. Many died in inhuman conditions. Some were deliberately murdered. The Maerzfeld railway station, which had been specially built for the arrival and departure of party rally participants, became the starting point for the deportation of more than 2,000 Franconian Jews to ghettos and death camps. Very few survived.

After years of silence about the history of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds and an initial exhibition in the Zeppelin Tribune in the 1980s, a concerted effort was made by all parties at the end of the 1990s to create a permanent information centre. Since 2001, the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds has been providing information about the historic site and is dedicated to conveying the phenomenology of the development of the Nazi regime.

The institution is now facing new challenges. The growing number of visitors requires an expansion, both in terms of space and concept. The content of the permanent exhibition is also being rethought. The temporary exhibition “Nuremberg – Site of the Nazi Party Rallies”, which has been specially conceived for this purpose, will be shown in a separate hall during the conversion phase. A modified educational programme completes the Centre’s offer.

You can find out more about the historic site and the Centre, as well as a detailed description of the educational programme we offer, on the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds website.