The Volkshalle (“People's Hall”), also called Große Halle (“Great Hall”) or Ruhmeshalle (“Hall of Glory”), was a huge domed monumental building planned by Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer for Germania. The project was never accomplished.

The word Volk had a particular resonance in Nazi thinking. The term völkisch movement, which can be translated to English as "the people's movement" or "the folkish movement", derives from Volk but also implies an otherworldly and eternal essence. Before the First World War, völkisch thought had developed an attitude to the arts as the German Volk; that is, from an organically linked Aryan or Nordic community (Volksgemeinschaft), racially unpolluted and with its roots in the German soil of the Heimat (homeland).

Hitler and Hadrian's Pantheon

Just as Augustus's house on the Palatine was connected to the temple of Apollo, so Hitler's palace was to have been connected by a cryptoporticus to the Volkshalle, which filled the entire north side of the forum. This truly enormous building was, according to Albert Speer, inspired by Hadrian's Pantheon, which Hitler visited privately on May 7, 1938. But Hitler's interest in and admiration for the Pantheon predated this visit, since his sketch of the Volkshalle dates from about 1925.Hermann Giesler records a conversation he had with Hitler in the winter of 1939/40, when Hitler was recalling his “Roman Impressions” (Römische Impressionen):

Hitler's impressions of the Roman Pantheon were revived when on June 24, 1940 he made a tour of selected buildings in Paris, with the German architects Albert Speer, Hermann Giesler and Arno Breker, including the Paris Panthéon, which seems to have disappointed him. His disappointment is independently recorded by Giesler and Breker.

The sketch of the Volkshalle given by Hitler to Speer shows a traditional gabled pronaos supported by ten columns, a shallow rectangular intermediate block and behind it the domed main building. Giesler notes that the pronaos of the temple in Hitler's sketch is reminiscent of Hadrian's Pantheon and of the style of Friedrich Gilly or Karl Friedrich Schinkel. However, there was little about Speer's elaboration of the sketch that might be termed Doric, except perhaps for the triglyphs in the entablature, supported by the geminated red granite columns with their Egyptian palm-leaf capitals, previously employed by Speer in the portico outside Hitler's study on the garden side of the new Chancellery.

Speer's Monster-Building (German: Monsterbau) was to be the capital's most important and impressive building in terms of its size and symbolism. Visually it was to have been the architectural centrepiece of Berlin as the world capital (Welthauptstadt). Its dimensions were so large that it would have dwarfed every other structure in Berlin, including those on the north-south axis itself. The oculus of the building's dome, 46 metres (151 ft) in diameter, would have accommodated the entire rotunda of Hadrian's Pantheon and the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. The dome of the Volkshalle was to rise from a massive granite podium 315 by 315 metres (1,033 × 1,033 ft) and 74 metres (243 ft) high, to a total inclusive height of 290 metres (950 ft). The diameter of the dome, 250 metres (820 ft), was to be exceeded, much to Speer's annoyance, by the diameter of Giesler's new domed railway station at the east end of Munich's east-west axis. It was to be 15 metres (49 ft) greater in diameter than Speer's Volkshalle.

The resemblance of the Volkshalle to the Pantheon is far more obvious when their interiors are compared. The large niche (50 metres high by 28 metres wide) at the north end of the Volkshalle was to be surfaced with gold mosaic and to enclose an eagle 24 metres (79 ft) high, beneath which was situated Hitler's tribunal. From here he would address 180,000 listeners, some standing in the central round arena, others seated in three concentric tiers of seats crowned by one hundred marble pillars, 24 metres (79 ft) high, which rose to meet the base of the coffered ceiling suspended from steel girders sheathed on the exterior with copper.

The three concentric tiers of seats enclosing a circular arena 140 metres (460 ft) in diameter owe nothing to the Pantheon but resemble the seating arrangements in Ludwig Ruff's Congress Hall at Nuremberg, which was modeled on the Colosseum. Other features of the Volkshalle's interior are clearly indebted to Hadrian's Pantheon: the coffered dome, the pillared zone, which here is continuous, except where it flanks the huge niche on the north side. The second zone in the Pantheon, consisting of blind windows with intervening pilasters, is represented in Speer's building by a zone above the pillars consisting of uniform, oblong shallow recesses. The coffered dome rests on this zone. The design and size of the external decoration of this Volkshalle, are all exceptional and call for explanations that do not apply to community halls planned for Nazi fora in other German cities.

The temple-like nature of the domed building was noted by Speer, who surmised that the building was ultimately intended for the worship of Hitler and his successors, that is, it was to be a dynastic temple/palace complex of the kind Augustus built on the Palatine, where his modest house was connected to the temple of Apollo.

Hitler's aspirations to world domination and the establishment of his New Order, already evident from architectural and decorative features of the new Chancellery, are even more clearly expressed here. External symbols suggest that the domed hall was where Hitler as cosmocrator (Herr der Welt) would appear before his Herrenvolk: On top of the dome's lantern was an eagle grasping in its claws not the usual swastika but the globe of the Earth (Erdball). This combination of eagle and ball was well known in imperial Roman iconography, for example, the restored statue of Claudius holding a ball and eagle in his right hand. The vast dome, on which it rested, as with Hadrian's Pantheon, symbolically represented the vault of the sky spanning Hitler's world empire. The globe on the dome's lantern was enhanced and emphasized by two monumental sculptures by Breker, each 15 metres high, which flanked the north façade of the building: at its west end Atlas supporting the heavens, at its east end Tellus supporting the Earth. Both mythological figures were according to Speer, chosen by Hitler himself. Despite the evidence these overt and largely traditional imperialistic symbols of domination over urbs and orbis, Giesler says that Speer was wrong to represent the Volkshalle as a symbol of World Domination (Weltherrschaft). Speer in his Playboy magazine interview states:

Nevertheless, Giesler remarked that Hitler never made plans for world domination and that to suggest as much is not only nonsense (Unsinn) but 'Speer Rubbish' (Speerlicher Quatsch).

Possible architectural problems

Although the Volkshalle was never built, critics claimed it might have severe architectural problems, such as acoustics that would (depending on the critic) either make it impossible to hear a speaker, or would magnify the speaker's voice to such a volume that it might cause deafness.

In an interview with James P. O'Donnell, Speer said that, during his time in Spandau Prison, he constantly reviewed such criticisms of his architecture, and eliminated (in his opinion) many of them. One problem, however, remained—Speer speculated that during cold weather, the breathing and perspiration of 180,000 occupants in such a large and high dome might precipitate and fall back down. In short, it was possible that the hall might have its own 'weather' and create indoor rain because of its overcapacity. This phenomenon has been observed in other very large buildings that have been constructed in reality, such as the Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building, and (on a minor scale, with light mist as the precipitation on high humidity days) inside the Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio.

Because Berlin is a city founded on swampland, the engineers conducted several experiments to see how this huge building could be built on the muddy ground. A standing relic of this testing is the Schwerbelastungskörper (literal translation: “Heavy load-bearing body”) on Dudenstrasse in Berlin. It is a mushroom-shaped cylinder constructed out of 12,650 tons of concrete, standing 18 meters tall and was constructed on the site of a proposed triumphal arch that would be placed on the large avenue leading up to the Volkshalle. It could not be demolished with explosives shortly after the war due to nearby apartment buildings, and so was left in place. Since 1995, the Schwerbelastungskoerper has been designated as a German cultural and historical monument of great significance, thus assuring its preservation.