Welthauptstadt-Germania may look like the shining fruit of the Führer's labor, but its roots run deep, as does the rot infecting it.

Hundreds of meters below Speer's elegantly designed promenades and Hitler's megalomaniacal symbols of his will, great concrete and steel superstructures groan under the weight of the Welthauptstadt, while pumps run round the clock to keep the swamps of Old Berlin from swallowing the Führer's vision.

The tremendous, and classified, cost of reshaping Berlin far exceeded even the plunder of a dozen nations, and outside the whispering grand halls of the city centre, the Berliners of old still live like before Germania's rise, or in cheap apartment blocks for the unemployed masses.