-Caveat Lector- German Gov't Might Use Nazi Offices By PAUL GEITNER .c The Associated Press BERLIN (AP) - Hitler's ``Thousand-Year Reich'' lasted only a dozen years, but a few of the hulking neoclassic buildings erected by Nazi megalomaniacs still loom over the heart of Berlin. Now, with the city resuming its role as the federal capital, the incoming government - hungry for office space but strapped for cash - has reluctantly recycled them for its ministries. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's staff officially moves into the former Reichsbank on Monday, where gold looted from concentration camp victims piled up in the basement while officials above worked to finance Hitler's war effort. The Finance Ministry is taking over the former Aviation Ministry, where Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering plotted Hitler's air war. The Labor Ministry will be housed where Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels directed his anti-Semitic media campaign. The Defense Ministry will move into the building used by the Nazi army's central command. Some in this famously introspective country fret that the reuse of such grandiose structures sends the wrong signal to a world closely watching a new generation of leaders stake out a bigger role for Germany in European and world affairs. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the first German leader too young to personally remember World War II, dismisses such concerns. ``I also can't imagine that Joschka Fischer will sit every day in his office remembering Hjalmar Schacht (Hitler's banker) with a sigh,'' Schroeder said in Der Spiegel magazine last week. ``Our politics doesn't change just because the finance minister will be sitting in the former Reich Aviation Ministry.'' Indeed, many view the buildings as useful daily reminders to Germans about past mistakes. ``It would be even worse if we didn't put public agencies back into these buildings because then we'd be hiding them,'' says historian Andreas Nachama, head of Berlin's Jewish community. ``The opposite should be done. These buildings should be made visible with their history.'' Such questions were not an issue in Bonn, the Rhine River village that became defeated West Germany's postwar capital. There, the federal government housed itself in modern buildings that were usually small and unobtrusive. By contrast, the overblown style favored by Hitler and his court architect, Albert Speer, was big and commanding: The Reich Chancellery, bombed by the Allies and torn down by the Soviets after the war, was more than a quarter-mile long. Absolute symmetry and natural stone facades with strict window axes were meant to convey order and strength. Recessed pillars harked back to Roman architecture. ``Our buildings are built with the aim of strengthening ... authority,'' declared Hitler, who once considered becoming an architect. Most of the Nazi ministries that survived Allied bombing were in East Berlin, where the communist leaders had no qualms about putting them to use after stripping them of swastikas and other Nazi remnants. After unification in 1990 and the decision to return to Berlin, the government of Helmut Kohl considered bulldozing Nazi and communist-era structures and starting fresh. But Berlin preservationists fought creation of an entire new city center, and a post-unification recession helped persuade the government to reuse much of the existing space. The Foreign Ministry fought the hardest for a new building, worried about the impression a Nazi structure would make on visiting foreign dignitaries. But it eventually accepted the Reichsbank. Built in the 1930s according to a design selected by Hitler, the six-story pile of sandstone curves along a canal in the center of the city. After the war, the East German communists moved their party headquarters into the fortress-like structure. ``The building has this heavy architecture of the early 1930s, which gives it a Nazi appearance,'' says Andreas von Mettenheim, head of the Foreign Ministry's Berlin office. But the communists cleared any Nazi traces from inside decades ago. ``You don't see any ghosts,'' von Mettenheim says, sitting in his high-ceilinged, wood-paneled office in the building's first renovated wing. A sign outside noting the building's history will be the solitary indication it is anything but an office building. ``What people want is that we don't hide anything - accept the history but make a different policy,'' he says. The ministry is spending $300 million to spruce up and expand the old Reichsbank. Windows and skylights closed off by the communists have been reopened; courtyards have been planted with trees. The sweeping main lobby, once awash in Nazi flags and giant eagles, now has an illuminated sky-blue ceiling to give it a more welcoming feel. The biggest alteration is a glass-and-steel extension, with 800 additional offices, being built in front of the main entrance where Nazi banners once hung. Some architectural critics complain the new building, with its garden cutouts, vaguely resembles a swastika when viewed from the air. Felix Zwoch, editor of Berlin's Bauwelt architecture magazine, calls the debate ``typically German.'' ``It's not like behind every stone wall there's a blood-spattered dictator, while democratic decisions are only made behind glass,'' he says. ``After 50 years, I think one can have enough self-confidence to reuse these buildings as a way of dealing with the past.'' 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