The Nuremberg party rallies were held annually on a purpose-built site of eleven square kilometers, and they were not political meetings in any ordinary sense. They ran for a week, involved hundreds of thousands of participants, and were designed by Albert Speer as an experience.
His most famous device was invented from a shortage. In 1934 the party's own senior figures were, in Speer's account, physically unimpressive — middle-aged men in ill-fitting uniforms — and he needed to conceal them. He asked Hitler for a hundred and thirty anti-aircraft searchlights, effectively the Luftwaffe's entire strategic reserve. Göring objected. Hitler agreed, on the ground that the rest of the world would conclude Germany was swimming in searchlights.
The lights were placed around the perimeter at twelve-meter intervals and aimed vertically. Their beams were visible to about eight kilometers and the effect, in Speer's own description and in the British ambassador's, was of a cathedral of ice.
Three mechanisms operate at once, and they are all documented.
Synchrony. Tens of thousands of people marching, standing, saluting, singing and responding in unison. Wiltermuth and Heath's experimental work shows that synchronized movement measurably increases cooperation and conformity toward the group, independent of what the group is doing, and Dunbar's research on the physiology of synchrony finds endorphin release and raised pain thresholds in collective activity.
Awe. Keltner and Haidt's account of awe holds that vastness which the mind cannot accommodate produces a diminished sense of self and an increased sense of connection to something larger. Speer's design targets this directly: the scale of the field, the vertical beams disappearing into cloud, the repetition of identical figures to the horizon.
And deindividuation, in Zimbardo's sense. Uniform dress, dense crowding, submergence in a mass, reduced self-awareness, reduced personal accountability, and increased adherence to whatever norm the situation supplies.
The combination produces what Durkheim called collective effervescence, and its distinguishing feature is that the participant does not experience it as persuasion. Nothing is argued. There is no proposition to evaluate. What is produced is a physiological and emotional state that the participant then attributes to the truth of the cause, because that is the only explanation available in the room.
Speer wrote after the war that the rallies were the only thing he had built that he still regarded as good architecture, and that the experience had been genuinely beautiful. Both his admiration and his complicity are on the record, and the second should be read alongside the first.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Ritual and Social Proof