Lawson Deming works in visual effects.

And in 2015, he was tasked with digitally recreating a city that never was.

A task not unlike rebuilding a Mesopotamia or a Babylon.

Deming had some source material to go off of for this lost city.

There are blueprints for it and detailed maps and models, architectural models.

But it was up to him to put these maps and models together,

to render an image of Adolf Hitler's proposed redesign for Berlin.

Germania, or Germania, as it's now known, would be Hitler's ideal version of the capital of

the Third Reich. This, you may say, is not a utopia. I agree. It was a utopia that my grandmother

had to flee from. A utopia that was built as many utopias are, on land that was already in use.

For Hitler, a new capital would be a revision, like ethnic cleansing and genocide wasn't enough.

He had to raise Berlin to the ground and start a new. This was his utopia.

And Lawson Deming was digitally assembling it for the Amazon original series,

The Man in the High Castle, which takes place in a world where the Axis powers had one World War

which is a world in which Germania was built. And in this alternative world of Germania,

the skyline of Berlin would mostly be taken up by one massive dome.

I think it was something like 300 meters tall. It would have been the largest

freestanding dome in the world. That when there were 100,000 people inside that space that

would create its own atmosphere, and that there would be clouds formed inside the dome simply

by the exhaled breath of 100,000 Germans. A space so massive, the breath of Nazis meeting under

the inconceivably high dome would create its own weather system. This space would tower over

everyone and everything. The idea of it is essentially to to minimize the individual.

...