There is no doubt that Sagebiel owed his later livelihood to the Third Reich even if, unlike Speer, he remained an architect rather than moving into a political role. After the Mendelsohn office closed, he worked for Goering's Air Ministry, and spent the years 1933 to 1936 designing and building a vast new headquarters for the organisation in the city centre (still there, now being converted to German government use again after its spell under Communist rule). He also designed airports at Stuttgart and Munich, both long superseded. Tempelhof, however, had an importance beyond its function. Hitler was personally involved in the project: Tempelhof was to form the conclusion of Speer's grandiose (and never built) north-south axis. Hitler went on record in 1934 defending the stupendous size of the projected construction on the grounds that it was necessary for national prestige. As late as 1939, expert commentators in America saw Tempelhof merely as a way of allowing for an anticipated explosion in civil air travel: ironically it was the occupying American forces in the late 1940s who repaired and largely completed Sagebiel's design.

Largely, but not entirely: Sagebiel had envisaged a raised stand for 65,000 spectators on the roof, and built 14 staircases to serve it before the war stopped work. Spectators for what, exactly? And what became of Sagebiel, this highly competent architect to the Reich, doomed forever to be eclipsed both by Speer? Well-known prominent Jewish architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Mendelsohn himself, and the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, had emigrated and did not return in the post-war years. There were architects of note who remained, but dissented from the official style. Hans Scharoun, one of these, had little work in the late 1930s as a consequence, but received his reward by being made Berlin's city architect for the reconstruction, and built the masterly Philharmonie concert hall (1956-63). But Sagebiel? I do not know, and it irks me. I realise that I know almost nothing about him apart from a couple of buildings, one of which is a masterpiece. Sagebiel's was not the kind of history that people have wanted to write over the past half-century: he was associated with the wrong crowd, and how. What else did he build, if anything? When did he die? Did he and his former master Mendelsohn ever correspond? Silence.