The Nazis staged their power on a scale meant to dwarf the individual, and nowhere more than at Nuremberg. Each year the party held its rallies on a vast purpose-built parade ground on the city's edge, where hundreds of thousands of uniformed marchers assembled before a monumental stone grandstand — a reviewing tribune designed by Hitler's architect Albert Speer, modelled on an ancient temple, from which the leadership looked down on the massed ranks below. Speer understood the propaganda of architecture: the sheer size, the endless columns, and at night his famous "cathedral of light," scores of searchlights throwing pillars into the sky, were all engineered to make each person feel like a cell in something vast and eternal. This display stand is a piece of that machinery of awe.

The piece is a stone reviewing stand hung with a red swastika banner and flanked by steps — the platform from which the leadership surveyed the marching columns. Place the Hitler figure atop it, review the goose-stepping SS Flagbearer and the SS Trumpeter passing below, and you have the rally in miniature. And as K&C notes, it works the other way too: in 1945 American troops captured the Nuremberg grounds and dynamited the great swastika atop the tribune — so the same stand, crawling with victorious GIs, can just as easily depict the end of the Reich as its height.

Model: LAH082 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / display stand accessory