The Great Avenue

The Great Avenue was designed by Albert Speer to be the central ceremonial axis and to bring a degree of symmetry to the rally grounds.
It connected the March Field with the Luitpold Arena and was symbolically aligned to the medieval Imperial Castle in the Old Town.

While the Great Avenue linked the March Field (8) to the Luitpold Arena (1) and was aligned with the medieval castle, there was an "unsightly kink" due to the location and orientation of the Luitpold Arena

The Great Avenue was designed to be 2 kilometres long and 60 metres wide and between work starting in 1935 and finishing in 1939 when WW2 broke out, approximately 1.5 km had been completed.
The surface consists of roughly 60,000 granite slabs with darker slabs creating a line to help soldiers maintain their marching formation.
The slabs were deliberately sized at 1.2m square—exactly twice the length of a standard Prussian goose step.

Laying the granite slabs making up the Great Avenue....the darker stone can be seen LHS

Most of these granite slabs were quarried by prisoners in SS-run concentration camps like Flossenbürg and Mauthausen

The SS owned German Earth & Stone Company provided the building material from the Concentration Camps

To enable the road to cross the Dutzenteich, the lake was split in two by the foundations required for the Great Avenue.

The picture shows the division of the Dutzenteich and the pattern created by the darker granite slabs

There were terraces on both sides of the road for spectators to view the enormous parades (which never happened)