POWER SPACE VIOLENCE

Planning and building under the National Socialists pervaded all areas of life between 1933 and 1945 and were inseparably linked to the regime’s totalitarian practices – both in the German Reich and in the European territories it occupied. The members of the Independent Commission of Historians – Wolfgang Benz, Tilman Harlander, Elke Pahl-Weber, Wolfram Pyta, Adelheid von Saldern, Wolfgang Schäche and Regina Stephan – were tasked by what is now the Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building with the research project “Planning and Building under the National Socialists: Prerequisities, Institutions, Impacts”. The research findings are presented in their essays, each of which draws on contemporary photographs and plans with accompanying commentary to amplify seven areas of focus: Housing and Settlements; Party and State Architecture; Camps in the National Socialist Era; Infrastructure and Spatial Planning; Internationality; Continuities in Urban Planning and Architecture in the East and West after 1945; The Building Legacies of National Socialism. Included in the book are biographies of fifty architects, landscape designers, construction specialists and civil servants.