The period of reconstruction after the Second World War is the period has a vast impact on the urban landscape of Germany today. Due to the chaotic circumstances at the end of the war, it is very difficult to calculate the exact percentage of destruction for specific cities at the end of the war (Hohn 1993). Architectural historians have studied the fate of surviving historic buildings, such as the Berlin Palace, during and after the war. However, little attention has been paid to the distribution of war damage in the urban area and the consideration of extensive destruction in urban planning. The main reason for this is the difficulty in obtaining reliable sources on the distribution of damage and its percentage. Urban damage maps are scattered in local archives and often follow local guidelines for legends and damage categories (for a map collection see Enss and Knauer 2023).
Architects who were part of the Nazi regime prepared large parts of the reconstruction plans as early as 1943 (Durth and Gutschow 1988). Specifically, the Working Group for the Reconstruction Planning of Destroyed Cities formed a network of planners from different cities. Leading figures such as Konstanty Gutschow focused more on technical ideas for modernization than on the creation of representative urban spaces for Hitler (Diefendorf 1985). Many of the plans from the network were pursued under this pretext after the war.
In the spring of 1944, the Working Group commissioned damage mapping for war-damaged cities in the German Reich. This mapping campaign resulted in a collection of war damage maps for 43 cities, standardised in scale, map design and method of data collection. The map design divided the damage continuum into three groups of damage shown on a map with red hatching: damage below 50% (no hatching), 50-70% of damage, and more than 70% of damage (see figure). Although these maps from 1944 do not show the maximum damage of 1945, they formed the basis for planning by the working group.
The renewal and clearance work that began in 1943-44 and continued into the 1970s has often been described as a 'second destruction' of the cities. Planning historians studied reconstruction plans and related written documentation, damage maps and statistics from the archives (Durth and Gutschow 1988). More recent research resulted in city reconstruction biographies for Hamburg, Kassel and Nürnberg. Although examples of surviving buildings demolished after the war are well known, the extent of the phenomenon “second destruction” has not yet been estimated.
The paper analyses whether the modernisation and regeneration plans of the members of the working group in the cities of Hamburg, Kassel and Nuremberg are related to the location and distribution of the destroyed areas in these cities. An overlay of the 1944 damage maps and the urban reconstruction plans of the same period is a first possibility to estimate which parts of the surviving buildings the planners wanted to sacrifice to modernisation.
First, the 1944 damage maps for Hamburg, Kassel and Nuremberg are digitised and georeferenced. Through historical research, the maps have been linked to printed guidelines for damage mapping issued by the working group (reprinted in Enss and Knauer 2023, 236-247). These guidelines guide damage surveys according to criteria of stability of surviving structural elements such as roofs, perimeter walls, etc. Reconstruction plans (1944-45) are selected form the city reconstruction biographies. They are scanned for comparison and superimposition.
One feature that is often described in terms of modernisation during post-war reconstruction is the introduction of motor traffic arteries into the dense urban fabric (Diefendorf 1989). A visual comparison between damage and street layout has been made for Nuremberg (Knauer and Enss 2022). New proposed traffic arteries are mapped as a layer on top of the damage map in GIS. The proportion of the route of new arterials that passes through destroyed areas is compared to the total damage percentage of the building stock (for the calculation of a bomb damage index see Alvanides and Ludwig 2023).
Another typical planning tool for modernisation is to plan the renewal of an entire neighbourhood. In some cases, inner city neighbourhoods have been redesigned from scratch, requiring the demolition of the area. Such redevelopment areas are mapped on top of the damage maps to check if these areas coincide with the "total" damage.
The correlation between the damage and urban renewal plans is discussed qualitatively and, where possible, quantitatively. Finally, a comparison of aerial photographs taken by the Allied Forces in the spring of 1945 will show the extent to which the damage situation changed by the end of the war.
The juxtaposition of war damage and planned bulldozing for modernisation helps to unravel the sequential and intertwined intentions and developments of destruction and reconstruction in cities during and after the Second World War.
References
Ludwig, Carol, and Seraphim Alvanides. 2023. ‘A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of the Urban Fabric of Nuremberg From the 1940s Onwards Using Historical Maps’. Urban Planning 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i1.6084.
Diefendorf, Jeffry M. 1985. ‘Konstanty Gutschow and the Reconstruction of Hamburg’. Central European History 18 (2): 143–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900016976.
———. 1989. ‘Artery: Urban Reconstruction and Traffic Planning in Postwar Germany’. Journal of Urban History 15 (2): 131–58.
Durth, Werner, and Niels Gutschow. 1988. Träume in Trümmern: Planungen Zum Wiederaufbau Zerstörter Städte Im Westen Deutschlands 1940 - 1950. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Braunschweig: Vieweg.
Enss, Carmen M., and Birgit Knauer, eds. 2023. Atlas Kriegsschadenskarten Deutschland: Stadtkartierung Und Heritage Making Im Wiederaufbau Um 1945. Basel: Birkhäuser. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035625011.
Hohn, Uta. 1991. Die Zerstörung Deutscher Städte Im Zweiten Weltkrieg : Regionale Unterschiede in Der Bilanz Der Wohnungstotalschäden Und Folgen Des Luftkrieges Unter Bevölkerungsgeographischem Aspekt. Dortmund: Vertrieb für Bau- und Planungsliteratur.
Knauer, Birgit, and Carmen M Enss. 2022. ‘Wiederaufbauplanung und Heritage Making im kriegszerstörten Nürnberg. Historische Stadtkarten als Quelle der Stadtforschung’. Moderne Stadtgeschichte, no. 1: 133–60.

Historical urban studies frequently study the city as a palimpsest. This is a speaking
metaphor in the case of wartime destruction and rebuilding. During the bombing and
subsequent rebuilding processes, buildings were damaged, destroyed and partly rebuild.
The UrbanMetaMapping research consortium examines war damage maps from the
Second World War and other thematic urban maps covering Central and Central Eastern
Europe, investigating urban mapping as a cultural practice of transformation, the social
and spatial development, and how heritage was mapped and historical consciousness
formed.
The city of Nürnberg, Germany, was heavily damaged in successive air raids during WWII.
This especially included the inner city with its many historically significant buildings. From
1942 onwards, the Nürnberg administration concentrated its disaster control efforts on
the historic centre. This is evidenced by a newly created cadastral map, covering the area
of the walled city, with a granularity that identifies each building, including side buildings.
This map served as a basis map for war damage maps from air raids as well as for
thematic maps, e.g. stated historic values (“Nürnberg” 2023).
By comparing written sources and maps from the Nuremberg archives, we study the
processes of disaster prevention, disaster relief and reconstruction directed by the city
administration between 1942 and 1952. During this period, Nürnberg underwent a
transformation from a centre of National Socialism (“Stadt der Reichsparteitage”) through
the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (1946–1949) to democratic regional centre. Throughout
this period, the regulations for demolition, reconstruction and dismantling of damaged
buildings organised by the city administration show considerable continuity, including the
urban planning for reconstruction dating back to 1943. Until recently these complex and
intertwined processes of planning, rubble clearance and rebuilding against the
background of political change have been studied separately from each other.
Using traditional art historical comparative methods, we analysed the reconstruction
strategies for selected town squares, streets and the urban landscapes in general and
specifically the preservation of damaged historical buildings in particular (Enss 2022,
Knauer 2023, Knauer and Enss 2022). For a comprehensive study of the walled city of
Nürnberg, especially the investigation of traces of the intertwined processes, we now
resort to a GIS-based approach. We also use this as a case study for the question of how
GIS can support studies of historical maps and which methods are most promising.
The various maps of air raids, historical values, reconstruction plans, etc., superimposed
on the cadastral base map, constitute a multi-layered paper database, that holds all kinds
of thematic information, but is tedious to analyse manually, especially in terms of cross-
comparison between maps. Georeferencing and vectorising the maps into a GIS database
allows for attainable access and quantitative analysis, from the temporal sequences of
damage on one hand to the relationships between different thematic data, such as the
declared historic value of buildings.
With GIS we create our own multi-thematic maps. The data from the different paper maps
is attributed to the geo-objects (buildings), which allows the selection and visualisation of
complex queries such as: show all buildings mapped as destroyed and as historically
valuable. Due to our exploratory approach, visualising these cross-references between
different data points is crucial, for our own research as well as for dissemination.
Additionally, the publication of maps created from GIS is possible without navigating the
complex copyright situation of the original maps. A quantitative evaluation of these
queries, e.g. how many buildings or what percentage of the total area have features X and
Y, provides a tangible measure of these findings.
Having all the data from the different maps combined allows us to check for internal
consistency: on the one hand we can check whether the data from successive maps are
coherent, and on the other hand we can test for hidden interdependencies. In the
Nürnberg air raid maps, we found that buildings shown as destroyed on one map were
shown as intact on a later map, which is an example of internal inconsistency. Comparing
the degree of destruction with additional information like the historical value of a building
can reveal hidden biases.
We plan to integrate additional data sources, such as georeferenced statistical data from
the period, as well as results from GIS-based research at other scales (Ludwig and
Alvanides 2023).
GIS gives us a view of the data from the paper maps that was not easily accessible before,
as it allows us to reveal, query, and visualise unexpected relationships. We therefore
encourage the application of building level GIS to other historical city maps.

Bibliography

Enss, Carmen M. 2022. ‘Erbeprozesse Bei Den Aufbauplanungen Für Städte in Den 1940er Jahren:
Schadensaufnahmen, Inventarisation, Aufbau’. Forum Stadt 1: 51–62.
Ludwig, Carol, and Seraphim Alvanides. 2023. ‘A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of the Urban Fabric of
Nuremberg From the 1940s Onwards Using Historical Maps’. Urban Planning 8 (1).
https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i1.6084.
Knauer, Birgit. 2023. ‘Kapitel 7 . Definition Und Transformation von Erbe Im Rahmen Der
Wiederaufbauplanung’. In Atlas Kriegsschadenskarten Deutschland, edited by Carmen M. Enss
and Birgit Knauer, 66–79. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035625011-008.
Knauer, Birgit, and Carmen M Enss. 2022. ‘Wiederaufbauplanung und Heritage Making im
kriegszerstörten Nürnberg. Historische Stadtkarten als Quelle der Stadtforschung’. Moderne
Stadtgeschichte, no. 1: 133–60.
"Nürnberg" In Atlas Kriegsschadenskarten Deutschland: Stadtkartierung und Heritage Making im
Wiederaufbau um 1945 edited by Carmen M. Enss and Birgit Knauer, 196-232. Berlin, Boston:
Birkhäuser, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035625011-016