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.