![]() ![]() Hitler's wish to preserve a selective array of Germany's cultural treasures is well documented. In one memorandum he requested that the rebuilding should include "as far as possible - the widening of streets" to make way for the motor car. Hitler personally intervened in the reconstruction project at the same time as he was waging war on Europe. Speer's "work committee for the planned reconstruction of cities destroyed by bombing" was to decide the extent to which cities were to be reconstructed in detail. ![]() Photographers were dispatched across the country between 19 by Hitler's chief architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, with orders to capture the country from the air as it was then. They are not photographs of industrial sites or transport infrastructure so we know their purpose was not military, rather they were meant for propaganda and reconstruction purposes," said Christian Bracht, head of the photographic archives, Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, which acquired the images. "This is a spectacular and unique set of photographs which shows us for the first time the scale of the destruction. In pictures of the baroque city of Dresden, the bombing of which is one of the most controversial allied actions of the war, in which up to 40,000 died, historians say the pictures offer the most detailed pictorial study yet of the extent of the destruction. The late gothic splendour of Stuttgart has been captured in aerial shots taken before its Flemish late gothic town hall was destroyed in a fire following bombing raids of 1944. Gothic Frankfurt is depicted in the pictures prior to its widespread destruction in allied bombing raids in October 1943 and March 1944. "They show a land which no longer exists," author Katya Iken wrote in Spiegel Online, pointing out the irony that Hitler's plan was to reconstruct "a beauty which he had been responsible for destroying in the first place". They are a painful contrast to the post-war state of many of Germany's cities, most of which were filled with functional postwar architecture, car-friendly infrastructures and soulless inner cities. They concentrate on Germany's inner cities, which are shown in their full baroque and gothic splendour. The photographs, taken diagonally with special cameras from low-flying aircraft, offer detailed views of buildings. The black and white pictures, which have now been digitalised, were commissioned by the Nazis to assist in plans to rebuild German cities once Hitler's Third Reich had conquered Europe. ![]()
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