Pabst plan

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Pabst Plan (February 6, 1940)

" Pabst-Plan " is a plan for the transformation of the city of Warsaw during the German occupation into a "German city", which was named after the city planner Friedrich Pabst.

According to this plan of annihilation and destruction, Warsaw was to be transformed into a German provincial town. The plan assumed that 95% of the urban development would be destroyed and only the Kraków suburb and Belweder left undamaged, with Belweder as the seat of German administration. The city's population was to be taken to concentration camps or murdered on site - in KL Warsaw , which was established in 1943 .

After the attack on Poland and the military administration ended on October 25, 1939 and a German civilian occupation administration was established, the city treasurer of Würzburg , Oskar Rudolf Dengel , was appointed mayor of Warsaw on November 4, 1939. For the planned redesign of Warsaw, Dengel brought Hubert Groß and about 20 other employees from the city of Würzburg to Warsaw in the second half of December 1939 and commissioned them with a design for the “dismantling of the Polish city” and the conversion into a “new German city of Warsaw”. In addition, Dengel's staff had to oversee the municipal offices of Warsaw.

In his memoirs, Groß put it: "It was about developing a planning concept as to how and where the city structure with extensive buildings for the party and the state can be stamped with a German city."

Dengel appointed Groß on January 15, 1940 as head of department VII for building construction, urban development and the building police, and Erwin Suppinger , head of the Würzburg civil engineering office, as head of department VIII for civil engineering, road clearance, street maintenance, sewerage, bridges, street cleaning, vehicle fleets and supplies .

The joint efforts of the Würzburg planning staff resulted in a project documentation with the title: “Warsaw, the new German city”, the cover sheet was labeled as follows: “This work was carried out by urban planners from Würzburg, whose Würzburg city plan was recognized on June 20, 1939 Leader has found. I thank my co-workers for the work and I am placing the same in the hands of the Governor General of the Occupied Polish Territories Reich Minister Pg. Frank. Warsaw, February 6, 1940. Mayor Dr. Dengel ".

The plans exhibited in the Warsaw City Museum consist of 15 panels in a bound 59 × 75 cm portfolio, with drawings of the network of railways and roads, the destruction of the war, the planned dismantling of the existing buildings and the representation of the new construction sections for the future German population as well as model photos and a panorama drawing and a panorama photo.

The aim was to reduce the city from 1.3 million to around 40,000 inhabitants and to create a German-dominated core city through the so-called dismantling of the Polish city and the evacuation of the Jewish population. The German residential quarters were arranged in an approximately 1,500 × 2,000 m oval, in the middle of which was the Saxon Garden . For the new city, ten cells were assumed, which, according to the cell structure of an urban organism developed by Gottfried Feder , comprised a size of approx. 3,500 inhabitants, so that a planned population of 30,000 to 40,000 can be assumed. The design of a ring-shaped traffic structure around the reduced urban area as well as an axis cross of the large east-west and north-south streets were decisive. A Gauforum with a tower, as in almost all redesign plans, was also planned.

With the planning he initiated "for the new German city of Warsaw", for which he had secured the support of the Reich Ministry of the Interior , City President Dengel promised himself advantages in the dispute over competencies with the district governor Ludwig Fischer , who would replace the previous supervisory administration with a direct German administration and at the same time wanted to incorporate the building administration of Warsaw into its district administration. Finally, Dengel was supposed to recommend such a radical planning draft to reduce the area and population of the former Polish capital to Governor General Hans Frank , to whom the planning folder in the title was dedicated. Since Dengel could not prevail in the end, he announced his resignation as mayor in February 1940. On March 21, 1940, he was transferred to Liège . The staff recruited by Dengel from the Würzburg city administration also resigned and most of them left Warsaw.

See also

literature

  • Niels Gutschow, Barbarta Klain: Destruction and Utopia. City planning Warsaw 1939–1945. Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-88506-223-2 .
  • Niels Gutschow: mania for order. Architects plan in the "Germanized East" 1939–1945. Gütersloh 2001, ISBN 3-7643-6390-8 .

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