Führer city

A Führer city, or Führerstadt in German, was a status given to five German cities in 1937 by Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany. The status was based on Hitler's vision of undertaking gigantic urban transformation projects in these cities, and executed by German architects including Albert Speer, Paul Ludwig Troost, German Bestelmeyer, Konstanty Gutschow, Hermann Giesler, Leonhard Gall and Paul Otto August Baumgarten. More modest reconstruction projects were to take place in thirty-five other cities, although some sources assert this number was as high as fifty. These plans were however not realised for the greater part because of the onset of the Second World War, although construction continued to take place even in wartime circumstances at Hitler's insistence. After the Battle for France in 1940, Hitler ordered that the architectural reshaping of these cities was to be completed by 1950, and should represent the magnitude of the German victories in Western Europe. The five Führer cities were: Linz:The town where Adolf Hitler spent his youth ("Jugendstadt des Führers"), and where he planned to retire after the war. Hitler wanted to turn Linz into a "German Budapest" – a city which, in Hitler's mind, then surpassed German cities of the Danube in beauty. Linz was to be "the new metropolis of the Danube," eclipsing Vienna, a city he hated.Linz was to expand three or four times from its then current size, with Reichswerke Hermann Göring providing jobs for the laborers relocating from Vienna. The bank of the Danube was to be built up with magnificent private homes, and a new "Hitler Centre" (Hitlerzentrum) was to be furbished with new community buildings.Major intended building projects were a Strength through Joy hotel, new municipal buildings designed by Hermann Giesler, a NSDAP party house designed by Roderich Fick, a Wehrmacht Headquarters, an Olympic Stadium, and "as a counter to the pseudo-science of the Catholic Church" an observatory representing "the three great cosmological conceptions of history — those of Ptolemy, of Copernicus and of Hörbiger.