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Christian Dittus
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HITLER'S NORTHERN UTOPIA

Despina Stratigakos

Building the New Order in Occupied Norway

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II

Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire - one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings.

Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme—a German cultural capital and naval base—remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance.

A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been—a world colonized under the swastika.

Despina Stratigakos is a vice provost and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
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Published 2020-08-01 by Princeton University Press

Comments

“Tackling a subject that has not been covered before, this original book adds to our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi occupation of Norway, Nazi expansionism, and the ideology of a new European order. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, and featuring an impressive range of illustrations, Hitler's Northern Utopia is filled with interesting detail.” —Tim Kirk, author of Nazi Germany “Using underexplored archives and bringing new material to light, Hitler's Northern Utopia is an excellent history of the construction and significance of architecture and infrastructure projects in Nazi-occupied Norway. Despina Stratigakos also gives equal and subtle attention to Speer and Hitler's imagined Norway as part of a postwar Germanic empire.” —Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy “Written by an accomplished architectural historian, this unusual study investigates Hitler's racial fantasy of Nordic brotherhood by exploring the built remains of the German occupation of Norway and the popular resistance against it. This original account is supported by impressive photographs that illustrate the stunning extent of Nazi ambition as well as the failure to realize most of the plans.” —Konrad Jarausch, author of Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century