Pabst Plan
Encyclopedia
The Pabst Plan was a Nazi German
urban plan
to reconstruct the city of Warsaw
as a Nazi model city
. Named after its creator Friedrich Pabst, the Nazis' "Chief Architect for Warsaw", the plan assumed that Warsaw, the historical capital of Poland
and a city of 1.5 million inhabitants, would be completely destroyed and rebuilt as a small German town of not more than 130,000 inhabitants.
In modern historical works the term is used to denote any of the German World War II
plans concerning the destruction and reconstruction of Warsaw. In particular the "Pabst Plan" refers to a plan prepared by Hubert Groß and Otto Nurnberger in 1940 and another plan, prepared by Pabst himself in 1942. Both plans envisioned the destruction of most of Warsaw with its historical monuments and residential areas. In its place a new model city was to be created as a seat for the German ruling class of the occupied Polish territories. It was to house a large Parteivolkshalle ("People's Party Hall") in place of the Royal Castle in Warsaw and serve as a major transportation hub.
After the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Germans decided to destroy the city in its entirety
.
, even prior to the start of World War II
. On 20 June 1939, while Adolf Hitler
was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg
, his attention was captured by a project to create a future "German" town – Warsaw , which later became known as the Pabst Plan. Herr Pabst prepared a technical plan for the annihilation of Warsaw and the complete ethnic cleansing of its native Polish population, with Polish Jews condemned to be the first destined for extermination. It envisaged the transformation of the Polish capital into a new, provincial German town, containing an exclusively ethnic German
population of no more than 130,000 people on the left bank supported by a slave labour camp of 80,000 Poles on the right bank of the Vistula. Warsaw’s total population in 1935 was around 1.3 million, consisting of Poles
, Jews
and other minorities, which meant that putting the new urbanization plan to work would require the complete removal of its entire population. The project included 15 separate plans and photos, and solid pre-build documentation. Among all the pages of the project the most important is a colored plan of the future town which was created by German architects in 1:20 000 scale titled: Die neue deutsche Stadt Warschau(Warsaw, the New German City). The final table bore the caption Der Abbau der Polenstadt und der Aufbau der Deutschen Stadt(The Destruction of the Polish City and the Construction of the German City).
Some parts of the project that were showing Warsaw’s urban development from the half of 17th century until the year 1935 were based on Polish documentation from 1935 and presumably on scientific sources prepared for Warsaw’s Territorial Development of Communication and Transportation by Prof. O. Sosnowski. All these sources were skillfully extracted long before the war. At an early stage, thanks to German deception based on the false pretense of doing scientific research, the German planners concealed the hidden agenda necessary for creating such a plan. German scholars, historians, conservators and professors of architecture and other experts were enlisted to catalogue all of the most important and culturally significant landmarks of the city, the most exquisite churches and public buildings, key library collections, artworks and sculptures.
The "German Varsavia" was planned to be a built on the crossroad of German highways and railroad networks
. It covered a 6 km² built-up area plus 1 km² of the centuries-old Warsaw’s Prague district, for a combined 7 km² area, with parks and green areas bringing to a total of 15 km². The 7 km² of buildings was just 1/20 of the existing Polish capital city and was very different from the actual existing road network of 1939. The whole town center was to be built into a net of narrow, picturesque streets, resembling the planning of a typical German town. The modern and wide Polish capital avenues (like Ulica Marszałkowska, Twarda, Mokotowska, Dzika, Oś Saska, Oś Stanisławowska) would have been erased forever with all their monumental and beautiful buildings and palaces. Only the remains of the Old Town district
(without the Polish King’s Castle), the King’s Baths Palace and Belvedere
, and modified parts of the Vistula riverside buildings would have been saved.
into German hands the project was updated, incorporating the city's partial destruction in the September offensive of 1939. The project was soon to be included as a part of the overall Germanization plan of the East, the genocidal Generalplan Ost
.
On October 8, 1939 western areas of Poland were annexed
by the Third Reich, and on October 12, 1939 the central areas of Poland were incorporated into the General Government
by Hitler’s decrees. The capital of the Gubernia was placed in Kraków
(Krakau, Cracow) for security reasons. The occupying German elite was afraid of unsubdued Warsaw, calling the Polish capital the "City of Bandits" (Banditenstadt Warschau).
The plan was to be implemented in several stages. One of the parts for the plan, the "Demolition of the Polish City and the Construction of the German City" (Abbau der Polen-Stadt und der Aufbau der Deutschen Stadt) included a list of the Polish capital’s centers of life destined for destruction, put in chronological order based on planned liquidation date. The planners also decided to use the destruction caused by bombings and fires during the September 1939 seizure of the city as a pretext for the urbanistic changes. Another part of the plan included a detailed map of the anticipated destruction showing almost all buildings destroyed coincidentally according to the original plan. In reality only 10 percent of the buildings were destroyed in 1939, with total civilian and military losses of around 12,000 killed and 66,000 wounded.
In the "Small Plan" (Kleine Planung), the population of Warsaw was to be limited to 500,000 people. The first group affected by this measure was Warsaw's Jewish population, which the German planners assumed would be removed (Judenaussiedlung) from an area of around 482 hm² and forcibly relocated to a "Jewish Quarter
" (Judenviertel) which was 3.5 times smaller, i.e. 143 hm² surrounded by walls and watchtowers. In 1940, the Nazis turned the northern part of mid-town Warsaw (Wola and Muranow) into a Jewish ghetto. The Jewish Ghetto
was planned to accommodate around 30,000 of the capital's inhabitants that were of Jewish origin; however it eventually held nearly 400,000 people living in deplorable conditions. The next step for decreasing the original population of the city was the systematic displacement of people captured and destined for either slave labor in the Third Reich or extermination in concentration and labor camp
s. As early as 1940 all inhabitants of Warsaw were subject to round-ups (łapanki) and mass shootings in the streets. Nearly 250,000 civilians were eventually murdered this way. Memorial plaques can be seen throughout Warsaw today commemorating this indiscriminate program of ethnic cleansing men, women and children. Those who did not manage to escape were sent to death camps at Auschwitz or Majdanek
or forced into labour in Germany. Among the 2,857,500 Poles working as slave labor in the Third Reich during World War II, a significant percentage was composed of Warsaw and Warsaw province inhabitants.
On 6 February 1940 the German mayor of the city presented an unusual gift to Hans Frank
, the Governor-General of the Occupied Polish Territories. The gift was a full documentation of the new German town Warsaw (Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau), the so-called Pabst Plan, prepared by German architects Hubert Gross and Otto Nurnberger.
On October 9, 1942 Heinrich Himmler
ordered the creation of the Warsaw concentration camp
(Konzentrationslager Warschau - KL Warschau) which consisted of the Koło district camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager Warschau, 1939) and two other camps in the proximity of Dworzec Zachodni (Western Train Station, 1942): the Gęsia camp (Geese Street Camp, 1943) and the Bonifraterska camp (Bonifraterska Street Camp, 1943). KL Warschau was functioning until August 28, 1944 when the German government of the city ordered the evacuation of its prisoners
into the Third Reich, out of fear that the ongoing Warsaw Uprising might result in freeing them. The prisoners were transported to concentration camps in Third Reich: Dachau, Landsberg, Mühldorf
, Kaufering
, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück.
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
urban plan
Urban planning
Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
to reconstruct the city of Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
as a Nazi model city
Nazi architecture
Nazi architecture was an architectural plan which played a role in the Nazi party's plans to create a cultural and spiritual rebirth in Germany as part of the Third Reich....
. Named after its creator Friedrich Pabst, the Nazis' "Chief Architect for Warsaw", the plan assumed that Warsaw, the historical capital of Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and a city of 1.5 million inhabitants, would be completely destroyed and rebuilt as a small German town of not more than 130,000 inhabitants.
In modern historical works the term is used to denote any of the German World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
plans concerning the destruction and reconstruction of Warsaw. In particular the "Pabst Plan" refers to a plan prepared by Hubert Groß and Otto Nurnberger in 1940 and another plan, prepared by Pabst himself in 1942. Both plans envisioned the destruction of most of Warsaw with its historical monuments and residential areas. In its place a new model city was to be created as a seat for the German ruling class of the occupied Polish territories. It was to house a large Parteivolkshalle ("People's Party Hall") in place of the Royal Castle in Warsaw and serve as a major transportation hub.
After the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Germans decided to destroy the city in its entirety
Planned destruction of Warsaw
The planned destruction of Warsaw refers to the largely realised plans by Nazi Germany to completely raze the city. The plan was put into full motion after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944...
.
Pre-war planning
The destruction of the city was already planned long before its almost total destruction in 1944Planned destruction of Warsaw
The planned destruction of Warsaw refers to the largely realised plans by Nazi Germany to completely raze the city. The plan was put into full motion after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944...
, even prior to the start of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. On 20 June 1939, while Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg
Würzburg
Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....
, his attention was captured by a project to create a future "German" town – Warsaw , which later became known as the Pabst Plan. Herr Pabst prepared a technical plan for the annihilation of Warsaw and the complete ethnic cleansing of its native Polish population, with Polish Jews condemned to be the first destined for extermination. It envisaged the transformation of the Polish capital into a new, provincial German town, containing an exclusively ethnic German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
population of no more than 130,000 people on the left bank supported by a slave labour camp of 80,000 Poles on the right bank of the Vistula. Warsaw’s total population in 1935 was around 1.3 million, consisting of Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and other minorities, which meant that putting the new urbanization plan to work would require the complete removal of its entire population. The project included 15 separate plans and photos, and solid pre-build documentation. Among all the pages of the project the most important is a colored plan of the future town which was created by German architects in 1:20 000 scale titled: Die neue deutsche Stadt Warschau(Warsaw, the New German City). The final table bore the caption Der Abbau der Polenstadt und der Aufbau der Deutschen Stadt(The Destruction of the Polish City and the Construction of the German City).
Some parts of the project that were showing Warsaw’s urban development from the half of 17th century until the year 1935 were based on Polish documentation from 1935 and presumably on scientific sources prepared for Warsaw’s Territorial Development of Communication and Transportation by Prof. O. Sosnowski. All these sources were skillfully extracted long before the war. At an early stage, thanks to German deception based on the false pretense of doing scientific research, the German planners concealed the hidden agenda necessary for creating such a plan. German scholars, historians, conservators and professors of architecture and other experts were enlisted to catalogue all of the most important and culturally significant landmarks of the city, the most exquisite churches and public buildings, key library collections, artworks and sculptures.
The "German Varsavia" was planned to be a built on the crossroad of German highways and railroad networks
Breitspurbahn
The Breitspurbahn was a planned broad-gauge railway, a personal pet project of Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich of Germany, supposed to run on 3 metre gauge track with double-deck coaches between major cities of Grossdeutschland, Hitler's expanded Germany.-History:Since reparations due after...
. It covered a 6 km² built-up area plus 1 km² of the centuries-old Warsaw’s Prague district, for a combined 7 km² area, with parks and green areas bringing to a total of 15 km². The 7 km² of buildings was just 1/20 of the existing Polish capital city and was very different from the actual existing road network of 1939. The whole town center was to be built into a net of narrow, picturesque streets, resembling the planning of a typical German town. The modern and wide Polish capital avenues (like Ulica Marszałkowska, Twarda, Mokotowska, Dzika, Oś Saska, Oś Stanisławowska) would have been erased forever with all their monumental and beautiful buildings and palaces. Only the remains of the Old Town district
Warsaw Old Town
Warsaw's Old Town is the oldest historic district of the city. It is bounded by Wybrzeże Gdańskie, along the bank of the Vistula, and by Grodzka, Mostowa and Podwale Streets. It is one of Warsaw's most prominent tourist attractions....
(without the Polish King’s Castle), the King’s Baths Palace and Belvedere
Belweder
Belweder is a palace in Warsaw, a few kilometers south of the Royal Castle. The President of the Republic of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, resides at Belweder.-History:...
, and modified parts of the Vistula riverside buildings would have been saved.
Wartime implementation of the plan
After the start of military operations and the fall of the capitalSiege of Warsaw (1939)
The 1939 Battle of Warsaw was fought between the Polish Warsaw Army garrisoned and entrenched in the capital of Poland and the German Army...
into German hands the project was updated, incorporating the city's partial destruction in the September offensive of 1939. The project was soon to be included as a part of the overall Germanization plan of the East, the genocidal Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing to be undertaken in the Eastern European territories occupied by Germany during World War II...
.
On October 8, 1939 western areas of Poland were annexed
Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany
At the beginning of World War II, nearly a quarter of the pre-war Polish areas were annexed by Nazi Germany and placed directly under German civil administration, while the rest of Nazi occupied Poland was named as General Government...
by the Third Reich, and on October 12, 1939 the central areas of Poland were incorporated into the General Government
General Government
The General Government was an area of Second Republic of Poland under Nazi German rule during World War II; designated as a separate region of the Third Reich between 1939–1945...
by Hitler’s decrees. The capital of the Gubernia was placed in Kraków
Kraków
Kraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...
(Krakau, Cracow) for security reasons. The occupying German elite was afraid of unsubdued Warsaw, calling the Polish capital the "City of Bandits" (Banditenstadt Warschau).
The plan was to be implemented in several stages. One of the parts for the plan, the "Demolition of the Polish City and the Construction of the German City" (Abbau der Polen-Stadt und der Aufbau der Deutschen Stadt) included a list of the Polish capital’s centers of life destined for destruction, put in chronological order based on planned liquidation date. The planners also decided to use the destruction caused by bombings and fires during the September 1939 seizure of the city as a pretext for the urbanistic changes. Another part of the plan included a detailed map of the anticipated destruction showing almost all buildings destroyed coincidentally according to the original plan. In reality only 10 percent of the buildings were destroyed in 1939, with total civilian and military losses of around 12,000 killed and 66,000 wounded.
In the "Small Plan" (Kleine Planung), the population of Warsaw was to be limited to 500,000 people. The first group affected by this measure was Warsaw's Jewish population, which the German planners assumed would be removed (Judenaussiedlung) from an area of around 482 hm² and forcibly relocated to a "Jewish Quarter
Jewish Quarter
The Jewish Quarter is one of the four traditional quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem. The 116,000 square meter area lies in the southeastern sector of the walled city, and stretches from the Zion Gate in the south, along the Armenian Quarter on the west, up to the Street of the Chain in the...
" (Judenviertel) which was 3.5 times smaller, i.e. 143 hm² surrounded by walls and watchtowers. In 1940, the Nazis turned the northern part of mid-town Warsaw (Wola and Muranow) into a Jewish ghetto. The Jewish Ghetto
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of all Jewish Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. It was established in the Polish capital between October and November 15, 1940, in the territory of General Government of the German-occupied Poland, with over 400,000 Jews from the vicinity...
was planned to accommodate around 30,000 of the capital's inhabitants that were of Jewish origin; however it eventually held nearly 400,000 people living in deplorable conditions. The next step for decreasing the original population of the city was the systematic displacement of people captured and destined for either slave labor in the Third Reich or extermination in concentration and labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s. As early as 1940 all inhabitants of Warsaw were subject to round-ups (łapanki) and mass shootings in the streets. Nearly 250,000 civilians were eventually murdered this way. Memorial plaques can be seen throughout Warsaw today commemorating this indiscriminate program of ethnic cleansing men, women and children. Those who did not manage to escape were sent to death camps at Auschwitz or Majdanek
Majdanek
Majdanek was a German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, established during the German Nazi occupation of Poland. The camp operated from October 1, 1941 until July 22, 1944, when it was captured nearly intact by the advancing Soviet Red Army...
or forced into labour in Germany. Among the 2,857,500 Poles working as slave labor in the Third Reich during World War II, a significant percentage was composed of Warsaw and Warsaw province inhabitants.
On 6 February 1940 the German mayor of the city presented an unusual gift to Hans Frank
Hans Frank
Hans Michael Frank was a German lawyer who worked for the Nazi party during the 1920s and 1930s and later became a high-ranking official in Nazi Germany...
, the Governor-General of the Occupied Polish Territories. The gift was a full documentation of the new German town Warsaw (Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau), the so-called Pabst Plan, prepared by German architects Hubert Gross and Otto Nurnberger.
On October 9, 1942 Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
ordered the creation of the Warsaw concentration camp
Warsaw concentration camp
The Warsaw concentration camp was an associated group of the German Nazi concentration camps, possibly including an extermination camp, located in German-occupied Warsaw, capital city of Poland...
(Konzentrationslager Warschau - KL Warschau) which consisted of the Koło district camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager Warschau, 1939) and two other camps in the proximity of Dworzec Zachodni (Western Train Station, 1942): the Gęsia camp (Geese Street Camp, 1943) and the Bonifraterska camp (Bonifraterska Street Camp, 1943). KL Warschau was functioning until August 28, 1944 when the German government of the city ordered the evacuation of its prisoners
Death march
A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees. Those marching must walk over long distances for an extremely long period of time and are not supplied with food or water...
into the Third Reich, out of fear that the ongoing Warsaw Uprising might result in freeing them. The prisoners were transported to concentration camps in Third Reich: Dachau, Landsberg, Mühldorf
Mühldorf subcamp
In mid-1944, the Schutzstaffel established at Mühldorf in Bavaria the Mühldorf camp complex, a satellite system of the Dachau concentration camp to provide labor for an underground installation for the production of the Messerschmitt 262 , a jet fighter designed to challenge Allied air superiority...
, Kaufering
Kaufering concentration camp
Kaufering concentration camps were a network of subsidiary camps of the Dachau concentration camp.With the intensification of the Allied air war against German industrial and military enterprises after 1943, the German Armaments Ministry and the Schutzstaffel agreed to accelerate construction of...
, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück.
See also
- Planned destruction of WarsawPlanned destruction of WarsawThe planned destruction of Warsaw refers to the largely realised plans by Nazi Germany to completely raze the city. The plan was put into full motion after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944...
- Nazi architectureNazi architectureNazi architecture was an architectural plan which played a role in the Nazi party's plans to create a cultural and spiritual rebirth in Germany as part of the Third Reich....
- Welthauptstadt GermaniaWelthauptstadt GermaniaWelthauptstadt Germania refers to the projected renewal of the German capital Berlin during the Nazi period, part of Adolf Hitler's vision for the future of Germany after the planned victory in World War II...