Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
New Town ideas of the anti-Semitic propagandist Theodor Fritsch.
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Relo-
cating city dwellers into smaller settlements at the edges of cities or out in
the countryside, the Reich's program of decentralization—also referred to
as “internal colonization” or “repatriation”—produced new housing proj-
ects around the country, usually in conjunction with industrial sites.
According to Nazi propagandists, resettlement would remove down-
trodden city dwellers from corrupting urban environments and bind
them spiritually and morally to “Mother Earth” in a new form of rural
industrial town. In actual practice, the decentralization program became
a tool for social control and forced migration of undesirables; it emphasized
the resettlement of minority groups and workers—a policy with deadly
implications.
NAZI IDEOLOGIES OF RESETTLEMENT
The
Siedlungs
program's framing ideologies can be seen in the views of two
high Nazi officials: Richard Walter Darré and Gottfried Feder. Darré,
Hitler's agriculture minister and one of the Nazi Party's most powerful fig-
ures, brought a fierce anti-urban and anti-technology bias to National
Socialist ideology. In his “blood and soil” philosophy, he categorized
Europe's original peoples as either “settlers” or “nomads.” Darré idealized
the non-urban, land-loving peasantry—the settlers—as precursors of the
“Nordic race” and condemned the nomads, citified purveyors of godless
technology, as the progenitors of all other races, especially the “Semitic” and
the “oriental.” He called for “repatriating” urban populations to the soil as
the only way to restore Nordic racial values. His racist mythology took a
deadly turn when Heinrich Himmler made him head of the Race and Set-
tlement Office within the S.S., which implemented Himmler's resettlement
policies, and he became deeply implicated in the execution of “the final
solution.”
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Gottfried Feder, the Reich's
Siedlungskommisar,
launched a broad pro-
gram of invented cities that sought a compromise between urban/techno-
logical and rural/agrarian values. He had a powerful role in shaping the
Reich's policy of decentralizing urban populations and in carrying out the
ideology of “blood and soil.” Not sharing Darre's anti-technology views, he
envisioned “green” towns of around 20,000 people that combined agricul-
ture with industry. Feder compared the new city to an organism, hierarchi-
cally organized with lesser parts linked to greater, much as cells in the body
