Architecture in the New Reich

Abstract

Paul Troost was Hitler’s favored architect in the early years of the National Socialist regime, but died in January 1934, barely a year after the National Socialist Party had gained power. His widow, Gerdy Troost, who was also an architect, maintained close connections with Hitler as an architectural advisor, and published a semi-official survey of National Socialist architecture, from which the text that follows is extracted. The focus of this text is the community’s attachment to the German Heimat, the homeland, and the architecture that, according to Troost, is appropriate to it.

Keywords:

• Gerdy Troost
• Paul Troost
• architecture
• National Socialism
• Heimat
• homeland

Notes

1 Gerdy Troost, Das Bauen im neuen Reich (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1938), 24.

2 Idem, 60.

3 Idem, 53–54.

4 For a biography of Gerdy Troost, see Despina Stratigakos: Die Nationalsozialistin: Gerdy Troost, in Christina Budde, Mary Pepchinski, Peter Cachola Schmal, and Wolfgang Voigt (eds.), Frau Architekt. Seit mehr als 100 Jahren: Frauen im Architekturberuf. Over 100 Years of Women in Architecture. (Tübingen & Berlin, Wasmuth 2017), 146–151.

5 Editor’s note: the Adolf-Hitler-Koog (now the Dieksanderkoog) was an area of nearly 3,300 acres in Dithmarschen, Northern Germany, adjoining the North Sea, which was reclaimed as a governmental work creation project and opened by Hitler himself in August 1935. The first residents of the new housing built there were chosen as representatives of “ancient Germanen farming stock”—91 out of a total of 92 were members of the National Socialist Party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerdy Troost

Translated from German by Richard George Elliott

Originally published as Das Bauen im Neuen Reich (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1938), 5, 116–18, 126–27, 134–38.