Hitler's Northern Utopia

<p><b>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</b> <p/>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. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway plans to remake the country into a model Aryan society fired the imaginations of Hitler his architect Albert Speer and other Nazi leaders. In <i>Hitler's Northern Utopia</i> 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. <p/>Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries photographs and maps as well as newspapers from the period <i>Hitler's Northern Utopia </i>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. <p/>A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway <i>Hitler's Northern Utopia </i>reveals a haunting vision of what might have been--a world colonized under the swastika.</p>