Pabst Plan

The Pabst Plan (German: Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau, "New German city of Warsaw") 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", who did not work on the plan, 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.

The destruction of the city was already planned long before its almost total destruction in 1944, 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 (German: Warschau, Polish: Warszawa), which later became known as the Pabst Plan. Friedrich 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).

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