With her recent book, architectural historian Despina Stratigakos offers a detailed history of how Nazi Germany's architectural plans shaped or were supposed to shape occupied Norway.
In her account, Stratigakos traces how the country should have become transformed into a Nordic utopia, with architecture and new building construction that would reflect the National Socialist ideology and offer a vision of Hitler's New Order. Stratigakos portrays in detail how much effort, resources, time, and prominent personnel Nazi Germany put into supposedly racially equal Norway to make it the architectural flagship of the Greater Germanic Reich, comprised of the occupied Germanic countries.
Hitler's Northern Utopia consists of five main chapters, each covering one distinct topic. While the first chapter gives a general overview of Nazi Germany's press accounts of Norway, the other four chapters explore German construction activities in the occupied country: infrastructure, with a main focus on highways (inspired by the German Autobahn) and the so-called Lebensbornheime; soldiers’ homes; town planning; and the plans for establishing a new Trondheim (near the original city of Trondheim), which was envisioned as the perfect example of a Nordic city.
A key player in this regard was Organisation Todt , named after its founder Fritz Todt, a National Socialist civil and military engineering organization responsible for a number of projects in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries. After Todt's death in 1942, Hitler's close collaborator and favorite architect, Albert Speer, took over the organization.
Stratigakos's study is built on a number of sources and different literature, showing how the decision-making processes in Berlin came about and which visions the architects, city planners, constructors, and Nazi leadership pursued. In doing so, she maps how Nazi Germany literally left its footprints in the Norwegian landscape. Her book is one of the most comprehensive accounts of this topic to date. It leaves the strongest impression when describing the dehumanizing aspects of this policy: the race breeding ambitions (manifested in the Lebensborn program) and the use of thousands of forced laborers (mainly Soviet and Yugoslav war prisoners) to realize Hitler's ambitious plans.
What is noticeable, however, is that Stratigakos does not seem to locate her book in the existing research landscape. There exist a number of studies, first and foremost written by Norwegian researchers, on Nazi construction policy in Norway, with a particular focus on Organisation Todt. Here, the large research project The Political Economy of Forced Labor: Organization Todt in Norway during the Second World War (Tvangsarbeidets politiske økonomi. Organisation Todt i Norge under andre verdenskrig), financed by the Norwegian Research Council, must be mentioned.
Thus, Stratigakos combines well-known topics with original research findings. This is evident when, for example, she maps the plans and decision-making processes around the proposed construction of New Trondheim, providing the most coherent summary of the German plans for Trondheim so far. In this chapter, she offers new information regarding Speer's and his architects’ roles in Norway. A similar approach is found in Hitler's Builders: Fritz Todt and Albert Speer in Norway (Hitlers byggherrer. Fritz Todt og Albert Speer i Norge [2021]) by Norwegian researcher Ketil Gjølme Andersen, which is a part of the research project mentioned above.
A general weakness of Stratigakos's book is that, for the most part, she refers only to English literature. This makes it seem as if a large part of the Norwegian research literature on Norway's occupation history has been ignored. It would have been helpful if she had communicated clearly to the reader where and to what extent she is contributing new perspectives and original findings. Since several of her sources have been used by other researchers, it would have been interesting from a research perspective to learn where she places herself in the field of Norwegian occupation history. The Lebensborn project in Norway and the use of forced labor, for example, have been investigated before and are familiar to the general public.
Given that Stratigakos builds her study on a number of archival sources, including Norwegian archives, it is striking that she uses sources written in Norwegian only to a very small extent. The complex structure of occupation policy and the role of Norwegian collaborators in the occupation regime are not thematized in her book. Such thematization would have required a close reading of Norwegian sources. Accordingly, Stratigakos's book is mainly a story of the occupier, and the Norwegian perspective is not sufficiently explored, with hardly any Norwegians in the picture. It raises the question of whether the Norwegian authorities played a role in Nazi Germany's building plans and, if so, what kind of role. This would have been an important topic to learn more about and would have provided several other perspectives in addition to a history written from above. Since the conditions of the occupation regime are not presented in Stratigakos's study, the reader has to assume that the German building plans and activities took place largely detached from local realities. But to what extent was this the case? Stratigakos does mention that occupied Norway was characterized by a strong civil resistance movement and a society that widely rejected the National Socialist ideology, a theme she could have explored further in order to reflect various kinds of reality checks that Hitler's builders experienced in a country that was mostly hostile toward the occupier, local collaborators, and National Socialist plans to reshape Norway.
While Stratigakos must generally be praised for her use of a vast number of sources, the selection of source material at times seems somewhat random. In particular, given that she uses very different types of sources with very different levels of usefulness and reliabilty, it would be helpful to learn more about the criteria she used when choosing her material. Why, for example, offer a chapter on German press accounts of Norway that stem first and foremost from the press-clippings collection of the Reich Commissariat's own propaganda department? In addition, more interconnection between the chapters would have given less of an impression of this being a collection of standalone articles. A clearer distinction between the building projects that eventually became a reality and those that remained at the planning stage, such as Hitler's vision for New Trondheim, would have contributed to a better understanding of which building projects Nazi Germany actually accomplished and which remained only an idea.
Despite these critical objections, Stratigakos offers a detailed and well-written account for a broader audience that is interested in learning more about how the Nazi New Order was intended to be realized through architecture and to reshape “racially equal” Norway.
