Dresden by Frederick Taylor

the forcible occupation of the remaining Czech lands as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia just a few months later.
    As the decade advanced, the ancillary industrial area was slowly remilitarized. The administering company remained technically independent until 1941, when it was formally taken over by the army. However, long before that the main private companies leasing manufacturing and warehousing space there had been integrated into the rearmament program, and their freedom of activity accordingly limited.
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    A “PEARL” Dresden may have been, but the city had never been simply a collection of pretty buildings. Nor were all those buildings sacrosanct. Strict planning laws had kept large-scale industrial development to a minimum in the old center, the Altstadt, but even before 1933 historic areas had been redeveloped or demolished to accommodate the needs of a fast-growing city. To build the grandiose New Town Hall in the early 1900s, an extensive area of eighteenth-century dwellings had been cleared, and the expansion of the Alsberg department store complex in the late 1920s had also meant the demolition of a number of historic buildings in the Altstadt.
    It is ironic that these new commercial buildings, though built in a consciously “fitting” style, were steel-framed in the manner developed in America around the turn of the century, and therefore survived the bombing of Dresden in far better condition than the surrounding area. In the early Nazi years, before all civilian construction was postponed due to the war, several high-density, decaying districts were redeveloped, with entire blocks of picturesque but unsanitary houses being pulled down to provide more air and light and allow for street widening. Among the historic areas subjected to total demolition was the Frohngasse, which fronted a tumbledown network of dark yards and alleys notorious through the centuries as the haunts of prostitutes.
    Other observers—not just the city’s sex workers—were less than delighted at Hitler’s promise to reset their “pearl.” Several “garden suburbs” were built on the outskirts of the historic city, designed in the steep-roofed, traditional “Germanic” style favored by the Nazis. Like the new buildings, their tenants were politically sound—large families, many of whose breadwinners were employees of the National Socialist Party and affiliated organizations.
    Among the genuinely alarming elements of the “improvements” Hitler had promised was the building of a gigantic new Nazi Party conference hall and headquarters, the Gauforum. This was to be constructed in the overbearing style developed by Albert Speer—inflicting a disparity of scale with the surrounding city that Dresden’s adroit planners had spent centuries determined to avoid. The planned building would have meant demolishing hundreds of dwellings in the eastern part of the city center, and hacking off a great chunk of the Bürgerwiese, the carefully sculpted municipal park created in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscaping genius Paul Joseph Lenné. What remained of this precious area of greenery would have been demoted to little more than a decorative access area for the Nazi Party’s enormous congress building. Only the coming of war prevented this act of vandalism.
    There was also much thought of how Dresden, like Germany’s other historic cities, would cope with the increased motor traffic that the Reich’s new prosperity and dynamism would inevitably bring. In the Altstadt alone, it was planned that twenty-six hundred dwelling units would have to disappear to “open up” Dresden to cars and trucks. In 1937 Dresden, along with Hamburg, Augsburg, Bayreuth, Breslau, Graz, and Würzburg, was declared one of the so-called Führer cities singled out for direct intervention by Hitler and Speer. From now on, the fuddy-duddy