Hitler's Northern Utopia

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

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 Hitler-s Northern Utopia, 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.

Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well