El Don Quijote de Viena
Wien, 3. Bezirk (not beautiful but prominent), Arenberg-Park, ehemaliger (ancient) Flakturm Wien (la torre antiaérea, la tour antiaérien, flak tower), a reminder of the past, a warning for the future and an upset in present times
(to see further pictures and read other information please go to the end of page!)
Flaktowers
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
The Vienna flak towers are six large, of reinforced concrete erected defensive and protective structures in Vienna, which were built in the years 1942-1945 as giant bomb shelters with fitted anti-aircraft guns and fire control. The architect of the flak towers was Friedrich Tamms (1904-1980).
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Image: Terrace of the flak tower in Arenbergpark
The system of the Vienna flak towers consists as a whole of six buildings, three turrets, each with a Feuerleitturm (fire-control tower). The three bunker pairs are arranged in a triangle in the approximate middle of which the Stephansdom is situated. The towers are of different heights, but their upper platforms are in exactly the same altitude, so that an overall coordination of air defense was possible. The maximum operating radius of the four main guns (12.8 cm twin) of each tower was under ideal conditions 20 km. The smaller platforms of combat and fire-control towers were provided for 2 cm anti-aircraft guns, but they were never used in Vienna. In addition to its military crew the flak towers in Vienna served as makeshift hospitals, housed radio stations and partly war-relevant technical companies and offered on a large scale air raid shelters for the population.
Flakturm Augarten
Picture: Flakturm, Augarten
After the war, the Red Army undertook blasting tests in Gefechtsturm (flak tower with battle platform) Augarten, but a removal of the towers failed because of the proximity to residential areas. Nowadays, a removal of the towers would be possible, but now existing only an official decision as to the two anti-aircraft towers in Augarten from 5 April 2000 (GZ 39.086/2/2000) because all six buildings ex lege have been put under monument protection. Today, the towers are partially owned by the City of Vienna and partly owned by the Republic of Austria. There were repeatedly attempts to rebuild the flak towers and make it usable. The ideas range from depot for important backup data to a café or hotel.
Planning
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark - Notstiege (Emergency flight of stairs)
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Elevator shaft to the left, original instructions for lift usage right
After the battles of World War II also spread more and more to Vienna, Adolf Hitler ordered on 9 September 1942 the construction of flak towers in Vienna. The Air Force leadership provided for this purpose as building sites the Schmelz (Vienna), the Prater and Floridsdorf but Hitler rejected these places since the city center would not have been adequately protected because of the large distances. After discussions with Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) Baldur von Schirach, the final locations were determined. Instead of the Augarten, however, was initially the Roßauer barracks under discussion. The decisive factor for the choice of the places were on the one hand, the easy availability of the building ground and on the other hand the possibility to establish railway connections. The plan provided after the victorious end of the war to disguise the flak towers with marble and devote them as monuments to the fallen German soldiers. As with all the flak towers Friedrich Tamms was responsible for the planning, he was represented in Vienna by Anton Ruschitzka, construction management held Franz Fuhrmann from Vienna's city building department. The military leadership rested with Major Wimberger, which, however, had no mission staff. The material procurement was carried out by the Organisation Todt.
Construction
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Emergency Exit Photo: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
With the construction of the flak towers the companies Philipp Holzmann and Gottlieb Tesch were commissioned, smaller firms being integrated via joint ventures. Since the availability of local workers due to conscription declined steadily, more and more prisoners of war, foreign and forced laborers were used in the course of the war. Cement was delivered primarily from Mannersdorf at Leithagebirge, to a lesser extent from Rodaun (situated in the outskirts of Vienna). The gravel stemmed from the gravel pits Padlesak in Felixdorf and Gustav Haager at Heidfeld at the Bratislava railway (Pressburger Bahn), about in the area of today's airport Wien-Schwechat. Sand was delivered in ships over the Danube Canal, which is why in the area of Weißgerberlände sand silos of the United Baustoffwerke AG were built. In this area was already in 1918 a feeder track of the tram through the Drorygasse. Although this was already in 1925 shut down it was restored in 1941 and enlarged in the following year after the construction of a new silo to two tracks. For the then due to the excavation of the foundations coming up overburden, at the Kratochwijlestraße (then Weissenbachstraße) in 22 District was created a landfill, which also got a tram connection.
This report is based on an article in the
WIKIPEDIA - The Free Encyclopedia
and is licensed under the GNU license
Free Documentation Creative Commons CC -BY- SA 3.0 Unported.
On Wikipedia there is List of the authors Available .
de.wikipedia.org
The monstrous remnants of the "Third Reich"
District II (Leopoldstadt), anti-aircraft towers in the Augarten, tram line 31 from metro station Scots ring/Schottenring (U2, U4).
On 15 March 1938 gathered some 200 000 Wiener (Viennese people) on Heldenplatz in order to celebrate the "Anschluss" of Austria to the so-called fatherland Germany, something, since the end of the first World War I many had been longing for. Adolf Hitler himself appeared on the balcony of the Neue Burg and announced: "As leader and Chancellor of the German nation and the Reich I report before story now the entry of my home in the German Reich". Then he boarded a plane back to Germany, the rest, as they say, is history. A few years later the magnificent Heroes Square (Heldenplatz) was dug up to plant vegetables there, they needed food for the distraught people who suffered the privations in Hitler's zusammenbrechendem (breaking down) "millennial Reich".
Right: Gefechtsturm in the Augarten
In Leopoldstadt
Below: The Leitturm (control tower) in Arenbergpark
In III. District highway (Landstraße).
The already existing and sometimes bombastic Viennese architecture the occupiers seems to have pleased, no major buildings were added during their reign. On 9 September 1942, however, Hitler decreed that the city center of Vienna like in Berlin and Hamburg should be protected by some huge flak towers, three pairs should form a defensive triangle, St. Stephen's Cathedral was the center. 1943/44, the German troops began the construction of two flak towers in the Augarten and defaced in this way Austria's oldest still existing and in 1712 laid out baroque garden. Another pair of flak towers emerged in Arenberg Park in III. District (Landstraße), a third near the Mariahilferstraße (in Esterházypark and in the courtyard of the barracks Stiftskaserne) in the VI. resp. VII. District (Mariahilf/Neubau). The towers have been made of almost indestructible, 2.5 to 3.5 meters thick reinforced concrete and were self-sufficient, and they possessed their own water and power supply, first aid station and air filters if it should come to a gas attack. Each pair of flak towers contained a big, provided with a heavy gun flak tower and a smaller control tower for communication. The first is either a square tower in the style of a fortress, like the one in the Arenbergpark (neunstöckig - nine storeys), 41.6 meters high, 57 meters in diameter) or a round tower, in fact, sixteen -sided, as in the Augarten Park and the yard of the Stiftskaserne Barracks (zwölfstöckig - twelve storeys, 50.6 meters high, 43 meters in diameter). The heaviest artillery gun (105-128 mm) was standing on the roof, on the projecting balconies below there were lighter guns (20 to 30 millimeters). The Leittürme, from which the air defense was coordinated, were all rectangular (neunstöckig - nine storeys, 39 to 51.4 meters high, 24 to 39 feet long) and equipped with a lighter gun, they possessed communication devices and searchlights on the roof. Toward the of the war the towers only just were functional. They also served as air-raid shelter for the people in the area and each tower had space for 30 000 people. In the event that the war ended with a victory, the architect, the builder of the Reichsautobahn Friedrich Tamms, already had prepared designs to dress up the towers with black marble plates in which the names of the dead German soldiers should be engraved in gold letters. So the towers would also have been victory and war memorials (and thus in a strange way similar to the Mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna or the Castel de Monte in Apulia).
In the bureau of an architect of Berlin were even found plans to demolish the Jewish Quarter in the Leopoldstadt and to build a huge Nazi forum. Today, however, there is in Leopoldstadt again a thriving Jewish life and the flak towers are frozen monuments to the darkest times of Viennese history (in fact, the Russians tried to destroy the tower in Augarten with dynamite, which later on was mistaken for the vandalism of a few schoolboys, by mistake a forgotten weapon depot setting on fire).
In a famous quote Hitler Vienna compared with a pearl, which he wanted to give a socket. Towards the end of war, however, this socket only consisted of bombed-out buildings and abandoned flak towers, silent witnesses of the delusion of their builder. As a result, only the Leitturm was used in Esterhazy Park, and today in it the house of the sea (Zoo - Haus des Meeres) is accommodated. Outside there is a climbing wall with 25 different routes, and the vertical wall and the projecting balconies give a perfect imitation of an overhanging cliff of 34 meters of height. A conservatory (or biotope) with a miniature rain forest along with monkeys and birds has been added on one side; it is entered through a door that only with difficulty could be broken in the two and a half meters thick reinforced concrete, but this also ensures a uniform temperature for aquariums and vivariums in the tower.
The stable temperatures also have the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) brought to take advantage of the flak tower in Arenberg Park as a magazine and occasional exhibition space; in the meantime it is known as Contemporary Art Tower (CAT).
A former air-raid shelter at the base of the Leitturm in Esterhazy Park now contains the Museum of Medieval legal history: the history of torture
Excerpts from
Duncan J. D. Smith; Only in Vienna
A travelling guide to strange places, secret places and hidden attractions
Translated from English by Brigitte Hilzensauer
Photographs by Duncan JD Smith
"The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt". Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Vienna is certainly one of the greatest and also the most homogeneous capitals in Europe. And it is one of the most fascinating. The overabundance of travel guides that are out there to buy, presents the not too demanding visitor a magical (and easily accessible) abundance of museums, churches, palaces and culinary venues, and they recount the history of the city since the times of the Romans over those of the Habsburg Empire to the present.
Courtesy
Christian Brandstätter Verlag mbH
The publishing service for museums, businesses and public authorities
www.brandstaetter - verlag.at
Total, totalitarian, dead
Picture: Flak tower in 1943 /44, Augarten
At the zero point of the knowledge about the progress of the world stands since 11 September 2001 "Ground Zero". The debris field of the World Trade Center was used as a metaphor, which for its part marks a zero point. "Ground Zero" is called the area that lies in the center of a nuclear explosion. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki this area has been explored, the experiments that began with Albert Einstein's warning of a nuclear policy of Nazi Germany, were successful beyond measure. The name for the nuclear program, "Manhattan Project". With the beginning of the new millennium "Ground Zero" is real returned to where it had once taken its nominal starting point. The skyscraper obviously is able to stimulate the imagination of physicists, ballistics and aeronauts. In the skyscraper the obsessions of the 20th century are concentrated, self-sufficiency and utopia become one in the sky billowing tower. It is the exalted and the sublime. It provides a beacon, of the construction as well as of the destruction.
As the World Trade Center each of the Viennese "flak towers" come along as pairs: One serves as control tower, the other as a flak tower. The central component is the platform, it was needed in high altitudes in order to have a clear field of fire over the city. The tower architecture, which thereby became necessary, one used for bunker systems, no fewer than 40,000 people should here find shelter. For other facilities there was also space: the Gaupropagandaleitung (Regional propaganda direction) for example, the radio station, a munitions factory. At three locations in the city - the triangle that they abzirkelten (encircled), took in Vienna's historic center - in the years 1943/44 had established an own self-contained world, with it corresponded an outside, the world of total war. The flak towers gave this world the architectural icon.
On 14 February 1943, the British Air Force had carpet bombings on German cities announced after it adversary those commitments to civility, just in war of some validity, namely to protect non- military targets, long ago had abandoned. It was a strategy that should give World War II a decisive turn. The Germans had their production concentrated on weapons with immediate penetrating power, especially on fighter planes and tanks. The Allies, however, swore on sustainability, on long-range bombers that now more and more were used. Against such so-called "flying fortresses" should prepare the city's flak towers.
On 18 February 1943 already, the Nazi regime had reacted propagandistically. Joseph Goebbels delivered in the Sportpalast (Sports Palace) those infamous speech in which an unleashed crowd at the top of its voice loud the hysterical question "Do you want total war?" applauded. From then on, the action would no longer overridingly occur on the fronts. Now, as Goebbels put it, the "phalanx of the homeland" was at stake. The war would be carried to the cities. In their midst, in the urban milieu that would now lose all nonchalance and any worth of life. Also, and just that is what the flak towers stand for: their comfort is the security wing, their promise the ammunition depot. They guarantee offensive and defensive in one. In this hard as reinforced concrete alignment, imagined the regime each of every Volksgenossen (member of the German nation).
The flak towers are the architecture of total war par excellence: monumental exclamation marks for military preparedness, towering icons of the resistiveness, uniform archetypes of a technical, an instrumental progress, to which the Nazi state with due atavism was always committed. Furthermore, comes to some extent the domestic political effect: The flak towers are citadels against the own population, reduits in the face of a psychological and social situation, which solely by forced violence, by martial law and concentration camps could be overmastered.
The prototype of the flak towers built up in Berlin, as well as their principle was conceived in the capital, especially by Albert Speer, the Minister for the war economy. But as a kind of urban identification mark they stand in Vienna, and also for this the logic of total war can be used. It is the logic of destruction, the so-called "Nero-command", which after Hitler's disposal would have provided the destruction of all remaining infrastructure in the German Reich. It is the logic of a perverted Darwinism, which would have applied the dictum of unworthy life in the moment of defeat on the own population.
In one of his table talks in May 1942, Hitler blustered about the "huge task to break ... the supremacy of Vienna in the cultural field ...". The hatred toward the city of his youth was notorious, and one may assume that the flak towers, whose placement the "Führer" personally ordered, the enemy, in a manner of speaking, definitely should stake out a target area. Because naturally, the towers would increasingly attract attacks on themselves. But they have the war unscathed as hardly another building survived. That they are standing for the long shot, the totalitarism this very day is clear. To eliminate them, would mean to turn the city with them in rubble.
Wien, 3. Bezirk (not beautiful but prominent), Arenberg-Park, ehemaliger (ancient) Flakturm Wien (la torre antiaérea, la tour antiaérien, flak tower), a reminder of the past, a warning for the future and an upset in present times
(to see further pictures and read other information please go to the end of page!)
Flaktowers
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
The Vienna flak towers are six large, of reinforced concrete erected defensive and protective structures in Vienna, which were built in the years 1942-1945 as giant bomb shelters with fitted anti-aircraft guns and fire control. The architect of the flak towers was Friedrich Tamms (1904-1980).
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Image: Terrace of the flak tower in Arenbergpark
The system of the Vienna flak towers consists as a whole of six buildings, three turrets, each with a Feuerleitturm (fire-control tower). The three bunker pairs are arranged in a triangle in the approximate middle of which the Stephansdom is situated. The towers are of different heights, but their upper platforms are in exactly the same altitude, so that an overall coordination of air defense was possible. The maximum operating radius of the four main guns (12.8 cm twin) of each tower was under ideal conditions 20 km. The smaller platforms of combat and fire-control towers were provided for 2 cm anti-aircraft guns, but they were never used in Vienna. In addition to its military crew the flak towers in Vienna served as makeshift hospitals, housed radio stations and partly war-relevant technical companies and offered on a large scale air raid shelters for the population.
Flakturm Augarten
Picture: Flakturm, Augarten
After the war, the Red Army undertook blasting tests in Gefechtsturm (flak tower with battle platform) Augarten, but a removal of the towers failed because of the proximity to residential areas. Nowadays, a removal of the towers would be possible, but now existing only an official decision as to the two anti-aircraft towers in Augarten from 5 April 2000 (GZ 39.086/2/2000) because all six buildings ex lege have been put under monument protection. Today, the towers are partially owned by the City of Vienna and partly owned by the Republic of Austria. There were repeatedly attempts to rebuild the flak towers and make it usable. The ideas range from depot for important backup data to a café or hotel.
Planning
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark - Notstiege (Emergency flight of stairs)
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Elevator shaft to the left, original instructions for lift usage right
After the battles of World War II also spread more and more to Vienna, Adolf Hitler ordered on 9 September 1942 the construction of flak towers in Vienna. The Air Force leadership provided for this purpose as building sites the Schmelz (Vienna), the Prater and Floridsdorf but Hitler rejected these places since the city center would not have been adequately protected because of the large distances. After discussions with Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) Baldur von Schirach, the final locations were determined. Instead of the Augarten, however, was initially the Roßauer barracks under discussion. The decisive factor for the choice of the places were on the one hand, the easy availability of the building ground and on the other hand the possibility to establish railway connections. The plan provided after the victorious end of the war to disguise the flak towers with marble and devote them as monuments to the fallen German soldiers. As with all the flak towers Friedrich Tamms was responsible for the planning, he was represented in Vienna by Anton Ruschitzka, construction management held Franz Fuhrmann from Vienna's city building department. The military leadership rested with Major Wimberger, which, however, had no mission staff. The material procurement was carried out by the Organisation Todt.
Construction
Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Picture: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
Emergency Exit Photo: Flakturm, Arenbergpark
With the construction of the flak towers the companies Philipp Holzmann and Gottlieb Tesch were commissioned, smaller firms being integrated via joint ventures. Since the availability of local workers due to conscription declined steadily, more and more prisoners of war, foreign and forced laborers were used in the course of the war. Cement was delivered primarily from Mannersdorf at Leithagebirge, to a lesser extent from Rodaun (situated in the outskirts of Vienna). The gravel stemmed from the gravel pits Padlesak in Felixdorf and Gustav Haager at Heidfeld at the Bratislava railway (Pressburger Bahn), about in the area of today's airport Wien-Schwechat. Sand was delivered in ships over the Danube Canal, which is why in the area of Weißgerberlände sand silos of the United Baustoffwerke AG were built. In this area was already in 1918 a feeder track of the tram through the Drorygasse. Although this was already in 1925 shut down it was restored in 1941 and enlarged in the following year after the construction of a new silo to two tracks. For the then due to the excavation of the foundations coming up overburden, at the Kratochwijlestraße (then Weissenbachstraße) in 22 District was created a landfill, which also got a tram connection.
This report is based on an article in the
WIKIPEDIA - The Free Encyclopedia
and is licensed under the GNU license
Free Documentation Creative Commons CC -BY- SA 3.0 Unported.
On Wikipedia there is List of the authors Available .
de.wikipedia.org
The monstrous remnants of the "Third Reich"
District II (Leopoldstadt), anti-aircraft towers in the Augarten, tram line 31 from metro station Scots ring/Schottenring (U2, U4).
On 15 March 1938 gathered some 200 000 Wiener (Viennese people) on Heldenplatz in order to celebrate the "Anschluss" of Austria to the so-called fatherland Germany, something, since the end of the first World War I many had been longing for. Adolf Hitler himself appeared on the balcony of the Neue Burg and announced: "As leader and Chancellor of the German nation and the Reich I report before story now the entry of my home in the German Reich". Then he boarded a plane back to Germany, the rest, as they say, is history. A few years later the magnificent Heroes Square (Heldenplatz) was dug up to plant vegetables there, they needed food for the distraught people who suffered the privations in Hitler's zusammenbrechendem (breaking down) "millennial Reich".
Right: Gefechtsturm in the Augarten
In Leopoldstadt
Below: The Leitturm (control tower) in Arenbergpark
In III. District highway (Landstraße).
The already existing and sometimes bombastic Viennese architecture the occupiers seems to have pleased, no major buildings were added during their reign. On 9 September 1942, however, Hitler decreed that the city center of Vienna like in Berlin and Hamburg should be protected by some huge flak towers, three pairs should form a defensive triangle, St. Stephen's Cathedral was the center. 1943/44, the German troops began the construction of two flak towers in the Augarten and defaced in this way Austria's oldest still existing and in 1712 laid out baroque garden. Another pair of flak towers emerged in Arenberg Park in III. District (Landstraße), a third near the Mariahilferstraße (in Esterházypark and in the courtyard of the barracks Stiftskaserne) in the VI. resp. VII. District (Mariahilf/Neubau). The towers have been made of almost indestructible, 2.5 to 3.5 meters thick reinforced concrete and were self-sufficient, and they possessed their own water and power supply, first aid station and air filters if it should come to a gas attack. Each pair of flak towers contained a big, provided with a heavy gun flak tower and a smaller control tower for communication. The first is either a square tower in the style of a fortress, like the one in the Arenbergpark (neunstöckig - nine storeys), 41.6 meters high, 57 meters in diameter) or a round tower, in fact, sixteen -sided, as in the Augarten Park and the yard of the Stiftskaserne Barracks (zwölfstöckig - twelve storeys, 50.6 meters high, 43 meters in diameter). The heaviest artillery gun (105-128 mm) was standing on the roof, on the projecting balconies below there were lighter guns (20 to 30 millimeters). The Leittürme, from which the air defense was coordinated, were all rectangular (neunstöckig - nine storeys, 39 to 51.4 meters high, 24 to 39 feet long) and equipped with a lighter gun, they possessed communication devices and searchlights on the roof. Toward the of the war the towers only just were functional. They also served as air-raid shelter for the people in the area and each tower had space for 30 000 people. In the event that the war ended with a victory, the architect, the builder of the Reichsautobahn Friedrich Tamms, already had prepared designs to dress up the towers with black marble plates in which the names of the dead German soldiers should be engraved in gold letters. So the towers would also have been victory and war memorials (and thus in a strange way similar to the Mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna or the Castel de Monte in Apulia).
In the bureau of an architect of Berlin were even found plans to demolish the Jewish Quarter in the Leopoldstadt and to build a huge Nazi forum. Today, however, there is in Leopoldstadt again a thriving Jewish life and the flak towers are frozen monuments to the darkest times of Viennese history (in fact, the Russians tried to destroy the tower in Augarten with dynamite, which later on was mistaken for the vandalism of a few schoolboys, by mistake a forgotten weapon depot setting on fire).
In a famous quote Hitler Vienna compared with a pearl, which he wanted to give a socket. Towards the end of war, however, this socket only consisted of bombed-out buildings and abandoned flak towers, silent witnesses of the delusion of their builder. As a result, only the Leitturm was used in Esterhazy Park, and today in it the house of the sea (Zoo - Haus des Meeres) is accommodated. Outside there is a climbing wall with 25 different routes, and the vertical wall and the projecting balconies give a perfect imitation of an overhanging cliff of 34 meters of height. A conservatory (or biotope) with a miniature rain forest along with monkeys and birds has been added on one side; it is entered through a door that only with difficulty could be broken in the two and a half meters thick reinforced concrete, but this also ensures a uniform temperature for aquariums and vivariums in the tower.
The stable temperatures also have the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) brought to take advantage of the flak tower in Arenberg Park as a magazine and occasional exhibition space; in the meantime it is known as Contemporary Art Tower (CAT).
A former air-raid shelter at the base of the Leitturm in Esterhazy Park now contains the Museum of Medieval legal history: the history of torture
Excerpts from
Duncan J. D. Smith; Only in Vienna
A travelling guide to strange places, secret places and hidden attractions
Translated from English by Brigitte Hilzensauer
Photographs by Duncan JD Smith
"The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt". Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Vienna is certainly one of the greatest and also the most homogeneous capitals in Europe. And it is one of the most fascinating. The overabundance of travel guides that are out there to buy, presents the not too demanding visitor a magical (and easily accessible) abundance of museums, churches, palaces and culinary venues, and they recount the history of the city since the times of the Romans over those of the Habsburg Empire to the present.
Courtesy
Christian Brandstätter Verlag mbH
The publishing service for museums, businesses and public authorities
www.brandstaetter - verlag.at
Total, totalitarian, dead
Picture: Flak tower in 1943 /44, Augarten
At the zero point of the knowledge about the progress of the world stands since 11 September 2001 "Ground Zero". The debris field of the World Trade Center was used as a metaphor, which for its part marks a zero point. "Ground Zero" is called the area that lies in the center of a nuclear explosion. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki this area has been explored, the experiments that began with Albert Einstein's warning of a nuclear policy of Nazi Germany, were successful beyond measure. The name for the nuclear program, "Manhattan Project". With the beginning of the new millennium "Ground Zero" is real returned to where it had once taken its nominal starting point. The skyscraper obviously is able to stimulate the imagination of physicists, ballistics and aeronauts. In the skyscraper the obsessions of the 20th century are concentrated, self-sufficiency and utopia become one in the sky billowing tower. It is the exalted and the sublime. It provides a beacon, of the construction as well as of the destruction.
As the World Trade Center each of the Viennese "flak towers" come along as pairs: One serves as control tower, the other as a flak tower. The central component is the platform, it was needed in high altitudes in order to have a clear field of fire over the city. The tower architecture, which thereby became necessary, one used for bunker systems, no fewer than 40,000 people should here find shelter. For other facilities there was also space: the Gaupropagandaleitung (Regional propaganda direction) for example, the radio station, a munitions factory. At three locations in the city - the triangle that they abzirkelten (encircled), took in Vienna's historic center - in the years 1943/44 had established an own self-contained world, with it corresponded an outside, the world of total war. The flak towers gave this world the architectural icon.
On 14 February 1943, the British Air Force had carpet bombings on German cities announced after it adversary those commitments to civility, just in war of some validity, namely to protect non- military targets, long ago had abandoned. It was a strategy that should give World War II a decisive turn. The Germans had their production concentrated on weapons with immediate penetrating power, especially on fighter planes and tanks. The Allies, however, swore on sustainability, on long-range bombers that now more and more were used. Against such so-called "flying fortresses" should prepare the city's flak towers.
On 18 February 1943 already, the Nazi regime had reacted propagandistically. Joseph Goebbels delivered in the Sportpalast (Sports Palace) those infamous speech in which an unleashed crowd at the top of its voice loud the hysterical question "Do you want total war?" applauded. From then on, the action would no longer overridingly occur on the fronts. Now, as Goebbels put it, the "phalanx of the homeland" was at stake. The war would be carried to the cities. In their midst, in the urban milieu that would now lose all nonchalance and any worth of life. Also, and just that is what the flak towers stand for: their comfort is the security wing, their promise the ammunition depot. They guarantee offensive and defensive in one. In this hard as reinforced concrete alignment, imagined the regime each of every Volksgenossen (member of the German nation).
The flak towers are the architecture of total war par excellence: monumental exclamation marks for military preparedness, towering icons of the resistiveness, uniform archetypes of a technical, an instrumental progress, to which the Nazi state with due atavism was always committed. Furthermore, comes to some extent the domestic political effect: The flak towers are citadels against the own population, reduits in the face of a psychological and social situation, which solely by forced violence, by martial law and concentration camps could be overmastered.
The prototype of the flak towers built up in Berlin, as well as their principle was conceived in the capital, especially by Albert Speer, the Minister for the war economy. But as a kind of urban identification mark they stand in Vienna, and also for this the logic of total war can be used. It is the logic of destruction, the so-called "Nero-command", which after Hitler's disposal would have provided the destruction of all remaining infrastructure in the German Reich. It is the logic of a perverted Darwinism, which would have applied the dictum of unworthy life in the moment of defeat on the own population.
In one of his table talks in May 1942, Hitler blustered about the "huge task to break ... the supremacy of Vienna in the cultural field ...". The hatred toward the city of his youth was notorious, and one may assume that the flak towers, whose placement the "Führer" personally ordered, the enemy, in a manner of speaking, definitely should stake out a target area. Because naturally, the towers would increasingly attract attacks on themselves. But they have the war unscathed as hardly another building survived. That they are standing for the long shot, the totalitarism this very day is clear. To eliminate them, would mean to turn the city with them in rubble.