[1][2][3] Heinrich Friedrich Rudolf Hillebrecht was born in the north German village of Linden (since 1920 subsumed into Hannover and known as "Hannover-Linden") during the final decade of the Wilhelmine empire years.
[4] On leaving school Rudolf Hillebrecht enrolled at the Technische Hochschule Hannover (Technical University) in order to study Architecture.
During the first part of 1934 he was seconded to Berlin where he worked for Walter Gropius, helping with an entry for the "Häuser der Arbeit" architectural competition conducted under the auspices of the government backed German Labour Front.
)[8] After that Hillebrecht found a job with the "Bundesverband der Deutschen Luft- und Raumfahrtindustrie" working in Travemünde and Hamburg, exercising an oversight role as a government construction manager for a so-called anti-aircraft barracks development in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf.
[9] In 1939 Gutschow was appointed "Architekt des Elbufers" ("Architect to the Elbe Riverside") by Gauleiter (regional governor) |Karl Kaufmann and given the task of drawing up a more wide ranging redevelopment plan for a new "Führerstadt Hamburg".
At least one commentator describes Hillebrecht as "Gutrschow's closest co-worker" during this time [10][11][12] Starting in 1941, as Anglo-American bombing began to take its toll on Hamburg's civilian infrastructure, Gutschow's practice acquired a complementary role as the "Amt für kriegswichtigen Einsatz", organising operations made necessary by war damage, such as rubble clearance, air-raid protection measures and finding replacement housing for civilians whose homes had been destroyed.
[15][16] In December 1943 Hillebrecht and Gutschow became active members of Albert Speer's "Arbeitsstab für den Wiederaufbau bombenzerstörter Städte" (loosely, "Rebuilding staff") team.
[18] An early result was their report "Richtlinien zur Statistik" ("Guidelines for Statistics") and an extensive amount of damage mapping, intended to serve as the basis for post-war reconstruction plans.
[19] The slaughter of war was by this time leaving the army desperately short of fighting men, and in September 1944 Rudolf Hillebrecht, still aged only 34, was conscripted into an artillery regiment.
[17] At the start of 1946 Hillebrecht found a job which involved responsibility for reconstruction with Viktor Agartz, a socialist politician and academic who had recently been given charge of the "Main Regional Office for Economic Matters" by the British military administrators.
[20] After successfully applying for a post as city buildings officer in Hannover, in 1948 continued to implement the concepts he had developed in the context of Speer's "Arbeitsstab für den Wiederaufbau" plans with Gutschow, during their time together in Hamburg.
[21] The exhibition consciously emphasised the role of Hannover in pointing the way ahead for other cities looking to rebuild and redevelop in anticipation of a new age of mass mobility.
[19] Hillebrecht and, after 1948, his newly recruited planning office manager Hans Stosberg[b] formed an exceptionally "well-trained team", backed up by an unusual degree of professional mutual trust, in the judgment of the architecture historian Werner Durth.
[2][3] Despite very considerable – and understandable – resistance, Hillebrecht managed to persuade land owners not to insist on preserving plot shapes and sizes corresponding precisely to those on place before the British and American bombers destroyed so much of the city.
Today Hillebrecht continues to be seen as the harbinger of a generation of city planners who re-defined urban living space for the second half of the twentieth century, realising in concrete the post-war dream of a car-friendly metropolis.
Despite popular protest, a number of old buildings of significant historical and architectural interest and merit, having survived the war, were torn down rather than being repaired or restored.
Another was the Friederikenschlösschen (palace) constructed one and a half centuries earlier by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves alongside the brutally repurposed Friederikenplatz.
In 1975 Rudolf Hillebrecht was succeeded at the Hannover planning department by Hanns Adrian, heralding a slightly less bombastic approach to city redevelopment.
[31] In this way Hillebrecht's vision continues to underpin Hannover's reputation as a principal shopping city for a large part of north Germany.