New political and administrative entities, formed to govern territories occupied between 1938 and 1942, had spatial and urban planning as core features.

Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect, applied his skills to design and construct buildings and cities in support of the Nazi ideology.

This was achieved by introducing communist political ideas into the very nature of building and city design, such as through the construction of 'living cells' and collective farms.

[3] For the Third Reich and other European dictatorships of this period, urban design and planning were vital to their ideological implementation on both their homelands and conquered territories to display power and authority.

[4] This manifested itself in many ways throughout Germany, including the replacement of slums with middle-class employment and alignment of huge monuments to be visible from the entire metropolitan area.

[4] This application of spatial planning took a more sinister tone when Germany began conquering new territory, inhabited by people who they considered 'undesirables'.

In these areas, urban design and planning formed part of a wide range of tools used by the Nazi Party to control and ultimately destroy these populations and their culture.

Purpose-built ghettos in cities such as Warsaw and Lvov were deliberately created to separate Jews from the rest of the population and produce terrible living conditions.

In the style of Haussmann's renovation of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the inner city was to be demolished and replaced with grand public buildings, wide boulevards and nationalistic monuments.

[13] Similar scenarios of urban planning as a use for social control and racial segregation were to be repeated across Nazi-occupied territories, especially across Eastern Europe.

[12][15] Some urban planners and designers who worked under the Nazi regime fled Germany post-war and brought their ideas and experiences with them.

The only outcome noted by an urban planning historian was that, while the roads and sidewalks were spacious, there was much less traffic in proportion to the plentiful space, simply because car ownership was less common for its time.