Nordstern (city)

The conquest of Norway by the Wehrmacht presented the military leadership of the Nazi Germany with new opportunities for expansion. The city of Trondheim and its accompanying bay were determined to be very favorably located strategically for several reasons. Prior to the outbreak of war, the retired Vizeadmiral and naval strategist Wolfgang Wegener had already long stressed the strategic benefits that acquiring bases along the Norwegian coastline would give Germany. One notable example of these benefits is the case of the battleship , which had to be continually moved back to Germany for any additional repairs that she required. Due to her sheer size, there were simply no other docks in the north large enough to accommodate her. After the failure of the Luftwaffe to subdue Great Britain in the Battle of Britain by airpower alone, it was recognized that the fight for the British Isles would have to be fought and won at sea. ==History==

Preparatory work on the possibility of turning the bay around Trondheim into a new German naval base was already started at the Führer Headquarters before the project was officially commissioned by Hitler in 1941. As a permanent German possession, it was acknowledged that some arrangements would have to be made for its resident seamen and their accompanying families. Hitler concluded that this new harbor would make the construction of an accompanying city inevitable, with living accommodations for 250,000 inhabitants. He dubbed the new settlement Nordstern ("Northern Star"). On 1 May 1941, Speer received the necessary information on the spatial and structural requirements for a large shipyard from Vizeadmiral of the Oberkommando der Marine (Naval High Command; OKM). ==Location, size, and plans==

It was decided that the city was to be built in the wetlands of Øysand, to the southwest of Trondheim. It was supposed to provide living quarters for about 300,000 German inhabitants (more than three times the size of 1940s Trondheim), and for this purpose 55,000 residential houses were to be built on an area of approximately . The city was also to house an enormous art museum for the northern part of Germany's empire, containing "only works of German masters". The city was also meant to house a monumental war cemetery and monument, which would hold the remains of thirty-one hundred German war dead. An Autobahn was to be constructed to Trondheim across the Little and Great Belts of Denmark and further through southwest Sweden and Norway to connect the northern outpost with Germany proper. ==Atlantic Wall==

As one of Germany's most important naval bases in the anticipated near future, the city played an important role in German schemes for a massively enlarged version of the Atlantic Wall. Nordstern would therefore be one among many military quasi-colonies with almost exclusively German inhabitants. Together with other cities and island chains in both Europe and Africa, it was to form part of a string of German military bases that would span the entire Atlantic coastline from Norway all the way to the Belgian Congo. This was to assist Germany with the re-establishment of a large overseas colonial domain in Central Africa known as Mittelafrika, and was also intended for both offensive and defensive operations against the Western Hemisphere, specifically the United States. ==See also==