Rudolf Hillebrecht

His paternal grandfather, Heinrich Hillebrecht, had moved to Linden with his young wife in 1871 to find work as a bricklayer.

He prospered.

His mother, born Bertha Arning (1875–1964), was the daughter of a Hannover Buildings Inspector, a government official of some importance at the time.

Rudolf was his parents' only recorded child.

Ernst Hillebrecht (1876–1938), his father, was a grain trader.

Rudolf Hillebrecht (26 February 1910 – 6 March 1999) was a German architect and city planner.

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.

He attended the nearby (and subsequently renamed) Empress Augusta Victoria secondary school, passing his Abitur (school graduation exam) in 1928, thereby opening the way to university-level education.

On leaving school Rudolf Hillebrecht enrolled at the Technische Hochschule Hannover (Technical University) in order to study Architecture.

After two years he transferred to the "Technische Hochschule" (as it was known at that time) in Berlin-Charlottenburg where his teachers included Heinrich Tessenow and Hermann Jansen.

Two years later, when he passed his "Dipl.- Ing."

final exams and received his degree, he was back in Hannover.

He went on to work with Adolf Falke and Hans Nitzschke who ran an architectural firm in Hannover.

This appears to have been part of a post-graduate traineeship.

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.

They presented a proposal for a modern cubist development decorated with an abundance of swastika flags.

(Gropius, who had made the political error ten years before the Hitler take-over of choosing a Jewish wife, emigrated a few months later.) 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.

Passing the Level 2 national architecture exams in 1937 opened up new professional opportunities.

Hillebrecht left government service and accepted a senior appointment as a "Chefarchitekt" with Konstanty Gutschow in Hamburg.

Gutschow was in exceptionally good standing with the government, having recently submitted an entry to a government competition for the "Elbufer" ("Elbe shore") development in the context of the prestigious "Führerstädte" initiative, with a massive riverside redevelopment scheme incorporating the latest ideas from New York, including a 250m high sky-scraper for the party.

The Gutschow tender so impressed the leader that in January 1939 he intervened personally to award first place to the Gutschow scheme.

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".

Hillebrecht was by now part of a small inner circle in Gutschow's architecture practice which, at the start of 1941, numbered 150 people.

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.

Running Gutschow's office, Hillebrecht displayed formidable organisational abilities.

He was involved in the scheme for rebuilding Hamburg, co-ordinating the use both of prisoners of war and German detainees as forced labourers.

Notably, he organised the procurement of materials for the rapid construction of air-raid shelters.

That included the large-scale procurement of clinker bricks from the infamous Neuengamme concentration camp brick factory.

By the end of 1942 that had increased to 250.

At least one commentator describes Hillebrecht as "Gutrschow's closest co-worker" during this time

In December 1943 Hillebrecht and Gutschow became active members of Albert Speer's "Arbeitsstab für den Wiederaufbau bombenzerstörter Städte" (loosely, "Rebuilding staff") team.

During January 1944 the two men undertook a tour which involved visiting 24 towns and cities that had suffered major destruction from aerial bombing.

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.

In 1948, against an impressive list of rival candidates, he succeeded in obtaining appointment as city planning officer for his home city of Hannover, with a mandate to rebuild a city that had suffered massive bomb damage between 1942 and 1945.

He approached his task with evangelical zeal.

His ideas for post-war Hanover aligned with the prevailing spirit of the "Wirtschaftswunder" years, and by 1959 it was possible to boast that Hannover was the only city in West Germany with its own network of city motorways, while Hillebrecht had probably become the only man alive in Hannover with an international reputation.

Urban developments during the next twenty years repeatedly demonstrated the extent of Hillebrand's influence across and beyond western Europe.

His redevelopment of Hannover was nevertheless not uncontroversial even at the time.

A large number of historical buildings that had somehow survived Anglo-American bombing were now destroyed out of deference to a larger plan: some of the Hilebrecht plans involving wholesale destruction and replacement of entire districts of the city were indeed never implemented.

Hillebrecht himself later conceded that the destruction, during the early 1960s, of Hannover's striking neo-Renaissance "Flusswasserkunst" (water treatment plant) had been a mistake.