German Village (Dugway proving ground)
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German Village was the nickname for a range of residential houses constructed in 1943 by the U.S. Army in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, roughly a hundred kilometers southwest of Salt Lake City.
Dugway was a high-security testing facility for chemical and biological weapons. The purpose of the replicas of German homes, which were repeatedly rebuilt after being intentionally burned down, was to perfect tactics in the fire bombing of German residential areas during World War II.
The US Army employed German emigré architects such as Erich Mendelsohn to create copies as accurate as possible of the dwellings of densely populated poorer population quarters of Berlin. The main goal was to find a tactic to achieve a fire storm in the city center. Ironically the working class areas on which the test buildings were based, such as Wedding and Pankow, had been communist strongholds before Nazi repression suppressed dissent.
The architects who worked on the German village and on the Japanese equivalent also included Konrad Wachsmann and Antonin Raymond.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Mike Davis, "Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's Closet," in Dead Cities: And Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2002; paperback 2003), 64-83; ISBN 978-1565847651 or ISBN 1-56584-844-6.
[edit] External links
- Aerial view of German and Japanese villages, May 27 1943
- Assault on German village (Translation of article below)
- Angriff auf "German Village" Der Spiegel 11.10.1999
- German Village' may soon crumble
- Historic Evaluation of German Village at U.S. Army Dugway Proving Grounds
- US Army Bases
- Dugway MIL site on the village (With images of the village)
- Goodbye to Berlin
