Planning and building under the National Socialists pervaded all areas of life between 1933 and 1945 and were inseparably linked to the regime's totalitarian practices - both in the German Reich and in the European territories it occupied. The members of the Independent Commission of Historians - Wolfgang Benz, Tilman Harlander, Elke Pahl-Weber, Wolfram Pyta, Adelheid von Saldern, Wolfgang Schäche and Regina Stephan - were tasked by what is now the Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building with the research project "Planning and Building under the National Socialists: Prerequisities, Institutions, Impacts". The research findings are presented in their essays, each of which draws on contemporary photographs and plans with accompanying commentary to amplify seven areas of focus: Housing and Settlements, Party and State Architecture, Camps in the National Socialist Era, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning, Internationality, Continuities in Urban Planning and Architecture in the East and West after 1945, The Building Legacies of National Socialism. Included in the book are biographies of fifty architects, landscape designers, construction specialists and civil servants.