Austria, contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project... According to one of Hitler's secretaries, he never tired of talking about his planned museum, and it was often the subject at his regular afternoon teas. He would expound on how the paintings were to be hung: with plenty of space between them, in rooms decorated with furniture and furnishings appropriate to the period, and how they were to be lit. No detail of the presentation of the artworks was too small for his consideration. He said of the museum in 1942 "Anyone who wants to study nineteenth-century painting will sooner or later find it necessary to go to the Linz gallery, because only there will it be possible to find complete collections." Design and model In Autumn 1940, Hitler commissioned architect Hermann Giesler, a devout Nazi, to be in overall charge of the rebuilding of Linz, one of the five designated Führerstädte ("Führer cities"), along with Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, which were to be redeveloped drastically. Linz was to become a major cultural center, an art capital of Europe, a hub of trade and commerce, and the most beautiful city on the Danube, surpassing Budapest. It would have a new City Hall, new Nazi Party headquarters, a "Gau forum" featuring a massive auditorium, and a new railway station, a stadium, a community hall, a technical university, an institute of metallurgy, a planetarium, a suspension bridge, and two new towers, one of them with a carillon and a mausoleum for Hitler's parents. The city would also have Hitler's own retirement residence, designed by Giesler. In addition to all this, the Vienna facilities of the Hermann-Göring-Werks steel plant were to be moved to Linz as well, over the objections of officials of the city, the architects, and Fritz Todt, who thought the industrial facilities were incompatible with a city of art, architecture and culture. Hitler, though, wanted to provide the city with an ongoing means of income after he was dead and could no longer subsidize it. The cultural center at the heart of the redevelopment, the buildings for which were based on Hitler's ideas and rough designs, came to be referred to as the "European Culture Center". It included a monumental theatre, a concert hall, a library with over 250,000 volumes, an opera house as well as an operetta house, a cinema, a collection of armor and an