I doubt some of these statements.
First, systematic destruction of critical industrial infrastructure and transport facilities was very severe in the western part of the German Third Reich. In the Ruhr and Rhine area, whole cities were flattened by air raids. The Hamburg firestorm is widely known even today. Cities in the eastern part have not consistently been “more destroyed” to the best of my knowledge. However, the answer to the destructions have been very different, even if driven by the same needs.
I visited Leipzig. Berlin, Dresden, Freiberg and some other cities of the GDR before the fall of the wall and thus had an impression of the kind of development of these as compared to cities i visited in the FRG like Essen, Cologne, Dortmund, Aachen, Frankfurt, Duisburg, among others.
Communist, and explicitly Stalinist ideology did have a strong impact on cities in the east. The Berlin Stalinallee is perhaps the most impressive example, but especially Dresden and Leipzig have their more than fair share of Stalinist architecture.
Reconstruction of historical buildings wasn’t exactly en vouge in the Soviet sector and the GDR, by the way.
However, ideology alone is not the only factor, as stated above: the means to put certain ideas into realised architecture are a major factor.
From the 1950s to the1970s, Western Germany had a most extraordinary phase in which first many already destroyed or heavily damaged historical buildings were either reconstructed to restore the historical core of the cities at least as a facade (think Frankfurt and Cologne, e.g.), or eradicated. After the first phase, mainly in the 1950s, also other historical parts of the cities architecture were often replaced, either for benefit of the construction of motorways and large streets, or for mostly utilitarian, somehow moderately modernist and later sometimes post-modernist, more rarely also brutalist buildings. They not only had ideas of a “moderner Städtebau”, they also had the material and economical ability to put them on the ground. And a political will to do so: many cities in the FRG changed much during these two periods of modernisation, mostly for the benefit of car traffic, which was rapidly becoming both a driver of the economy and a real problem for cities.
The Soviet zone and GDR, on the other hand, had a short modernist phase, followed by the top-down approach of the Sechzehn Grundsätze des Städtebaus (the Sixteen Principles of Urban Design), explicitly breaking with Nazi architecture, but also explicitly to prevent “american”, “box-like” architecture. In the mid-fifties, the need for a more standardised, industrialised approach led to a new development. Ironically, with that, they returned to previously phrased principles of the modernists like Le Corbusier, which is why parts of the eastern German cities today much remind me of the the banlieus of Paris. This second post-war modernist turn in the GDR was only possible top-down, in fact. If the USSR had changed their own approach to build affordable housing in an industrialised way, the GDR couldn’t have started the Plattenbau new urban development in the 1960s.
Cost-effective housing with industrialised architecture, a.k.a. Plattenbau, however, also_was_ developed in the FRG, especially in since1970s and until the 1980s. Examples include Neuperlach, Frankfurt-Nordweststadt and Chorweiler. Before new urban development, larger parts of cities were re-build with housing closing gaps between less-damaged buildings. Housing cooperatives were an important element in the political toolbox of providing affordable housing in western Germany until the late 1980s, and an important factor why nearly completely destroyed cities like Cologne were rebuild and massively extended.
During the 1980s, renovation of inner city dwellings became a big thing, and at the same time many lower middle-class families left the cities to build or buy in small cities or larger villages, from where they could still reach their workplaces by motorway. New urban development was increasingly called a failure during that time, as in many places around Europe. The UK, come to think of it, even started pulling down block towers, their own Plattenbau developments.
Nowadays, compared to today’s St.Petersburg or Krakow, London and Paris don’t look special in the amount of historical or historicised buildings. So doesn’t Berlin, or Potsdam. However, it is worth noting again that the restoration of historical inner cities and representative buildings of the old empires (or kingdoms) in eastern European countries was somewhat limited. The stereotypical post-stalinist architecture we associate with many eastern cities, as I tried to outline above, has probably nothing to do with the destruction of cities, as you seem to imply. You are quite right that it has much to do with the need for cheap housing. But also much, very much indeed I think, with ideology, and also much with the economic means.
And there we are. If wanted to cut corners, I’d say it boils down to Marshall plan and social market economy vs. deindustrialisation and Real Socialism (real existierender Sozialismus) in the parts of the former Third Reich.
