By: Joshua Hagen
This study highlights the role of historic preservation to foster attachments between people and places. Historic preservation involves the protection and restoration of specific places believed to have special meaning because they can teach us something about the past or at least selective interpretations of the past. 
Those interpretations of the past naturally reflect contemporary agendas and so studying historic preservation and place attachments can help us understand differences in social and political power.
There is a tendency for research on place attachment to focus on correlating psychological and sociological variables to varying degrees of place attachment, but much less attention is given to the characteristics of place. Geography can make an important contribution by bringing more attention to place in place attachment. This study focuses on Nazi Germany to study the use of historical preservation to forge attachments to specific places that supported the regime’s ideology of blood and soil.
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