Bundesautobahn 5
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| Total length: | 445 km | |
| Bundesländer: | Hessen Baden-Württemberg |
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Exits and constructions
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Bundesautobahn 5 (translates from German as Federal Motorway 5, short form Autobahn 5, abbreviated as BAB 5 or A 5) is a 445 km (277 mi) long Autobahn in Germany. Its northern end is the Hattenbach triangle intersection (with the A 7. The southern end is at the Swiss border near Basel. It continues inside Switzerland as A 2.
Construction for the first section (between Frankfurt and Darmstadt was started on 23 September 1933 by Adolf Hitler personally. Propaganda celebrated the project as "the Führer's Autobahn" and "Germany's first Autobahn," however there is no truth in that statement. The AVUS race track in Berlin was opened in September 1921. The first public Autobahn was the Cologne-Bonn motorway opened in August 1932 (later called A 555).
In 1926, a private society proposed a fast road from Hamburg via Frankfurt to Basel (HaFraBa) - these plans were stopped in the Reichstag by a coalition of Communists and Nazis. This didn't stop Hitler from using these plans after he came to power in 1933. Work progressed slowly, however, because Hitler favored east-west routes.
After the war, plans to continue the A 5 to the north were abandoned for ecological reasons. Instead, an already completed section of the proposed A 48 near Gießen was used to connect the A 5 to the A 7 from Hamburg. The HaFraBa route was finally completed in 1962.
[edit] External links
- Working Papers in History of Mobility including the HaFraBa by Prof. Vahrenkamp, of the University of Kassel
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