text: The Škoda Tower managed to survive all the bombings during the war, so as fighting during the Belgrade offensive in October 1944. New Communist authorities decided to demolish it, and though the exact reason why is unknown, it is suspected this was because of the highly negative perception among the citizens due to the role the tower had during the war years when it was equipped with searchlights and several machine gun nests to monitor the area and the river, and to stop those trying to escape the lager, earning the moniker "death tower". Located in the southeast corner of the Sajmište complex, it was demolished in November 1945. The next Belgrade structure that would surpass the tower's height was the  tall Beograđanka building in 1974, almost 30 years later. Nothing remained of the tower, and a football pitch of FK Brodarac was built on its location.
  Rapid development
  The first sketches of urban plans were developed by Nikola Dobrović in 1946 and preparations began in 1947. The first news on the project were published in daily Politika on 5 January 1947. The project was still referred to as "new Belgrade", with a lowercase "n" pointing to the description rather than the new city's proper name. Architect Mihajlo Mitrović called New Belgrade "an obsessive vision of Dobrović". A monograph on the construction of New Belgrade by Slobodan Ristanović described what the area looked liked before the city was built: "In the thick reeds and bulrush there were many snakes and frogs, fishes and leeches. Above this swamp, flocks of birds circled and the swarms of mosquitos and other insects were going up and down. Just a few houses and an occasional shack in the marsh around the Zemun airport, so as the derelict neighborhood of Staro Sajmište attested the human presence in that inhospitable ambience."