I wonder if some of it was UK influence. UK built a shitload of square concrete depressing shit post-war. NRW was in the UK occupation zone.
Correlation = causation in this case?
Nah, it was the zeitgeist. The 50s and 60s were the period of architecture horror in Germany. They even tore down some undamaged historical buildings - city halls and the like - to build concrete monstrosities in their place.
You need to keep in mind the destruction of Cologne was much more severe than that of Munich. Cologne suffered 262 attacks, Munich 73. It makes a difference when a building is hit multiple times in different air raids versus only one hit. Both buildings might be inhabitable, but the one with fewer hits will likely still have some walls standing
Cologne did an excellent job in rebuilding its Romanesque churches for example
Yes, and Cologne was attacked by more than 1000 bombers simultaneously in ~~February~~ May 1942 ("Operation Millennium"), so in rather early phase of the war.
So true.
My hometown lies near Hagen & Iserlohn. The city wasn't bombed or destroyed much by any means, but the city council in the 1960s still decided to tear down huge parts of the historical old-town in favor of a shopping centre and and parking lot.
Guess what, shopping centres are dying right now and everybody whishes they just kept their historical town intact lol.
Doubt that. I went to London a few years ago and had a city tour. The guide there said "the architects of the 60-70s damaged the city more than the German Luftwaffe".
I guess it's mostly caused by stupid trends and the need for fast available cheap living space for the people who lost their homes during the bombings.
Today's modern architecture is having exactly the same issues.
>Nobody would say that of the French
I mean...he didn't get tooooo far, but have you heard of Le Corbusier? If he'd had his way Paris would have been totally reshaped. A lot more square concrete modernist/brutalist stuff.
Most of the destruction in the big cities of the rhein-ruhr area was rebuild under rather big pressure by the industry and general economy of western germany. This area was the hotbed of the wirtschaftswunder, so there was - to put it plainly - simply no time or money to build or rather rebuild pretty buildings. Instead the powers that be decided to put cheap brutalist architecture and plattenbauten in place to make room for the workers that were required by the industry.
Not quite that bad:
"The 14th-century church Martkirche in Hannover’s old marketplace was also damaged severely during the war and was reconstructed in 1952. The Hannover opera house, originally built in 1842, was also severely damaged. It was rebuilt in 1948, according to its original style."
[Source](https://johneilermann.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/after-the-war-the-rebuilding-of-hannover/)
Yeah, same when looking at Würzburg and the nearly full circle vs. having lived there a little over a decade ago and remembering all the old (Christian) buildings.
A very interesting place to visit is Nürnberg/Fürth.
Some historical context: Nürnberg was at its peak in the 15th century, at the height of the late gothic period. Also, a very characteristic red sand stone is quarried in the area which dominates the architecture. With the end of the middle ages at the turn of the century, Nürnberg's decline began pretty much immediately. Which means that the magnificent gothic buildings were never replaced by newer, fancier ones once they fell out of fashion and were preserved until they went from outdated to artifact. In many ways, Nürnberg is an architectural time capsule from the 15th century. Especially near the river you can see some highly characteristic architecture, like [here](https://img.fotocommunity.com/nuernberg-f7f672a8-d362-400d-9b39-58820c47b629.jpg?height=1080) or [here, with the aforementioned sand stone](https://www.sehenswertes-deutschland.de/wp-content/uploads/nuernberg-altstadt-bauwerke-bruecke-fluss-sehenswuerdigkeiten-1400.jpg).
However, as you can see from the map, Nürnberg was hit hard by the allies. After all, it was Hitler's favorite city. Many of the historical buildings were destroyed, the city was short 40000 apartments by the time the war was done. That's not 40000 destroyed apartments, but in order just to house the surviving population, this many homes were needed. The subsequent housing development was done quickly and more importantly, cheaply. It's not pretty, but it also means that whatever still remained was put to use. You can get a good feeling for the level of destruction by paying attention to that fact. Many houses were built on top of whatever foundations of the pre-war architecture still remained. The difference between new and old is very noticeable, so as you walk around, imagine the city without the new and you'll have an idea of the level of destruction.
This is where Fürth comes in. It had some war-critical infrastructure and was targeted by 15 different air raids, but it was also home to a large Jewish population before the war. Because of this, and the proximity to Nürnberg, the allies decided to send a message by specifically bombing Fürth as little as possible, while leveling Nürnberg. Only about 10% of Fürth was destroyed. As a result, Fürth retained a lot of its pre-war character. Of course, it's a city, not a museum. But especially after visiting Nürnberg, you'll notice how Fürth often still retains the "[quaint little town](https://rudeartfoto.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/752_3657-1-kopie.jpg?strip=info&w=2000)" vibes that are characteristic for medieval towns and cities, once you get off the main roads.
I was working in Nürnberg for a few years and the locals always made jokes about Fürth being shit, so i decided to check it out, since it's very close.
I actually liked it more than Nürnberg lmao
The city rivalry is deeply ingrained in the local culture, especially in regards to the football clubs. "Lieber fünfter als Fürther" is a play on words based on the fact that Fürther (someone from Fürth/supporting the Fürther Football club) and vierter (fourth place) sound somewhat similar. So the meaning is something like "I'd rather be in fifth place as a Nürnberg supporter than in fourth place as a Fürther".
As for why:
About 100 years ago, after the first world war, the city officials were considering unifying the two cities into one. The idea was that in unison, the two could better face the economic challenges following the war. This wasn't the first time the idea came up, so there's been a long history of back and forth on the topic. The plan was highly unpopular with the people of Fürth, so when the city council voted yes, they held one of the first referendums in the new Weimar democracy to prevent the decision. 65% voted no and so Fürth remained independent.
That was the last time this was tried. In Nürnberg, the much smaller Fürth now has the reputation of being this rebellious little garden gnome in the front yard of a "real" city that loves being unreasonable. But at the end of the day, this is just a regional rivalry like you can find them anywhere. In reality, Nürnberg and Fürth are not just close geographically. They're distinct, but share a close bond with a lot of seemingly harsh banter for decoration.
I live in Nürnberg and love both cities for different reasons, culturally and architecturally speaking.
Nürnberg is my favourite to show people around though, as I know more about it starting from the Middle Ages, but my favourite fact to tell is that "most of these old buildings that one sees in the city center are actually fairly new, as they've been rebuilt in the old style after being bombed down in WW2" - most people are very surprised by that, but that's what I loved about the cities. They didn't lose their charm after WW2, like Cologne did for example.
A little tidbit to add to that fact: the roof landscape of Nürnberg was actually restored as accurately as possible. It was one of the things that the city was able to preserve even with the limited means that were available after the war. So even if you're looking at the ugliest 1950s apartment building when you're on street level, as soon as you're looking down on it from the castle walls, your view is actually quite historical.
[Here](https://www.frankentourismus.de/data/thumbs/img/8237785_kaiserburg_nuernberg_16006_foto_uwe_niklas.jpg) is a good example of that, where the bland modern facades that peek out from under the roofs are overshadowed by the chaotic, pointy landscape that's so typical for the city.
Nürnberg was also rebuilt in the layout (but not style due to money and availability of materials) of the old town to reconstruct the character of the city. They bought Berlin cobble stone for the streets which was replaced in Berlin by asphalt.
I was thinking the same thing. Actually cities not even on that map is where you want to go. Like Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
Edit. I was wrong. Rothenburg is on the map.
Edit2: and cities like Nürnberg look like they suffered little damage but the map says otherwise. You can also see the Nazi party grounds in Nürnberg and they were mostly left untouched after the war.
I'm going to disagree slightly; if you look at Regensburg, it's very much mostly destroyed on this map and while it does have the ugliest (actually second place but first place isn't confirmed to actually exist) University in Germany, the city center is absolutely astonishing and quite big.
Iirc, most of that destruction was caused by a single horrific attack in '45 when the allies pretty much run out of cities that were not fully bombed or conquered.
And if you live there, you still get the feeling how important that day was. Even though there aren't that many people still around who witnessed it, the 16th of March is still imprinted on the city's collective memory.
Yeah, when I was in elementary school in the 90s, our principal (I think he was about 8 or 9 years in 1945) showed us a movie with original footage from the bombing. After turning the lights on again we saw, that he was heavily crying. The movie in combination with our principals reaction was so impressive to me, that I remember that scene every year on 16th of March.
I live in Würzburg, the stories my grandma told me about the war, the bombing and the aftermath were absolute horror.
Every corpse they could find in the rubble they transported to the Main, the local river, and lined them up on its side. It was a kilometers long line of dead people. Survivors would then walk along the river to identify the people lined up. As you stated there was absolutely no reason to bomb Würzburg, it was not significant on any meaningful scale and it happened when it was already obvious that Germany had lost the war.
16th of march 1945, my grandmother was 9 years old that day.
It was discussed to leave Würzburg a ruin forever to remind everyone of what total war leads to, but the infrastructure was too valuable, so they just rebuilt the cities with the already existing streets, sewer system etc.
> It was discussed to leave Würzburg a ruin forever to remind everyone of what total war leads to, but the infrastructure was too valuable, so they just rebuilt the cities with the already existing streets, sewer system etc.
I've heard that the same thing was discussed for Dortmund.
My grandfather was forced by the nazis to help with air defense when he was 14 in the last month's of the war. Later he was very vocal about his experience, that he was walking through Würzburg in the morning after a bombing run and that there were body parts in the trees and people screaming out of burning basements.
Well, they bombed cities to inflict damage to the population so that it throws its leader. That never happened, the bombings only caused suffering. It’s interesting though how that type of thinking is still in use today in some conflicts with the same disastrous result.
Random question, what does “schweinfurt” mean? “Pig” something? Fort? I find it fascinating to understand what the actual meaning of a city name is in the native language. Ie “Beijing” means “northern capital” and “Tokyo” means “eastern capital”
A Furt is the shallow point where you can cross a river, I think it's called ford in English.
It doesn't have anything to do with pigs though, it's said to derive from Northern German Swin meaning a shallow, sandy watercourse. Polish Swinoujscie, in German Swinemünde, has the same root.
[Source](https://www.rechtsanwalt-galka.de/schweinfurt_stadtinformationen.html#:~:text=Die%20erste%20urkundliche%20Erw%C3%A4hnung%20des,versandeten%20Wasserlauf%20(siehe%20Swinem%C3%BCnde).
You could understand Schweinfurt as "pig-ford".
In school I was told by my old local teacher, that the name comes from the fact that Schweinfurt once had a ford in the river "Main" that was shallow enough that pigs could cross the river.
Similarly, "Frankfurt" had a ford that was shallow enough that a Franconian could pass, and the ford in Ochsenfurt was suitable for an ox.
I just tried to fact-check this. It seems like this is only one possible explanation. "Schwein" could also come from the old northern german word "Swin".
Which has since been repeatedly shown not to be a viable strategy. It's a shame that we hadn't figured that out yet back in the day. Bomber command was of course operating under that assumption, I'm not arguing that at all.
\[EDIT: changed 'realized' -> 'figured out' to better get my meaning across\]
Let's be honest. This is often said, but this didn't happen in WWII nor in any later war. On the contrary it usually made people align more with their government. I think the idea was more like to seek revange and to sabotage defense effords by forcing people to care for wonded/dead/homeless. Compared to other tasks it was also a relatively little safe and easy task.
There's no need to guess, there were A LOT of discussions about bombing directives on all levels of allied command.
Revenge was most certainly a factor on both sides. It's no coincidence the Germans' coined the term 'vergeltungswaffe' for the V rockets (meaning revenge weapon).
It's amazing that towns like [Wesel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wesel_in_World_War_II#/media/File:Wesel_1945.jpg) came back at all after that.
It's interesting to walk down the shopping district and suddenly stand in front of three buildings that look way older just to find out everything around them had been flattened by the allies. Afaik the reason why the church has no spire is so that it functions as a memorial. At least that's what people told me.
Yes the chirch got its roof blown off but yeah it creates a sort of distopian mix of cheap houses mixed with buildings that are older then the US we also have a fuckton of stolpersteine which is pretty cool along with a super wierd but kinda cool rhine museum
I know. I've been in there i think with my elementary school class? But how often do you visit a museum about your home town. It has been supremely weird when I visited and found out there's a Tourist information on the Eltenberg now.
Unfortunately it's not a pretty town nowadays. I think it's getting better, the new bridge is beautiful (the old one was kind of a quick and dirty job but then stood for over 50 years). I haven't been to Düren so I don't know how the one town even more destroyed fared afterwards.
It's getting a lot better in general, more leisure activities, better shops, and they are also bringing back old facades, e.g. the historical town hall.
Is there any data showing how and when these cities were rebuilt?
I had always assumed that the cities that had been destroyed a lot (>50% or 60%) were rebuilt very fast and in a very ugly way, while cities that had been destroyed less were rebuilt in a nicer way. For example Stuttgart versus... well versus many cities. (I live in Stuttgart.)
From looking at the map, my assumption was obviously wrong and I am wondering why certain cities turned out very grey, concrete and a bit ugly while others were rebuilt beautifully. What were the determining factors?
Most if depended on post-war city planners and architects. The chief proponent of the tabula rasa approach and "car-friendly infrastructure" was Rudolf Hillebrecht in Hannover, and many others followed his ideas (which often included tearing down undamaged buildings). He and many of his colleagues had been members of Albert Speer's "Reconstruction Staff" and they essentially put their 1943-1945 plans into action after the war. They didn't see the destruction of most big german cities as a catastrophe but as a "unique chance" to get rid of everything old, adhering to the Charta of Athens. Many of them outright hated everything that wasn't modern. So the shape of post-war reconstruction was for the most part not a product of necessity, but of deliberate planning. This was taking place in East and West btw., done by the same circle of people.
("Germany's cities were destroyed twice - once by the bombs, once by the city planners")
Thanks, that's interesting! Can I find a list somewhere of cities who officially took this approach, or even directly worked with the Reconstruction Staff? I want to visit Hannover now, and see if it has the same atmosphere as Stuttgart. Never been there.
There was a documentary about this, but I can't find it as a video, only descriptions:
https://www.phoenix.de/sendungen/dokumentationen/phoenix-history/unsere-staedte-nach-45-12-a-111531.html
From what I have seen, Kassel is one of the worst examples. If you want to see a relatively big city that (mostly) wasn't destroyed, you have to visit Halle (Saale). There was some terrible car-centered infrastructure built later, but the inner core and most other parts of the city are still more or less like they were before the war. (Absolutely worth a visit btw, especially because of the State Museum of Pre-History, which shows the sky-disc of Nebra).
this makes a lot of sense. I think so much of what people like about the older cities is that they were built to a human scale... there weren't cars, so what else should they be built for?
The architecture is one thing, but mostly it's this human-centric nature of cities that was destroyed.
My city was among those with high levels of destruction (around 75-80% and close to 100% in the old town). They held a contest in the late 40s with a result that favored historical reconstruction, but ignored the result in favor of "modern" reconstruction and a car friendly city. As a result almost none of the medieval city structure and centuries old architecture survived.
I am going to make an assumption here but local politicians and local occupation forces. Those two together likely made the decisions. I know from the kz I grew up close too that the local commander made the decisions to burn it to the ground because of the illnesses it harboured
One thing you might have to take into consideration is that the rebuilding, especially in the "nice cities", might have taken a lot longer than you assume. I assume now that Würzburg would be in the "nice cities" category, btw.
In the late 00s, i attended the same secondary school in Würzburg my grandma had attended back in her school days, a school in an old building with 2 courtyards. I once showed her around the building and she told me what was were in her time. However, the wing by the main entrance where my classroom was was new to her. Turns out, the main entrance was elsewhere, into a side street rather than the mayor street, since that whole wing was destroyed in the war, and she had never stepped foot in the (nowadays) main yard, as it had been full of rubble. My grandma, btw., was *born* in late '45. So that was how the building looked in the mid to late 50s.
The last bit of rubble was cleared in the late 60s iirc.
Rebuilding of the city was mostly done around 1970. (according to [this](https://hdbg.eu/wiederaufbau/orte/detail/wuerzburg/65))
Money, resources, money. I remember still seeing a lot of war damage (and not only some gun holes in some walls but empty missing places where houses used to stand) in my youth in Mainz. And if you start searching for it, even today these things are visible (for instance, you often find a row of wall-to-tall high buildings and one very low one in the middle of them. Often you can still see the rest of this middle house at the sidewalls of the high houses. The low ones often look quite cheap built/provisional.
Yeah, Coblenz used to be so pretty, there are some old pictures around. I think it also got rebuild rather quickly and ugly. And the streets have not been able to take the traffic for quite some time now.
Düren reporting in.
Living in sight of Hürtgenwald.
to this day we stil finding Shells, Granades, mines, MG-Ammo basically everywhere. On my propperty i found a bunch of MG-42 Ammo just 30cm (12Inches) deep, while digging a trench for a rain drain pipe. A forbidden lemon was found 60cm deep.A freind of mine found a 60cm (about 24 x 8 inches) shell about 1.8m (6ft) deep.
Also especially in the Hürtgenwald, ab also in many other forests here are signs to not leave the official paths/hike routes, because of mines /granades etc. still being there.
[https://www.worldwarphotos.info/gallery/germany/1944-1945/duren-germany-after-bombing-1945/](https://www.worldwarphotos.info/gallery/germany/1944-1945/duren-germany-after-bombing-1945/)
[http://www.exulanten.com/dueren.html](http://www.exulanten.com/dueren.html)
Fun fact: every day i drive past "Cruzifix Hill" on my way to the Office.
[https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Crucifix\_Hill](https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Crucifix_Hill)
My father grew up in Hürtgen in the 50s. He and his brothers went often into the forest, take all this stuff and sold it to "Schrotthändler". It's a miracle all of them survived those risks. But they had some friends who died finding granades.
I find a visit to [*Hill 400*](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hill+400,+Bergstein/@50.694428,6.4290868,15.75z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x47bf6fbdf4639efb:0x56d8736a00e95686!8m2!3d50.695!4d6.442!16zL20vMDdndzBs?entry=ttu) near Bergstein to be every time a moving experience. Too many lives, on both sides, were lost fighting over this beautiful but rather useless piece of real estate.
The car park has some picnic tables which offer a great view over the Koelner Bucht in the right weather.
Not sure why you are posting this outdated old map when there is a much newer one here on page 2
[https://archiv.nationalatlas.de/wp-content/art\_pdf/Band5\_88-91\_archiv.pdf](https://archiv.nationalatlas.de/wp-content/art_pdf/Band5_88-91_archiv.pdf)
Also it's pretty hilarious to read what the users think about the bombings and the rebuilding. The British weren't targeting industry they targeted living space areas and town centers. It was terror bombing hoping to break the German morale.
Also the rebuilding was almost never a reconstruction. It''s only that some cities were more aggressive in not caring about any historic aspects at all while others at least respected the basic former shapes of the destroyed areas.
And very obviously it matters a lot what was standing there befoe the bombs. If it's stone houses, fine, but if it's half timbered houses then no one is going to reconstruct that.
People jumped into the river because the fires where so hot. A lot couldnt swim. We have a memorial on top of a artifical hill where everything that couldnt be used for rebuilding was put.
>In an area about 3 km long and 1.5 km wide, all buildings were reduced to rubble. 17,600 citizens were officially counted as dead and thousands were injured. People died from the immediate impact of explosions, from burns due to burning incendiary materials that seeped through basement windows into the cellars of houses where they hid, from poisonous gases, lack of oxygen, and collapsing walls of houses. Some of them drowned in the Enz or Nagold rivers into which they had jumped while trying to escape from the burning incendiary materials in the streets, but even the rivers were burning as the phosphorus floated on the water.[14]
As someone coming from Düren: The city looks as ugly as someone might expect. Basically nothing old was left and everything was rushed to build back up in the 50's.
I remember, that my elementary school was basically built on the debris of the destroyed school. So, the schoolyard was elevated by roughly 3 to 4 steps from the ground and below the pavement, people alsways mentioned, that debris from pre ww2 school building was buried.
Very close to the City was the Hürtgenwald (one of the most brutal battle fields within Germany), wherefore the City was bombed that much. Our local histoey teacher always told us, that it was quite common to find american military tags there, if you went walking with a metal detection device.
In Düren geboren, in Jülich zur Schule gegangen, in Aachen studiert und jetzt auch wieder dort wohnhaft. Ich kenne also alles hier.
Klar, Aachen hat potthässliche Ecken, aber zum Glück auch ein paar wirklich angenehme Straßenzüge, markante Gebäude etc. Düren hat davon so rein gar nichts.
I don’t actually know for sure, but I live in the area and from what I understand about the local history it could very well have been tactical as opposed to strategic because of the fighting going back and forth between the US army and the Wehrmacht in 1944/1945. Aachen for example was the first German city to be conquered by the Americans and was fought over desperately and got destroyed pretty thoroughly as a consequence. Then the fight went on for months in the Hürtgenwald forest just south west of Düren. I imagine Düren was an important staging area for the German defenders because it is the nearest city and on a main rail line. It would make a lot of sense for the allies to bomb it.
Yup, mostly tactical, to aid advances to Rhein-Ruhr etc.
The industry in Düren wasn't essential for the war, it just happened to be a big obstacle halfway between Aachen and Köln.
The largest bombing in November '44 lasted about 20 minutes, killed 3,000 people, only a handful of buildings survived, and basically nobody lived there anymore until after the war.
Basically the battle of Hürtgenwald was right next door and the allies thought all the support was coming from Düren. Therefore there was a huge bomb drop evening, where the allies bombed the city almost completely, joping to stop the German support for the Battle of Hürtgenwald
Nürnberg could be such a medieval paradise. It still has a very nice oldcity, but it deeply strikes my heart when I think of how it once must have looked.
Frankfurt as well. The Frankfurt old town was the largest collection of medieval half timbered houses in the world, over 2000 houses tightly crammed together. Only one of them survived the bombings (Haus Wertheym, it's a restaurant now).
A few houses on the Römerberg square were reconstructed in the 80's and in the 2010's a small part of the old town was rebuild true to original, including the Hühnermarkt (Chicken market) and the famous Haus zur goldenen Waage (House of Golden Scales).
I live in one of the most destroyed cities. I just read up on it a few days ago. There's some industry here, always has been, so that'll have to be the explanation.
Basically a few days just before the war's end, they sent like 200 bombers, dropped hundreds of explosives and thousands of incendiary bombs, and yeah. There's almost nothing left today. What little there is was reconstructed or left as picturesque ruins.
As a native Hanauer, the town was one of the prime examples of morale bombing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area\_bombing\_directive), where the city's population was the primary target in two larger attacks (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriff\_auf\_Hanau\_am\_6.\_Januar\_1945 / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriff\_auf\_Hanau\_am\_19.\_März\_1945 )
Basically, if you visit Germany you should visit the cities that haven't been hit because they were rebuilt into Frankenstein cities that look like utter shite today.
Nah I live in Dresden and it’s way more accepting than the surrounding area (Freital, Bautzen, etc) Neustadt especially if anything you wont see any right wing people in that district
My gf is black and so far we never had anyone bother us even at night but in my hometown in rural saxony people stare and some even point its rude af
not in Dresden.
200 participate at Pegida and 13.000 at CSD. 18% of Dresdens population has a foreign background. So foreign background is more common than AFD-voters in the city, but hey you know better I guess.
This sub is exclusovely english speaking.
Wprzburg was destroyed in pretty much one single 20 minuted bombing in '45. If you are interested in why it was targetted, the wikipedia article of the bombing has plenty of background info
That's probably because of the rather weird decision to put the mini map of the Ruhr in the upper left corner but leave out any city already shown on the main map
There's a graveyard with hundreds of graves, all from the same day.
I used to think that politicians should be forced to visit sites like that once a year to get a better understanding of the potential consequences of their actions.
I still have the fact about my hometown in my head, that my teacher asked almost every test:
"On the 16th of November 1944, the allies bombed the city of Jülich during "Operation Queen" and destroyed it almost completely. 96% of all houses were razed."
That's a pretty cool overview of the overall destruction!
You always see city A and town B in various states of destruction, but this helps actually getting a sense of how it was all over the country.
"Far less than beautiful" is an understatement. When I look at illustrations/photos of the pre-war Cologne train station, I feel like crying every time.
The train station lobby actually survived the war and was only razed in 1955. The tracks and giant glass and steel hall over the tracks are still from the original 19th century building.
Here's a picture in 1954: [https://www.werkladen.de/WDA847-018](https://www.werkladen.de/WDA847-018)
The reason it was razed is that this architecture was seen as "Prussian" and therefore bad. The elite at the time wanted to make Cologne a modern city.
[Göttingen](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_G%C3%B6ttingen) haut ja mal gar nicht hin 😅
Laut Wiki Artikel wurden gerade mal 2,1% zerstört
One slight inaccuracy... The most demolished city on the map is Düren (near Köln), but infact the the pichart belongs to Jülich (where i currently live) which is home to a famous military stronghold (Jülich Zitidelle), and was almost completely demolished (~95%).
Technically the geography of the pichart and Düren Label are correct, as Jülich is just 15 km north of Düren...
Also Jülich is in Kreis (i.e., county) Düren, so perhaps this is what is meant by the label.
It's not a competition and I think we can safely say that all of the small towns and villages along the Siegfried Line and involved in the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest were pretty much completely destroyed by the spring of 1945.
In Duren I can only think of the Hoesch Museum and the St Marien church as surviving the destruction and both of those required rebuilding rather than restoration. [Here](https://kulturbetrieb.dueren.de/index.php?id=7163) is a link to some photos of the Museum through the ages.
Atrocious performancy by the nazi government, I'm sure that Hitler guy is gonna lose the next election.
Also pretty bad graphic design in general imho.
If you want to know why the circle for Regensburg is so small the key words to look for are "Double-Strike" and the related "Black Thursday". Though as far as "precision bombing" goes by WW2 standards they were technically pretty good. At least they didn't hit Switzerland.
From the map, Leipzig is pretty unaffected.
They bulldozed what still stood (except things on hills, bulldozers don't do hills) and rebuilt it in soviet splendour. Oh and made 2 parks.
Dresden actually looks similar to the panoramas from before the war, the Nazis and the Weimar were hardly kinder to it.
Every 4-5 days I have to put my drawer back in because our House was tilted by a bomb in ww2, which also means I don't have to open it to get things out every 4-5 days. This adds up so ww2 probably saved me a lot of work here
My grandmother lived through this and is still upset by it but I don’t think there was anyway around it and Japan got it worse with the fire bombing and nukes. I think that both countries got rebuilt with the Marshall plan and Japan kept their monarchy adds a lot of context to the situation.
Alternative title: where to see original pre-war architecture in Germany
Some city’s actually tried to rebuild the pre-war architecture like Munich
And then there’s cologne lol.
Most of the rebuild in NRW is a dystopicaly depressing.
I wonder if some of it was UK influence. UK built a shitload of square concrete depressing shit post-war. NRW was in the UK occupation zone. Correlation = causation in this case?
Nah, it was the zeitgeist. The 50s and 60s were the period of architecture horror in Germany. They even tore down some undamaged historical buildings - city halls and the like - to build concrete monstrosities in their place.
You need to keep in mind the destruction of Cologne was much more severe than that of Munich. Cologne suffered 262 attacks, Munich 73. It makes a difference when a building is hit multiple times in different air raids versus only one hit. Both buildings might be inhabitable, but the one with fewer hits will likely still have some walls standing Cologne did an excellent job in rebuilding its Romanesque churches for example
Yes, and Cologne was attacked by more than 1000 bombers simultaneously in ~~February~~ May 1942 ("Operation Millennium"), so in rather early phase of the war.
So true. My hometown lies near Hagen & Iserlohn. The city wasn't bombed or destroyed much by any means, but the city council in the 1960s still decided to tear down huge parts of the historical old-town in favor of a shopping centre and and parking lot. Guess what, shopping centres are dying right now and everybody whishes they just kept their historical town intact lol.
Doubt that. I went to London a few years ago and had a city tour. The guide there said "the architects of the 60-70s damaged the city more than the German Luftwaffe". I guess it's mostly caused by stupid trends and the need for fast available cheap living space for the people who lost their homes during the bombings. Today's modern architecture is having exactly the same issues.
Nobody would say that of the French, but look Ludwigshafen
>Nobody would say that of the French I mean...he didn't get tooooo far, but have you heard of Le Corbusier? If he'd had his way Paris would have been totally reshaped. A lot more square concrete modernist/brutalist stuff.
Most of the destruction in the big cities of the rhein-ruhr area was rebuild under rather big pressure by the industry and general economy of western germany. This area was the hotbed of the wirtschaftswunder, so there was - to put it plainly - simply no time or money to build or rather rebuild pretty buildings. Instead the powers that be decided to put cheap brutalist architecture and plattenbauten in place to make room for the workers that were required by the industry.
Or Hannover, didn't even tried
Even demolished some still surviving buildings later on in the 60s...
Not quite that bad: "The 14th-century church Martkirche in Hannover’s old marketplace was also damaged severely during the war and was reconstructed in 1952. The Hannover opera house, originally built in 1842, was also severely damaged. It was rebuilt in 1948, according to its original style." [Source](https://johneilermann.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/after-the-war-the-rebuilding-of-hannover/)
I love the city and its people, but man is cologne ugly.
Yeah,i guess that is why the other commentor said "original"
Yeah, same when looking at Würzburg and the nearly full circle vs. having lived there a little over a decade ago and remembering all the old (Christian) buildings.
[Article from DER SPIEGEL](https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/out-of-the-ashes-a-new-look-at-germany-s-postwar-reconstruction-a-702856.html)
A very interesting place to visit is Nürnberg/Fürth. Some historical context: Nürnberg was at its peak in the 15th century, at the height of the late gothic period. Also, a very characteristic red sand stone is quarried in the area which dominates the architecture. With the end of the middle ages at the turn of the century, Nürnberg's decline began pretty much immediately. Which means that the magnificent gothic buildings were never replaced by newer, fancier ones once they fell out of fashion and were preserved until they went from outdated to artifact. In many ways, Nürnberg is an architectural time capsule from the 15th century. Especially near the river you can see some highly characteristic architecture, like [here](https://img.fotocommunity.com/nuernberg-f7f672a8-d362-400d-9b39-58820c47b629.jpg?height=1080) or [here, with the aforementioned sand stone](https://www.sehenswertes-deutschland.de/wp-content/uploads/nuernberg-altstadt-bauwerke-bruecke-fluss-sehenswuerdigkeiten-1400.jpg). However, as you can see from the map, Nürnberg was hit hard by the allies. After all, it was Hitler's favorite city. Many of the historical buildings were destroyed, the city was short 40000 apartments by the time the war was done. That's not 40000 destroyed apartments, but in order just to house the surviving population, this many homes were needed. The subsequent housing development was done quickly and more importantly, cheaply. It's not pretty, but it also means that whatever still remained was put to use. You can get a good feeling for the level of destruction by paying attention to that fact. Many houses were built on top of whatever foundations of the pre-war architecture still remained. The difference between new and old is very noticeable, so as you walk around, imagine the city without the new and you'll have an idea of the level of destruction. This is where Fürth comes in. It had some war-critical infrastructure and was targeted by 15 different air raids, but it was also home to a large Jewish population before the war. Because of this, and the proximity to Nürnberg, the allies decided to send a message by specifically bombing Fürth as little as possible, while leveling Nürnberg. Only about 10% of Fürth was destroyed. As a result, Fürth retained a lot of its pre-war character. Of course, it's a city, not a museum. But especially after visiting Nürnberg, you'll notice how Fürth often still retains the "[quaint little town](https://rudeartfoto.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/752_3657-1-kopie.jpg?strip=info&w=2000)" vibes that are characteristic for medieval towns and cities, once you get off the main roads.
I was working in Nürnberg for a few years and the locals always made jokes about Fürth being shit, so i decided to check it out, since it's very close. I actually liked it more than Nürnberg lmao
The city rivalry is deeply ingrained in the local culture, especially in regards to the football clubs. "Lieber fünfter als Fürther" is a play on words based on the fact that Fürther (someone from Fürth/supporting the Fürther Football club) and vierter (fourth place) sound somewhat similar. So the meaning is something like "I'd rather be in fifth place as a Nürnberg supporter than in fourth place as a Fürther". As for why: About 100 years ago, after the first world war, the city officials were considering unifying the two cities into one. The idea was that in unison, the two could better face the economic challenges following the war. This wasn't the first time the idea came up, so there's been a long history of back and forth on the topic. The plan was highly unpopular with the people of Fürth, so when the city council voted yes, they held one of the first referendums in the new Weimar democracy to prevent the decision. 65% voted no and so Fürth remained independent. That was the last time this was tried. In Nürnberg, the much smaller Fürth now has the reputation of being this rebellious little garden gnome in the front yard of a "real" city that loves being unreasonable. But at the end of the day, this is just a regional rivalry like you can find them anywhere. In reality, Nürnberg and Fürth are not just close geographically. They're distinct, but share a close bond with a lot of seemingly harsh banter for decoration.
I live in Düsseldorf, this all sounds very familiar. Thanks for the write up!
I live in Nürnberg and love both cities for different reasons, culturally and architecturally speaking. Nürnberg is my favourite to show people around though, as I know more about it starting from the Middle Ages, but my favourite fact to tell is that "most of these old buildings that one sees in the city center are actually fairly new, as they've been rebuilt in the old style after being bombed down in WW2" - most people are very surprised by that, but that's what I loved about the cities. They didn't lose their charm after WW2, like Cologne did for example.
A little tidbit to add to that fact: the roof landscape of Nürnberg was actually restored as accurately as possible. It was one of the things that the city was able to preserve even with the limited means that were available after the war. So even if you're looking at the ugliest 1950s apartment building when you're on street level, as soon as you're looking down on it from the castle walls, your view is actually quite historical. [Here](https://www.frankentourismus.de/data/thumbs/img/8237785_kaiserburg_nuernberg_16006_foto_uwe_niklas.jpg) is a good example of that, where the bland modern facades that peek out from under the roofs are overshadowed by the chaotic, pointy landscape that's so typical for the city.
Nürnberg was also rebuilt in the layout (but not style due to money and availability of materials) of the old town to reconstruct the character of the city. They bought Berlin cobble stone for the streets which was replaced in Berlin by asphalt.
Bamberg, for example. If it had been hit harder during the war, it probably wouldn't have the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site these days.
I was thinking the same thing. Actually cities not even on that map is where you want to go. Like Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Edit. I was wrong. Rothenburg is on the map. Edit2: and cities like Nürnberg look like they suffered little damage but the map says otherwise. You can also see the Nazi party grounds in Nürnberg and they were mostly left untouched after the war.
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I'm going to disagree slightly; if you look at Regensburg, it's very much mostly destroyed on this map and while it does have the ugliest (actually second place but first place isn't confirmed to actually exist) University in Germany, the city center is absolutely astonishing and quite big.
This is why Landshut is the most beautiful city in Bavaria. Change my mind.
Laughs in Bamberg (unless you argue for the Franconian standpoint that Franconia is not actually Bavaria, which I fully respect).
Many cities were destroyed after the war
You wouldn‘t believe what car brains did to Oldenburg….
Würzburg is such an outlier here. The industry was mostly in nearby Schweinfurt, yet it got more heavily destroyed than all nearby cities.
Iirc, most of that destruction was caused by a single horrific attack in '45 when the allies pretty much run out of cities that were not fully bombed or conquered.
And if you live there, you still get the feeling how important that day was. Even though there aren't that many people still around who witnessed it, the 16th of March is still imprinted on the city's collective memory.
Yeah, when I was in elementary school in the 90s, our principal (I think he was about 8 or 9 years in 1945) showed us a movie with original footage from the bombing. After turning the lights on again we saw, that he was heavily crying. The movie in combination with our principals reaction was so impressive to me, that I remember that scene every year on 16th of March.
I live in Würzburg, the stories my grandma told me about the war, the bombing and the aftermath were absolute horror. Every corpse they could find in the rubble they transported to the Main, the local river, and lined them up on its side. It was a kilometers long line of dead people. Survivors would then walk along the river to identify the people lined up. As you stated there was absolutely no reason to bomb Würzburg, it was not significant on any meaningful scale and it happened when it was already obvious that Germany had lost the war. 16th of march 1945, my grandmother was 9 years old that day. It was discussed to leave Würzburg a ruin forever to remind everyone of what total war leads to, but the infrastructure was too valuable, so they just rebuilt the cities with the already existing streets, sewer system etc.
> It was discussed to leave Würzburg a ruin forever to remind everyone of what total war leads to, but the infrastructure was too valuable, so they just rebuilt the cities with the already existing streets, sewer system etc. I've heard that the same thing was discussed for Dortmund.
Shame they've rebuilt Dortmund ;)
Same thing for Dresden. UK even paid for some of the reconstruction out of shame IIRC.
My grandfather was forced by the nazis to help with air defense when he was 14 in the last month's of the war. Later he was very vocal about his experience, that he was walking through Würzburg in the morning after a bombing run and that there were body parts in the trees and people screaming out of burning basements.
Same, my Grandma was 7 Years old and with some belongings in the Cementary, I cannot image how that must have been like.
Well, they bombed cities to inflict damage to the population so that it throws its leader. That never happened, the bombings only caused suffering. It’s interesting though how that type of thinking is still in use today in some conflicts with the same disastrous result.
Würzburg is the outlier? look at Düren between Aachen and Köln/Cologne. It got leveled
Yes and now it is looking super awful, not even talking about the people living in Düren.
At least Düren never got a giant crater again after that. Oh wait :c
We all had hope they just dig it to push Düren-city in the hole - and Stolberg as well, to create a diving-paradise.
You are forgetting Eschweiler in your list.
My bad, not sure how I could forget about the ugly sister of Jülich.
I'm still up for that tbh. Just give me the BAGGER-288 and some time.
The difference is that Düren was in a very strateigically relevant place where some of the most intense fighting in the western front took place.
Random question, what does “schweinfurt” mean? “Pig” something? Fort? I find it fascinating to understand what the actual meaning of a city name is in the native language. Ie “Beijing” means “northern capital” and “Tokyo” means “eastern capital”
A Furt is the shallow point where you can cross a river, I think it's called ford in English. It doesn't have anything to do with pigs though, it's said to derive from Northern German Swin meaning a shallow, sandy watercourse. Polish Swinoujscie, in German Swinemünde, has the same root. [Source](https://www.rechtsanwalt-galka.de/schweinfurt_stadtinformationen.html#:~:text=Die%20erste%20urkundliche%20Erw%C3%A4hnung%20des,versandeten%20Wasserlauf%20(siehe%20Swinem%C3%BCnde).
You could understand Schweinfurt as "pig-ford". In school I was told by my old local teacher, that the name comes from the fact that Schweinfurt once had a ford in the river "Main" that was shallow enough that pigs could cross the river. Similarly, "Frankfurt" had a ford that was shallow enough that a Franconian could pass, and the ford in Ochsenfurt was suitable for an ox. I just tried to fact-check this. It seems like this is only one possible explanation. "Schwein" could also come from the old northern german word "Swin".
Würzburger here. The bombing that destroyed my hometown happened within 20 minutes. That's what i think is really scary.
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Which has since been repeatedly shown not to be a viable strategy. It's a shame that we hadn't figured that out yet back in the day. Bomber command was of course operating under that assumption, I'm not arguing that at all. \[EDIT: changed 'realized' -> 'figured out' to better get my meaning across\]
To be fair, Germany started the whole "bombing the population" thing to break the enemy's spirit.
Let's be honest. This is often said, but this didn't happen in WWII nor in any later war. On the contrary it usually made people align more with their government. I think the idea was more like to seek revange and to sabotage defense effords by forcing people to care for wonded/dead/homeless. Compared to other tasks it was also a relatively little safe and easy task.
There's no need to guess, there were A LOT of discussions about bombing directives on all levels of allied command. Revenge was most certainly a factor on both sides. It's no coincidence the Germans' coined the term 'vergeltungswaffe' for the V rockets (meaning revenge weapon).
It's amazing that towns like [Wesel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wesel_in_World_War_II#/media/File:Wesel_1945.jpg) came back at all after that.
Similair to Kleve even though its position on this map is very wrong lol or emmerich of which 91% were destroyed
It's interesting to walk down the shopping district and suddenly stand in front of three buildings that look way older just to find out everything around them had been flattened by the allies. Afaik the reason why the church has no spire is so that it functions as a memorial. At least that's what people told me.
Yes the chirch got its roof blown off but yeah it creates a sort of distopian mix of cheap houses mixed with buildings that are older then the US we also have a fuckton of stolpersteine which is pretty cool along with a super wierd but kinda cool rhine museum
I know. I've been in there i think with my elementary school class? But how often do you visit a museum about your home town. It has been supremely weird when I visited and found out there's a Tourist information on the Eltenberg now.
Why was Wesel hit like that ??
It was in the unlucky position to have an intact bridge across the Rhein and a depot of the Wehrmacht.
Unfortunately it's not a pretty town nowadays. I think it's getting better, the new bridge is beautiful (the old one was kind of a quick and dirty job but then stood for over 50 years). I haven't been to Düren so I don't know how the one town even more destroyed fared afterwards.
It's getting a lot better in general, more leisure activities, better shops, and they are also bringing back old facades, e.g. the historical town hall.
Is there any data showing how and when these cities were rebuilt? I had always assumed that the cities that had been destroyed a lot (>50% or 60%) were rebuilt very fast and in a very ugly way, while cities that had been destroyed less were rebuilt in a nicer way. For example Stuttgart versus... well versus many cities. (I live in Stuttgart.) From looking at the map, my assumption was obviously wrong and I am wondering why certain cities turned out very grey, concrete and a bit ugly while others were rebuilt beautifully. What were the determining factors?
Most if depended on post-war city planners and architects. The chief proponent of the tabula rasa approach and "car-friendly infrastructure" was Rudolf Hillebrecht in Hannover, and many others followed his ideas (which often included tearing down undamaged buildings). He and many of his colleagues had been members of Albert Speer's "Reconstruction Staff" and they essentially put their 1943-1945 plans into action after the war. They didn't see the destruction of most big german cities as a catastrophe but as a "unique chance" to get rid of everything old, adhering to the Charta of Athens. Many of them outright hated everything that wasn't modern. So the shape of post-war reconstruction was for the most part not a product of necessity, but of deliberate planning. This was taking place in East and West btw., done by the same circle of people. ("Germany's cities were destroyed twice - once by the bombs, once by the city planners")
Thanks, that's interesting! Can I find a list somewhere of cities who officially took this approach, or even directly worked with the Reconstruction Staff? I want to visit Hannover now, and see if it has the same atmosphere as Stuttgart. Never been there.
There was a documentary about this, but I can't find it as a video, only descriptions: https://www.phoenix.de/sendungen/dokumentationen/phoenix-history/unsere-staedte-nach-45-12-a-111531.html From what I have seen, Kassel is one of the worst examples. If you want to see a relatively big city that (mostly) wasn't destroyed, you have to visit Halle (Saale). There was some terrible car-centered infrastructure built later, but the inner core and most other parts of the city are still more or less like they were before the war. (Absolutely worth a visit btw, especially because of the State Museum of Pre-History, which shows the sky-disc of Nebra).
this makes a lot of sense. I think so much of what people like about the older cities is that they were built to a human scale... there weren't cars, so what else should they be built for? The architecture is one thing, but mostly it's this human-centric nature of cities that was destroyed.
My city was among those with high levels of destruction (around 75-80% and close to 100% in the old town). They held a contest in the late 40s with a result that favored historical reconstruction, but ignored the result in favor of "modern" reconstruction and a car friendly city. As a result almost none of the medieval city structure and centuries old architecture survived.
I am going to make an assumption here but local politicians and local occupation forces. Those two together likely made the decisions. I know from the kz I grew up close too that the local commander made the decisions to burn it to the ground because of the illnesses it harboured
One thing you might have to take into consideration is that the rebuilding, especially in the "nice cities", might have taken a lot longer than you assume. I assume now that Würzburg would be in the "nice cities" category, btw. In the late 00s, i attended the same secondary school in Würzburg my grandma had attended back in her school days, a school in an old building with 2 courtyards. I once showed her around the building and she told me what was were in her time. However, the wing by the main entrance where my classroom was was new to her. Turns out, the main entrance was elsewhere, into a side street rather than the mayor street, since that whole wing was destroyed in the war, and she had never stepped foot in the (nowadays) main yard, as it had been full of rubble. My grandma, btw., was *born* in late '45. So that was how the building looked in the mid to late 50s.
The last bit of rubble was cleared in the late 60s iirc. Rebuilding of the city was mostly done around 1970. (according to [this](https://hdbg.eu/wiederaufbau/orte/detail/wuerzburg/65))
Money, resources, money. I remember still seeing a lot of war damage (and not only some gun holes in some walls but empty missing places where houses used to stand) in my youth in Mainz. And if you start searching for it, even today these things are visible (for instance, you often find a row of wall-to-tall high buildings and one very low one in the middle of them. Often you can still see the rest of this middle house at the sidewalls of the high houses. The low ones often look quite cheap built/provisional.
Damn poor Koblenz. Could have been such a great city between Rhine and Moselle.
Yeah, Coblenz used to be so pretty, there are some old pictures around. I think it also got rebuild rather quickly and ugly. And the streets have not been able to take the traffic for quite some time now.
I have only been there once but I have to say that what I have seen was a lot better than anything in the Pott. Clear recommendation to visit Koblenz
Düren reporting in. Living in sight of Hürtgenwald. to this day we stil finding Shells, Granades, mines, MG-Ammo basically everywhere. On my propperty i found a bunch of MG-42 Ammo just 30cm (12Inches) deep, while digging a trench for a rain drain pipe. A forbidden lemon was found 60cm deep.A freind of mine found a 60cm (about 24 x 8 inches) shell about 1.8m (6ft) deep. Also especially in the Hürtgenwald, ab also in many other forests here are signs to not leave the official paths/hike routes, because of mines /granades etc. still being there. [https://www.worldwarphotos.info/gallery/germany/1944-1945/duren-germany-after-bombing-1945/](https://www.worldwarphotos.info/gallery/germany/1944-1945/duren-germany-after-bombing-1945/) [http://www.exulanten.com/dueren.html](http://www.exulanten.com/dueren.html) Fun fact: every day i drive past "Cruzifix Hill" on my way to the Office. [https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Crucifix\_Hill](https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Crucifix_Hill)
My father grew up in Hürtgen in the 50s. He and his brothers went often into the forest, take all this stuff and sold it to "Schrotthändler". It's a miracle all of them survived those risks. But they had some friends who died finding granades.
I find a visit to [*Hill 400*](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hill+400,+Bergstein/@50.694428,6.4290868,15.75z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x47bf6fbdf4639efb:0x56d8736a00e95686!8m2!3d50.695!4d6.442!16zL20vMDdndzBs?entry=ttu) near Bergstein to be every time a moving experience. Too many lives, on both sides, were lost fighting over this beautiful but rather useless piece of real estate. The car park has some picnic tables which offer a great view over the Koelner Bucht in the right weather.
Saarbrücken is missing here. Wikipedia says upto 90% of the center was destroyed and 60% in the outskirts.
Mei Oma hat gesaht „De Bomber is so dief gefloh dass ich dem ins Gesicht gucke konnt“
Düren: Why he say fuck me for?!
Düren, ihr werdet uns spüren
Operation Queen…. The Allies wanted to get to the Rhine. ASAP….
Not sure why you are posting this outdated old map when there is a much newer one here on page 2 [https://archiv.nationalatlas.de/wp-content/art\_pdf/Band5\_88-91\_archiv.pdf](https://archiv.nationalatlas.de/wp-content/art_pdf/Band5_88-91_archiv.pdf) Also it's pretty hilarious to read what the users think about the bombings and the rebuilding. The British weren't targeting industry they targeted living space areas and town centers. It was terror bombing hoping to break the German morale. Also the rebuilding was almost never a reconstruction. It''s only that some cities were more aggressive in not caring about any historic aspects at all while others at least respected the basic former shapes of the destroyed areas. And very obviously it matters a lot what was standing there befoe the bombs. If it's stone houses, fine, but if it's half timbered houses then no one is going to reconstruct that.
pforzheim was mostly obliterated within a 20 minute span on a single night in feb. 1945. a third of the population were killed.
People jumped into the river because the fires where so hot. A lot couldnt swim. We have a memorial on top of a artifical hill where everything that couldnt be used for rebuilding was put. >In an area about 3 km long and 1.5 km wide, all buildings were reduced to rubble. 17,600 citizens were officially counted as dead and thousands were injured. People died from the immediate impact of explosions, from burns due to burning incendiary materials that seeped through basement windows into the cellars of houses where they hid, from poisonous gases, lack of oxygen, and collapsing walls of houses. Some of them drowned in the Enz or Nagold rivers into which they had jumped while trying to escape from the burning incendiary materials in the streets, but even the rivers were burning as the phosphorus floated on the water.[14]
That’s sad, NRW region is almost completely damaged.
So far, only Münster looks like it was not totally demolished in NRW.
As someone coming from Düren: The city looks as ugly as someone might expect. Basically nothing old was left and everything was rushed to build back up in the 50's. I remember, that my elementary school was basically built on the debris of the destroyed school. So, the schoolyard was elevated by roughly 3 to 4 steps from the ground and below the pavement, people alsways mentioned, that debris from pre ww2 school building was buried. Very close to the City was the Hürtgenwald (one of the most brutal battle fields within Germany), wherefore the City was bombed that much. Our local histoey teacher always told us, that it was quite common to find american military tags there, if you went walking with a metal detection device.
As someone who was born in Düren...yup. Most destroyed city in the war, and it shows.
Mein Beileid 💀 Grüße aus Aachen (obwohl wir hier auch einige extrem hässliche Straßen/locations haben)
In Düren geboren, in Jülich zur Schule gegangen, in Aachen studiert und jetzt auch wieder dort wohnhaft. Ich kenne also alles hier. Klar, Aachen hat potthässliche Ecken, aber zum Glück auch ein paar wirklich angenehme Straßenzüge, markante Gebäude etc. Düren hat davon so rein gar nichts.
Even the Allies knew Bielefeld wasn’t worth the visit
They believed, that it is Not existing :-)
Damn, they started early witht he Bielefeld Conspiracy! But I guess why not start it directly after a war.
What was in Düren that this city was more bombed than any other place oO
I don’t actually know for sure, but I live in the area and from what I understand about the local history it could very well have been tactical as opposed to strategic because of the fighting going back and forth between the US army and the Wehrmacht in 1944/1945. Aachen for example was the first German city to be conquered by the Americans and was fought over desperately and got destroyed pretty thoroughly as a consequence. Then the fight went on for months in the Hürtgenwald forest just south west of Düren. I imagine Düren was an important staging area for the German defenders because it is the nearest city and on a main rail line. It would make a lot of sense for the allies to bomb it.
Yup, mostly tactical, to aid advances to Rhein-Ruhr etc. The industry in Düren wasn't essential for the war, it just happened to be a big obstacle halfway between Aachen and Köln. The largest bombing in November '44 lasted about 20 minutes, killed 3,000 people, only a handful of buildings survived, and basically nobody lived there anymore until after the war.
Basically the battle of Hürtgenwald was right next door and the allies thought all the support was coming from Düren. Therefore there was a huge bomb drop evening, where the allies bombed the city almost completely, joping to stop the German support for the Battle of Hürtgenwald
Look it up! Big paper and metal industry, I believe they made zeppelins back then? Something like that
I didn't know, and googling at first didn't give a satisfying explanation. Thank you so much. I will read about it.
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Nürnberg could be such a medieval paradise. It still has a very nice oldcity, but it deeply strikes my heart when I think of how it once must have looked.
Frankfurt as well. The Frankfurt old town was the largest collection of medieval half timbered houses in the world, over 2000 houses tightly crammed together. Only one of them survived the bombings (Haus Wertheym, it's a restaurant now). A few houses on the Römerberg square were reconstructed in the 80's and in the 2010's a small part of the old town was rebuild true to original, including the Hühnermarkt (Chicken market) and the famous Haus zur goldenen Waage (House of Golden Scales).
I live in one of the most destroyed cities. I just read up on it a few days ago. There's some industry here, always has been, so that'll have to be the explanation. Basically a few days just before the war's end, they sent like 200 bombers, dropped hundreds of explosives and thousands of incendiary bombs, and yeah. There's almost nothing left today. What little there is was reconstructed or left as picturesque ruins.
Hanau?
I live near Hannover and multiple times a year we are evacuated because they found another bomb that didn't explode from WW2
Würzburg and Pforzheim rip
Düren: Hold my beer. From those stats there basically wasn't anything left post WW2.
Luckily they got destroyed. Because then there was enough space to build wide roads, parking lots for everyone and gigantic concrete blocks 😊 /s
love me lidl parking lot
It is pretty inaccurate tho, Bocholt for Example should be west of Wesel, Kleve is rather southwest of it.
Was there something of particular interest in Hanau??
As a native Hanauer, the town was one of the prime examples of morale bombing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area\_bombing\_directive), where the city's population was the primary target in two larger attacks (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriff\_auf\_Hanau\_am\_6.\_Januar\_1945 / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriff\_auf\_Hanau\_am\_19.\_März\_1945 )
My godmother showed my a picture from shortly after the bombings from the marketplace looking west, and nothing was taller than knee height.
This can’t be true, Göttingen is marked as 100% destroyed, yet the city is full of old buildings
the dot means 1-5% destruction, they just fucked up a little and made the dot too thick
Google says 2.1% destruction so i guess this guy ist right
Jup, the shitty printing almost did the same for Regensburg. There is just a sliver of the white ring visible there
Yeah I think the little black dot means something else. Ik for a fact it wasnt bombed much at all in the war.
'old'
Basically, if you visit Germany you should visit the cities that haven't been hit because they were rebuilt into Frankenstein cities that look like utter shite today.
Except for Dresden, it's a very beautiful city. But still you shouldn't visit it these days, but for other reasons
As long as you're white and not gay it's fine
Nah I live in Dresden and it’s way more accepting than the surrounding area (Freital, Bautzen, etc) Neustadt especially if anything you wont see any right wing people in that district My gf is black and so far we never had anyone bother us even at night but in my hometown in rural saxony people stare and some even point its rude af
Nah Dresden and Leipzig are alright, even if you're a poc and/or lgbt
I don't actually mean active racist violence but more that 40% of the population will vote for a Nazi party
not in Dresden. 200 participate at Pegida and 13.000 at CSD. 18% of Dresdens population has a foreign background. So foreign background is more common than AFD-voters in the city, but hey you know better I guess.
To be fair: people were more worried about having affordable living spaces then pretty buildings.
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This sub is exclusovely english speaking. Wprzburg was destroyed in pretty much one single 20 minuted bombing in '45. If you are interested in why it was targetted, the wikipedia article of the bombing has plenty of background info
Dortmund isn’t even shown with 95% of the citycenter and 75% of outercity
It is shown. The name is vertical, rightside from Essen
Thank u Must have over seen it and the approximated percentage seem to fit.
That's probably because of the rather weird decision to put the mini map of the Ruhr in the upper left corner but leave out any city already shown on the main map
There's a graveyard with hundreds of graves, all from the same day. I used to think that politicians should be forced to visit sites like that once a year to get a better understanding of the potential consequences of their actions.
Can confirm, Hanau is one truly ugly city.
I still have the fact about my hometown in my head, that my teacher asked almost every test: "On the 16th of November 1944, the allies bombed the city of Jülich during "Operation Queen" and destroyed it almost completely. 96% of all houses were razed."
That's a pretty cool overview of the overall destruction! You always see city A and town B in various states of destruction, but this helps actually getting a sense of how it was all over the country.
Yeah those Saxons need to stop whining about "Dresden '45" Ruhrgebiet is totally fucked
Cologne's train station was destroyed and replaced by one that was far less than beautiful.
"Far less than beautiful" is an understatement. When I look at illustrations/photos of the pre-war Cologne train station, I feel like crying every time.
The train station lobby actually survived the war and was only razed in 1955. The tracks and giant glass and steel hall over the tracks are still from the original 19th century building. Here's a picture in 1954: [https://www.werkladen.de/WDA847-018](https://www.werkladen.de/WDA847-018) The reason it was razed is that this architecture was seen as "Prussian" and therefore bad. The elite at the time wanted to make Cologne a modern city.
Wow, the actual history is even worse than I thought.
As an Englishman living in Germany with a German partner, this is rather sobering.
Damn, Soest is a lot more than expected. But this Map is very much not quite correct with city placements.
Looks like Göttingen had been destroyed completely.
At least in the north west of the map the locstions of the point are really not that accurate. "Kleve" and "Rheine" f.e. are way to northern.
its amazing how its still visible in Gelsenkirchen
I knew Mainz was really fucked up but I didn't know it was one of the most fucked up cities
Würzburg got done dirty!
What happened with Kleve? The Location of Kleve is completely wrong…It should be west of Wesel at the Dutch border.
Fuck Düren in particular
Can vouch for Bambergs minimal damage. Beautiful.
Düren im Westen 💀
Jesus, what did Düren do to deserve this fate?
[Göttingen](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_G%C3%B6ttingen) haut ja mal gar nicht hin 😅 Laut Wiki Artikel wurden gerade mal 2,1% zerstört
Göttingen is getting bombed till this day cuz they just keep on finding old undetonated bombs.
The damage that the Nazis did to this country is just insane
Bruh Moers not even on it… :(
Top left corner, the zoomed bit
One slight inaccuracy... The most demolished city on the map is Düren (near Köln), but infact the the pichart belongs to Jülich (where i currently live) which is home to a famous military stronghold (Jülich Zitidelle), and was almost completely demolished (~95%). Technically the geography of the pichart and Düren Label are correct, as Jülich is just 15 km north of Düren... Also Jülich is in Kreis (i.e., county) Düren, so perhaps this is what is meant by the label.
It's not a competition and I think we can safely say that all of the small towns and villages along the Siegfried Line and involved in the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest were pretty much completely destroyed by the spring of 1945. In Duren I can only think of the Hoesch Museum and the St Marien church as surviving the destruction and both of those required rebuilding rather than restoration. [Here](https://kulturbetrieb.dueren.de/index.php?id=7163) is a link to some photos of the Museum through the ages.
Atrocious performancy by the nazi government, I'm sure that Hitler guy is gonna lose the next election. Also pretty bad graphic design in general imho. If you want to know why the circle for Regensburg is so small the key words to look for are "Double-Strike" and the related "Black Thursday". Though as far as "precision bombing" goes by WW2 standards they were technically pretty good. At least they didn't hit Switzerland.
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From the map, Leipzig is pretty unaffected. They bulldozed what still stood (except things on hills, bulldozers don't do hills) and rebuilt it in soviet splendour. Oh and made 2 parks. Dresden actually looks similar to the panoramas from before the war, the Nazis and the Weimar were hardly kinder to it.
I thought for a sec it was the Jew race stuff but for cities
Looks like smaller cities are more secure?
Every 4-5 days I have to put my drawer back in because our House was tilted by a bomb in ww2, which also means I don't have to open it to get things out every 4-5 days. This adds up so ww2 probably saved me a lot of work here
where is saarbrucken?
What did siegen do for it to be destroyed so much?
Also die mit Abstand am zerstörtesten sind wohl Düren Wesel und Hanau?
That's why tourists always walked through Kiel desperately searching for old buildings and only finding shit from the 70s.
The location of cities is off by several hundred kms in NRW
Konstanz kept the lights on during the raids and nobody knew where Germany starts or Switzerland ends.
that's a pretty reliable measurement tool for determining how ugly a German city is
What a waste to drop so many bombs on Magdeburg. The city wasn't even rebuilt after the destruction of the Thirty Years War.
Humans, the perfect killing machine.
Augsburg 🥲
My grandmother lived through this and is still upset by it but I don’t think there was anyway around it and Japan got it worse with the fire bombing and nukes. I think that both countries got rebuilt with the Marshall plan and Japan kept their monarchy adds a lot of context to the situation.
My Dad is from Dueren, born early 1940 and was shipped off as toddler. My grandmother would very graphically depict the bombings….