Many European cities, especially German ones, were devastated by aerial bombing in World War II, and I suppose a good many of them also had significant artillery and other damage. After the war the cities were rebuilt, some parts in the original style but more often with plainer modern architecture. I was wondering if there are any street maps (online or maybe in book form) which show which areas of various cities were significantly damaged or destroyed. I’ve lived in and visited a great number of such cities and am always curious as to whether or to what extent the older-looking buildings and monuments are reconstructions.
Links to maps for individual cities would be of interest, but if there’s a resource which gathers together maps for many different ones that would be even better.
Göring’s Air Ministry building somehow survived unscathed. Amazing, considering it was right in the middle of the city and pretty much everything around it was leveled.
Someone (the U.S. or the Brits, I think) did a survey of important lost buildings and published it as a book in the 50’s. I saw it in my University library back in the day. I’m not sure what it was called though.
my dad was a b-24 gunner and said there wasn’t a roof left on a building in any city in germany by 1945. i’ve seen this commented on several times by other witnesses. the army did an exhaustive bomb damage assessment as the war was ending and you could probably find that somewhere, don’t know if it has maps.
Yeah, I often hear figures such as this tossed around. For example, Wikipedia claims (without citation) that 80% of the buildings in Budapest were destroyed. This website on the Exulanten mentions the number or percentage of destroyed buildings (residential only or in total) for a number of cities: Wiener Neustadt, 88%; Villach, 85%; Vienna, 20%; Wesel, 98%, etc. Assuming the authors were just negligent in citing their sources rather than making up numbers out of whole cloth, whoever counted the buildings in the first place was probably working from a map. I just wish the maps themselves were available somewhere, and not just the statistics derived from them.
At the bottom of this page: map of Hamburg you can click on a Hamburg map icon to see a larger (yet still quite small) version of the 1945 city guide - red means destroyed.
First, getting maps online and in English will be much more difficult than getting the figures in paper form in German. At least in Germany, the authorities quickly established during the war and after the end of hostilities which buildings were completly destroyed, which were partly usable etc. After all, the city already has a list of houses (and who owns them) and of who lives in which flat, so the morning after a bombing, the survivors would go to the office to declare the damage (and receive some compensation to buy new clothes etc., after all their belongings were buried or burned), and then, if the survivors couldn’t find a new place to stay with relatives or friends, they would apply to the housing office to be allocated some temporary homes.
So counting how many houses in the city of Köln were destroyed compared to the total, the office would announce 80% destroyed (and in the Ruhr region, 70% destroyed was light damage compared to 90% or even 95%).
After the War, when the refugees from the East, the released german POWs and the liberated concentration camp survivors were distributed among the cities, the percentage played an important role, because more houses left standing meant that more people could live there, compared to a 90% destroyed city. For several years after the war, living space was so limited, that it was allocated to each citizen: if you had a house that had not been damaged, refugees or bombed-out strangers were assigned living quarters in your house, whether you wanted or not, and people lived very close together - a family to one room. (Also warmer in the very cold winters). Of course it was difficult, tempers flared, but there was no alternative.
As for the destruction in France during the military advance, I’ve heard anecdotally that in the 80s, the French were still pissed that the Yanks had bombed St. Malo during the war, because it was an important architectural and cultural city and so far unscaped, and the French feel that it was very unneccessary to just bomb it because the Americans could do it easily.
Here is the same kind of map for the city of Frankfurt, though unfortunately its use is restricted for non-paying visitors. It seems that the Falk Verlag, a well-known German publisher for maps, published several maps of German cities of that kind shortly after the war. Maybe there’s even more to find of them on the site I linked to, since it’s called landkartenarchiv. de, which means “map archive”.