Nazi Sites in the Rhineland

Worms

Two American GIs take cover on the bridge on the Nibelungenbrücke on March 28, 1945, as snipers on the other bank of the Rhine take aim and taken from the same spot in July, 2022. In the foreground lies one of their victims. During the war, a total of four anti-aircraft guns were set up atop the tower caps above the stairwells on both bridge towers which had earlier been removed and replaced by concrete platforms in order to defend the bridge. On March 20, 1945, the retreating Wehrmacht blew up the bridge itself. Six days later engineers of the American 85th Combat Engineers Division built a pontoon bridge within ten hours a few metres downstream of the destroyed bridge whilst also building makeshift bridges over the Rhine in the south of Worms between Bobenheim-Roxheim and Frankenthal and in the north around Hamm am Rhein. Later a towing ferry was used but this provisional remedy could only cover the most urgent needs. It was not until 1948 that a permanent Rhine crossing was available in the Worms area with the makeshift Rhine Bridge in Worms, which at the time served as a railway and road bridge. Finally by the fall of 1950, preparatory work for the new building of a bridge began. The severely damaged eastern gate tower from where I took the photo on the right bank of the Rhine above the roadway was removed, whilst the three-story high base below the roadway was preserved. Still, the "old" Nibelungen Bridge could not cope with the increase in traffic between 1953 and 2005, which is why it was heavily overloaded at peak times and in the meantime also in need of renovation. It was closed to traffic from September 16, 2008 until September 12, 2013, when the "new" bridge that was being built at the same time was opened for traffic, when rehabilitation work began. On April 3, 2019, the Worms Mobility Agency announced that it would start planning a replacement for the old Nibelungen Bridge, the construction of which is planned from 2025 whilst retaining the older ramps and the Nibelungen Tower. 

The Nazi flags outside the main railway station have now been replaced by gay flags. As can be surmised by such contrasting images taken at the same location, Worms had been largely destroyed by two Allied bombing raids on February 21 and March 18, 1945. The British air raid of February 21, 1945 targeted the main train station on the outskirts of the city centre and the chemical factories southwest of the town centre, but also destroyed large parts of the city centre, including the Trinity Church, built in 1709-1725, which burned out completely except for the outer walls and parts of the tower. Worms Cathedral was also set on fire. 239 residents died. The American attack of March 18, 1945 killed 141 people. The attacks left about 15,000 residents homeless. 35% of the building stock was completely destroyed, another 29% damaged to varying degrees. The inner city was rebuilt after the war in a largely modern (ie: unappealing) style. 

Iron benchmark featuring the Nazi eagle affixed onto Worms's cathedral. As Taff Simon of Dark History Tours tells me, such benchmarks are 'like the "Crows Foot" you see on building in the UK - the Ordnance mark - because the Ordnance Survey mapped the UK. If I recall, the top of the bit which attaches in to the wall will have had a known height above sea level. The surveyor with their theodolite or dumpy level needs to know how high off the ground the instrument is. Their buddy will have a large scale ruler which is placed atop of the bit which goes into the wall. Add that known height which the value you read through the level and that is the height of your level."

As mentioned above, the cathedral had been bombed but, although the roofs burned down, the vaults (renewed after 1698) remained intact. Steel material from the Gernsheim Rhine Bridge, which was blown up in 1945, was reused when the roof structure was rebuilt. 

 

Speyer

 The rathaus in 1933 bedecked with the old Wilhelmine and Nazi flags and today with the red ensign from my bike. In the early summer of 1919, there had been attempted a coup in Speyer for an autonomous Palatinate which ended up failing miserably, mainly due to the resistance of the Deputy District President Friedrich von Chlingensperg auf Berg. In 1930 the French occupation forces withdrew. When the Nazis too power Speyer had initially belonged to the "Gau Rheinpfalz", which was merged with the Saarland to form the Gau Saar-Pfalz in 1935. The administrative seat of the district was in Neustadt, which thus outstripped the Bavarian state seat of government Speyer in importance during the Nazi era. 

The Speyer synagogue on Heydenreichstrasse was burned down in the November pogroms on November 9, 1938 and demolished shortly afterwards.  Over an hundred Jews from Speyer and the surrounding area who were no longer able to escape were killed. 

Resistance to the Nazis was attempted by the Speyer Comradeship group around the Speyer Social Democrat Jakob Schultheis and his wife Emma. 

Einst und jetzt...

Apart from the area around the railway station, Speyer suffered no major damage from air raids during the war. 

 

 During the war, Speyer was the site of one of the first encounters between pilots and UFOs, or Foo Fighters as they were called at the time:

In an encounter on November 27, 1944 over Speyer, pilots Henry Giblin and Walter Cleary reported a large orange light flying at 250 mph about 1,500 feet above their fighter. The radar station in the sector replied that there was nothing else there. Nevertheless, a subsequent malfunction in the plane's radar system forced it to return to base. An official report was made - the first of its kind - which resulted in many jokes at the pilots' expense. After the 27 November encounter, pilots who saw the Foo Fighters decided not to include them in their flight reports. 

Alan Baker Invisible Eagle -The History of Nazi Occultism

Standing in front of the Altpörtel, and as it appeared in 1939 at the end of the swasika-lined main street; the postwar changes are evident in this comparison. It was at the end of March 1945, Speyer was captured by American troops during Operation Undertone after withdrawing German troops blew up the Rhine bridge . A Wehrmacht unit in Speyer fought tenaciously. After the war the city was humiliated by being part of the French occupation zone and the seat of a French garrison. The establishment of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate was ordered on August 30, 1946 as the last state in the western occupation zones by decree No. 57 of the French military government under General Marie-Pierre Kœnig. The occupation regime ended on May 6, 1955

Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate) 

Hitler being driven down Kölner Straße in May, 1939. The local group of the Nazi Party was founded on November 26, 1925, which at that time consisted of nine members. Development was slow, so that the now 22 members were threatened with collapse in 1928 before the later Gauleiter of Trier, Gustav Simon, took over the leadership of the local group in 1930 and reorganised it. In the years that followed, membership grew rapidly, mainly due to the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland. A rapidly deteriorating economic situation also played an important role; in Trier, for example, around 15,000 people were unemployed at the beginning of 1932 and around 30% of the population depended on financial support from welfare and government agencies. As a result, national tendencies gained more and more influence and with it so did the Nazi Party. The number of members had increased in 1932 to about 900 members distributed over six local groups. The election results reflected this, the distribution of votes for the Nazi Party rose from 2.6% to 30% in the period from 1929 to 1933. However, it was still inferior to the Centre Party, which consistently had the support of the mid to upper 40% of the electorate. This increase from the initial 1.4% in 1928 to 31.9% in 1933 was also recorded in the Reichstag elections.

The Gasthaus "Zur Glocke" on Glockenstraße shown on the left. It had been owned by a Nazi activist and was a meeting place for them where they instigated attacks on political opponents.

 fter Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, a Nazi torchlight procession led by Gustav Simon went through the streets of Trier.  Their actions became more extreme as the general elections for the Reichstag , which were scheduled for March 5, approached. The "Emergency Decree for the Protection of People and State" of February 28 triggered a wave of arrests in Trier, as it did throughout the Reich, during which time fifteen communists were imprisoned and taken to the Sonnenburg concentration camp later that year. Although the new elections did not lead to any change in the political balance of power, the SA still hoisted the swastika flags on the main market square, on the town hall and on several government buildings. A few days later, the SA stormed the Karl-Marx-Haus shown below, which had housed the editorial offices of the social-democratic newspaper “Volkswacht” since the previous year, and occupied it. From May 4, 1933, the "Nationalblatt", a newspaper close to the Nazis, was published here.

  The Speyerer Tor and today.

In the days that followed, both the union building on Dietrichstrasse and the house of the Christian unions on Petrusstrasse were occupied. From March, more and more SA people and "Stahlhelm" members have been used as auxiliary police for house searches and arrests. A development that had its origins in the environment surrounding Police President Stötzel, amongst other things, participation in a Nazi propaganda march by the NSDAP in February. The social-democratic press had already alleged that the police would act more harshly against communists than against Nazis. The pressure on the other parties grew, so the KPD was excluded from the city councils from March 21, 1933 (on the basis of the "law for the synchronisation of the countries with the Reich"). The SPD was also affected by a ban, so that only the Centre Party, at that time the ruling party in Trier, remained. However, due to the concordat with the Catholic Church, the Centre party was forced to stop political work and ultimately dissolved.  With the dissolution of the Centre Party on October 20, the incumbent mayor Heinrich Weitz was relieved of his office and the Nazi politician Ludwig Christ was appointed in his place. The result of these political reversals was that after the other parties were either banned or dissolved and a decree prohibited the formation of new parties, the Nazis in Trier received 95% of the votes in the Reichstag elections of November 12, 1933 as the only party permitted. 

The Kemmelkarne on the Petrisberg, set up by the Nazis in 1938, became a notorious prison camp during the war, Stalag XII, in which mainly French prisoners of war were accommodated. The synagogue was desecrated by the Nazis in the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and completely destroyed by a bomb attack in 1944. On June 16, 1936 the city of Trier signed a contract with the German Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Bildung und Volksbildung to build a teacher training centre. Trier thus became again a university town after 138 years. The Teacher Training Centre was opened in the summer of 1936 with the presence of Reich Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, with a large, two-day celebration and a strong Nazi celebration. The buildings erected for the Teacher Training Centre on the Schneidershof are largely preserved and today the buildings J, K, L, O, T (Gymnasium) and today's nursery of the Trier University of Applied Sciences remain. 

 On the Hauptmarkt is the Hauptwache, shown July 1941 and today as an H&M shop, and which served as Gestapo headquarters from 1933 to 1935. The tasks of the Gestapo initially included monitoring the population, eliminating political and ideological opponents and suppressing any deviant behaviour. From the mid-1930s onwards, it increasingly became a 'national police force' that acted according to racial policy against people and groups who were described as “foreign to the community”. In the course of the war, not only did their sphere of influence expand to include the areas occupied by the Wehrmacht, but other groups such as forced labourers and "foreigners" as well as the population of the conquered countries, who were regarded as resistant, came into the focus of the Gestapo. It was also instrumental in the deportation and murder of European Jews.

In 1935 the Gestapo moved its offices here at the former Reichsbahngebäude at Christophstraße 1. Here it had its offices and interrogation rooms near the train station on the first floor, later also on the second floor. Heavy bomb hits at the beginning of October 1944 made it necessary to relocate the office to Olewig for a short time, from where it finally moved to Zeltingen (Moselle) at Christmas 1944. Until now, little was known about the activities of the State Police Office in Trier, since its files have not been preserved. Closed archival records are almost completely absent. The fact that the Gestapo Trier was involved in criminal acts in a variety of ways is proven by numerous individual examples such as the eyewitness reports from the persecuted, who report mistreatment by the Gestapo in the rooms of the Reichsbahn headquarters building. There was also an organisational and personal connection to the nearby ϟϟ special camp/Hinzert concentration camp. The 'interrogation squad' there was made up of Gestapo officials in Trier and Luxembourg. Force was often used against detainees to extract confessions during 'enhanced interrogations'. An event on October 16, 1941 proves that the Trier Gestapo acted as the lynchpin for the camp in Hinzert. On that day, officials from the Trier Gestapo picked up seventy Soviet prisoners of war from a work detail at the Baumholder military training area in order to take them to Hinzert, where they were murdered immediately after their arrival by injecting a cyanide solution. Isolated source editions that provide insight into the activitiesIts employees would later find employment within the West German state in the post-war period.

Simeonstraße in 1939 and today with the Porta Nigra behind. The Porta Nigra (Black Gate) at Trier is one of the most impressive examples of Late Roman fortification. Trier was frequently used as a capital by western emperors and was consequently developed on a grand scale. The construction of the city gate began in 170 CE as the northern entrance to the city of Augusta Treverorum. The dating of the gate was disputed for a long time and ranged from the 2nd to the 4th centuries. In January 2018, the start of construction could be fixed at 170 based on a dendrochronological examination of wooden remains of the city wall. In various places there are signs carved into the stones, some of which are upside down which are probably stonemason's marks that help to reconstruct the construction of the gate. The signs in the west tower contain dates, but without a year, so that an absolute dating of the Porta Nigra is not possible. However, the marks can be used to estimate the time it took to build the gate, as they marked several continuous blocks lying one on top of the other. Taking into account a sensible subdivision into construction lots and excluding the winter as a construction time, then the Porta Nigra would have been completed within two to four years.

The construction started under Emperor Marcus Aurelius was never finally completed.

Using Trier as his base of operations, Constantine the Great campaigned successfully against the Franks in 306–7 and against the Bructeri (north of the Ruhr) the next year. Two Frankish kings captured in the course of the former campaign he fed to the beasts in the amphitheatre of Trier. Today any visitor, even one with only a minimal knowledge of or interest in Roman history, can still see the evidence of the city’s former imperial splendour. Trier’s most famous landmark, the Porta Nigra, dates from the second century, as do the Roman bridge across the Mosel and the Baths of St Barbara; the amphitheatre was constructed even earlier, at the end of the first century.

As in other cities, institutions, schools, public squares or streets were renamed after prominent Nazis, and so Porta-Nigra-Platz was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz in 1933 after Hitler was made an honorary citizen. In addition to holding party events and commemorative days, this was one of the measures taken by the Nazi Party to change the character of Trier into that of a cultural model city; according to Gauleiter Gustav Simon, Trier was to be a "bulwark of National Socialism". Plans were also developed to carry out a series of building projects which were intended to consolidate and strengthen this new character. However, the planning periods fell on the time of the war, which is why only two of the scheduled projects were implemented- the Gaubräute Schule (established in 1942 at Ramstein Castle) and the College for Teacher Education (after being temporarily closed, in operation from 1941 to 1944). Both institutions aimed to convey Nazi ideological ideals to young men and women.

On a recent Sunday afternoon in front of the Porta Nigra which the Trier police described as a "macabre case" in their report, a tour guide of a group of about ten is said to be in front of the landmark in the city for about ten minutes in the pose of the Hitler salute. This came soon after an innkeeper in Trier landed in court because he had advertised "Hitler apple strudel" baked with "Jewish blood in gas" for "88 Reichsmarks" on his terrace in a Trier allotment garden . On March 31, 2022 the district court in Trier has sentenced the 40-year-old former innkeeper to five months' imprisonment on probation and to paying 800 euros to a charitable organisation for incitement to hatred.

Nazi propaganda at the cathedral on the Domfreihof reading "Deutsche Jungens und Mädels meidet die konfessionellen Jugendverbände"("German boys and girls- avoid confessional youth organisations." By 1937 all Catholic youth organisations would be banned.

The usurpation by force of the leadership of the Reich Committee of the German Youth Associations (Reichsausschluß deutscher Jugendverbände) on April 5, 1933, the umbrella organisation for all youth organisations in Germany, with a total membership of between five and six million young people, marked the beginning of Gleichschaltung of the political, religious, and youth movement–oriented youth organisations, their disbanding or forced transfer into the Hitler Youth. This led to a signicant increase in the Hitler Youth membership ranks and at the same time augmented the ranks of the league. The Hitler Youth continued to expand its sphere of power. For example, an agreement signed with the Reich sports leader (Reichssportführer) made it possible by 1936 to construct an organizational nexus, making any individual activity in sports dependent for all practical purposes on concomitant membership in the Hitler Youth. Similar agreements existed with the Reich Ministry for Nutrition (Reichsnährstand), the organization of National Socialist female students (Arbeitsgemeinschaft nationalsozialistischer Studentinnen, or ANSt), the National Socialist Welfare Organization (NSV), and the National Socialist Labour Organization (DAF). By binding more and more activities and interests to compulsory membership in the Hitler Youth, the net of inclusion became ever tighter and more closely meshed. 

Dagmar Reese (32-33) Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany

In Sichelstraße the former Bishop-Korum-house served as a gaol for collecting Jewish women and children beginning April 1942. The building itself had been built in 1929 by the Catholic Church as a centre for Catholic youth with a large hall, group rooms and a souvenir shop and is named after Bishop Michael Felix Korum, who presided over the Trier diocese from 1881 to 1921. In 1937 the Bishop Korum House was confiscated by the Nazis, and between 1941 and 1943 it was repeatedly used as a collective gaol for Jewish women and children and sometimes also for Jewish men before their deportation to the East. Jewish women and men had to gather here, were guarded and forced to sign documents by which all their belongings, their cash, their assets, their real estate, if they owned any, fell to the German Reich because they were considered enemies of the state.

 A mounted plaque on the site commemorates this doleful event shown on the left. At this point was 1929-1931 at the initiative of the "Marian Jünglingscongregation" (MJC), a Catholic youth organisation, established the so-called Bishop-Korum-house, which was demolished in the 1960s and replaced with the current building. From 1942 it served as a rallying point of the female Jewish prisoners prior to their deportation to concentration camps Lublin, Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.

 The Karl Marx House is where Karl Marx was born in 1818; it is now a museum. The significance of the house went unnoticed until 1904, at which point the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) worked hard to buy it, succeeding in 1928. After the Nazis came to power the building was confiscated and turned into a printing house. Here the corpse of the first victim of the Nazis, Social Democrat Hermann Möschel, was laid out in 1932. On March 8, 1933 over an hundred SA and ϟϟ men stormed the building, tore down the imperial flag replacing it with the swastika flag drove out the Socialists. The Karl Marx House was first occupied by the police then confiscated by the Nazis, and finally, on May 4, 1933 became the headquarters of their party newspaper "Der Stürmer." 

 ...some buildings still physically in existence after 1933 also disappeared from tourist literature. The Reich Committee for Tourism chastised the Trier Tourism Office for distributing a brochure that alluded to the house in which the ‘famous German Socialist Karl Marx was born’. The Committee therefore ordered the immediate destruction of material making such references to the ‘Marxist-liberalist past’

Semmens (60) Seeing Hitler's Germany

 The Kaufhaus Haas. It  had belonged to the Jewish owners of the fashion house Sinn Leffers and was a main target of Trier Nazis. On May 13, 1933 Albert and Max Haas and his wife were taken into "protective custody." The wife would hang herself and the men later taken to the town gaol. By November 1938, all Jewish businesses were to be 'aryanised'.
The Nazis' local group in Trier was founded in November 1925. In May 1930 there were only 150 members which rose to 800 in 1932. There had been increased interest from small and medium-sized businessmen. In 1931 about 35% of Nazi members belonged to the middle class. The Trier retailers had already founded a "trade and trade union" around 1900, in which the small and medium-sized shopkeepers opposed the supposed "growing pressure of the department stores" - which were mostly Jewish - under the motto "Our greatest enemy is the Department store." The National Socialist Handicrafts, Trade and Trade Organisation (NS-Hago)  ordered on March 8 and 10, 1933 that individual Jewish shops were to be boycotted. On April 1, 1933, within the framework of the Reichsbundes Generalboykotts, two large Jewish department stores were occupied by Nazi brownshirts including the Kaufhaus Haas. Already one evening before, on March 31, leading Jewish personalities had been taken into so-called "protection" including lawyer Dr. Voremberg as well as Max and Albert Haas. The importance of Haas, founded in 1869, is reflected in the fact that the Reichsregierung allowed her in emergency years after the Great War to make emergency money. In 1929, more than 400 employees worked in the largest department store in the government district of Trier. After the Nazis had made a further step of escalation in April 1935, many "new" firms claimed that they were now "German shops": Schuhhaus Hans Klodt, formerly a Jewish business haul in Brotstrasse 44; The "Geschwister Schiefelbusch" took over the handicraft business A. Schapira in Grabenstraße 16; Simon Reilinger's Jewish women's confectionery shop in Brotstraße 8/9 took over the "Geschwisterskanz"; the Wollgeschäft Ernst Ermann in Fleischstraße 2 to 4 became "Geschwister Nees". 

 

 The gaol on Windstraße. From May 1940 it became the way station for at least 25,000 prisoners and resistance fighters from neighbouring occupied countries Luxembourg, Belgium and France. According to conservative estimates at least 200 were likely sentenced to death here. Across the road is the Episcopal seminary where Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyons' lived.

The synagogue in 1944 and today. On the morning of November 10, 1938 it was plundered and the interior destroyed. Twenty-three of the twenty-four Torah scrolls were burned, and over an hundred Jewish men were arrested that day and gaoled. The synagogue and an adjacent residential house where the family of Chief Rabbi Dr. Altmann lived, were sold in 1939 and by 1944 were completely destroyed by bombing. Jewish men and women were then forced to do forced labour if they were able to work which, for men from Trier, this meant building roads, whilst women had to work in viticulture. Furthermore, freedom of movement was restricted, leaving the city was only allowed with a permit from the local police station and there was a curfew in the evenings. Eventually over 400 Jews were deported from Trier between October 1941 and June 1943. The transports went to Lodz, "Bohemia/Moravia", to the concentration camp "Theresienstadt" and "unknown" (this turned out to be Auschwitz).

Research today assumes that about 650 Jews from Trier and the surrounding area were killed. As far as is known, thirty survived, twenty returned to Trier and fourteen founded the Jewish Community of Trier. One of the most impressive documents telling of the deportation from Trier comes from Erich Süßkind: 

On 27 February 1943 at dawn I was arrested together with my wife and my underage son. I myself, like all Jewish men at that time, was sent to the Windstraße prison, while my wife and son were taken with the other Jewish women and children to the Bishop Korum House, where they were under the guard of the ϟϟ. Then, on 1 March 1943, we were all loaded into railway passenger cars. The transport went first to Dortmund. There all the Jews from Trier - men, women and children - were taken to the city slaughterhouse, where Jews from other cities were already waiting. A new transport was put together. Crammed into cattle cars, the train left on 2 March for Auschwitz, where it arrived on 3 March. During the journey there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink. In Auschwitz, the women and children were first separated from the men. That was the last time I saw my wife and son on the ramp.

The Hauptmarkt, scene of street battles between Nazis and Communists, in 1935 and today with St. Gangolf church in the background.  From September 1944 onwards, the city was not far from the front line, and was shot almost daily by American artillery. In December 1944, there were three heavy air raids on the Trier allies. On December 19, thirty British Lancaster bombers dropped 136 tonnes of explosive bombs across the city. Two days later on December 21, 1944, around 14.35, 94 of Lancaster bombers and 47 American bombers were dropped 427 tonnes of bombs (explosive, fire and napalm bombs). Two days later, on December 23, 700 tonnes of bombshell were dropped to the city. According to research by the local researcher Adolf Welter, at least 420 people died during these December attacks in Trier. Numerous buildings were damaged. On December 24, 1944 American B-26 attacked the Pfalzel Bridge. During the war, 1600 houses were completely destroyed. On the evening of March 1, 1945, the task force Richardson started towards Trier. A clear full moon night offered favourable visibility as just before midnight they reached the city. A surprised company with four armed gunmen capitulated without a shot. Richardson divided his troops into two halves and sent them both to a Mosel bridge. The northern team found 'its' bridge already blown up. Meanwhile the Kaiserbrücke team reported that the the Römerbrücke, Germany's oldest standing bridge- it had stood for almost 2,000 years and is shown on August 27, 1941 and today on the right-was intact.  Colonel Richardson drove himself in a tank to the bridge where his men were fired with light weapons from the other bank. He directed machine-gun fire from his tank to the other end of the bridge and ordered an infantry and an armoured group to advance across the bridge. When the infantrymen did so, a German major and five soldiers with burning detonators and an igniter ran toward the bridge but they were not able to explode. On March 2, 1945, the city fell into the hands of the Allies without heavy fighting.

 

American troops crossing the Amis Bridge in 1945

 

Then and now; only the buildings at the far right provide historical continuity

  Hitlerstraße is now Bahnhofstraße

Grabenstraße after the war and today and a memorial for the ubiquitous "victims of National Socialism", so vague that it could refer to practically to anyone and everyone. 

Braubach

Before the war and the wife at the same spot eighty years later. A rumour had spread that Standartenführer Julius Uhl had planned to shoot Hitler on July 1, 1934 here at a concert of the singer Heinrich Schlusnus. Hitler himself referred to this in his July 13, 1934 speech to the Reichstag justifying his slaughter of his own men during the so-called Night of the Long Knives when he spoke of how

the man had already been hired in the meantime who was to carry out my elimination at a later date: Standartenführer Uhl, who confessed only a few hours before his death that he had been willing to carry out such an order.

Uhl in fact had been in Bad Wiessee when he was arrested on June 30 and taken to Stadelheim Prison. Apparently, "Uhl was chosen to play the leading role in Hitler’s concocted assassination plot due to his well-known prowess as a brilliant marksman" (Domarus, 496). 

Bacharach 

The wife again at Stahleck Castle overlooking the Rhine and as it appeared at the start of Nazi rule when this 12th-century fortified castle was completely rebuilt, providing 260 beds to the hostel using the site. The ceremonial laying of its foundation stone took place on November 18, 1934. The work, which took only eleven months, cost 25,000 reichsmarks and included addition of a kitchen, another Fachwerk building, on the south side. On October 25, 1935, the rebuilt building was officially dedicated. In the presence of members of the Hitler Jugend, the Deutsches Jungvolk, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and both the SA and the ϟϟ, Gauleiter Gustav Simon gave the dedicatory address. Stahleck became one of 27 Jugendburgen to be used for indoctrination of teenagers and young adults. By early 1938 the turrets on the shield wall were built and its chemin de ronde roofed over. A visit by Rudolf Hess in June 1938 prompted the start of work to complete the rebuilding of the keep, which was still a ruined stump. The plan was to reconstruct it to a height of 36 metres and, seven storeys, and name it the Rudolf Hess Tower. However, the existing foundations would not have been able to bear the weight, so the ruin was pulled down, and in November 1938, work began on a completely new tower. Work on this was interrupted by the outbreak of the war. From 1940 to 1942, the castle served as a military hospital. In addition, in November 1940, students from now occupied Luxembourg who had been studying at German and Austrian universities when the war began were forced to attend re-education classes there, and eventually a youth re-education camp was set up.

Male schoolchildren and students from Esch-sur-Alzette and Echternach were interned at the castle for four months as punishment for protesting against the announcement in 1942 of the introduction of required military service in Luxembourg and the forced conscription associated with it, as well as for participating in the general strike which followed. (Girls were sent to a youth hostel at Adenau.) Those of military age were then sent to the front; a memorial plaque at the castle commemorates this as seen here beside my GIF of Nazis in the courtyard and the site today. A tin badge shows the castle at the top over the words “Jugendburg Stahleck” and “25 Jahre 1911 1936 Rhineland”. The central triangle reads “DJH”. 
Beginning in January 1943, the castle was used as an internment camp for German youth who had shown insufficient loyalty to the Party, such as the founders of the Catholic youth resistance group the Michael Troop; some were taken from Stahleck to concentration camps. From June 1943 to summer 1944, it was a work and military training camp for Germans between 14 and 18 years of age. 

Landau in der Pfalz

The former Herbert Norkus Platz from a Nazi-era postcard and today, renamed rathausplatz. Norkus was an Hitler Youth member who was murdered by communists on January 24, 1932 in Berlin whilst he and other Hitler Youth members were distributing leaflets advertising an upcoming Nazi rally. The group was confronted by communists. Norkus fought them off and ran to a nearby house for help. A man answered and slammed the door in his face, presumably because he saw the other boys. Norkus was then stabbed six times by the pursuing Communists. He banged on another door, which was answered by a woman who tried to get him to a hospital but died on arrival. He became a martyr for the Hitler Youth and was widely used in Nazi propaganda, most prominently as the subject of novel and film Hitler Youth Quex. His comrades nicknamed him “Quex” because ”he carried out orders faster than quicksilver”.

The post office on the former Adolf-Hitler-Straße. Landau traditionally relied on the  military for its development; extensive barracks were built for the 5th and 12th field artillery regiments and the 18th and 23rd infantry regiments. During the war Landau was targeted no less than 35 times by Allied, particularly American, air raids. The heaviest took place on "Black Friday", March 16, 1945 when a total of 1,045 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Landau leading to 40% of the town being destroyed and 586 people killed. Following the end of the war, Landau was an important barracks town for the French occupiers whose control, as usual, came under attack for its incompetence which led to significant loss of life.

No German accounting of the foreign exports was permitted by the French, who took the goods, at prices they set themselves, and paid not in the precious dollars received, but in marks, thus depriving the Germans of the one way they had to buy foreign food. For all these reasons, 'population losses were significant', according to the American writer F. Roy Willis. The death rate for the town of Landau in the Rheinland-Pfalz was 39.5% in 1946, which was more than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%, more than double the pre-war rate.

Bacque (36) Crimes and Mercies 

Rheinbrohl

The flag poles at the 29er Ehrenmal, a memorial to the 29th Infanterie-Regiments „von Horn“ (3. Rheinisches), are there, but the flags have since changed. Rheinbrohl achieved a bitter fame at the end of the war. After Linz had been taken by the Americans without a fight, Rheinbrohl fell only after a ten-day continuous bombardment in March 1945. A small German unit of 27 men, led by a first lieutenant, had managed to make the Americans believe that they were facing serious resistance with larger units by changing the position of a single anti-aircraft gun in the evening. It was not until a massive air raid on March 19, 1945 that the fighting ended. The result of this senseless resistance was forty deaths among the civilian population, with 66 completely destroyed houses and another 177 heavily destroyed and left uninhabitable houses. The shelling and capture of Rheinbrohl was filmed by a cameraman from the American army; these impressive original recordings were published by Spiegel TV in 2005 under the title “Als der Krieg nach Deutschland kam”.

Schweigen-Rechtenbach (Rhineland-Palatinate)

The Weintor, built in the autumn of 1936, marks the start of the Weinstrasse in the south of the Palatinate, less than a mile from the French border. It had been created as part of an economic initiative by the Nazi government in the 1930s. at a time when the wine industry in the Palatinate wine region was in crisis. A wine harvest more than twice as large as usual had caused prices to crash by 1934. Government policy had compounded the industry's difficulties by forbidding the business activities of Jewish wine traders, who had hitherto provided a vital commercial link for the wineries. Party leaders came up with the idea of the German Wine Route, with the imposing "Weintor" at its southern end, as a way to increase general awareness of the region's wineries and to boost employment in the tourism sector locally.  The regional Gauleiter, Josef Bürckel, produced an appropriately bombastic speech entitled "Kampf und Volk – Wein und Wahrheit" on October 19, 1935 as part of the official opening of the German Wine Route.

The "Weintor" was clearly visible from across the frontier, and the Gauleiter's speech contrasted the activist policy of the national government with the economic turmoil in nearby France, then experiencing, nationally, a particularly savage and destructive bout of industrial unrest and economic gloom. Press reports of the opening ceremony wrote of it as a form of "Weihe" (consecration). At this time the Weintor in Schweigen was a provisional timber structure. At Grünstadt, near the northern end of the "Wine Route" a second "Weintor", this one of Papier-mâché, had been erected. As part of the ceremony a column of 300 vehicles drove the length of the German Wine Route in convoy, from south to north, but not before a single engined airplane had flown its entire length. The stone-clad "Weintor" was finally built in 1936 after an architectural competition for its design was won by August Josef Peter and Karl Mittel from Landau. The foundation stone was laid on August 27, 1936, and less than two months later, on October 18, it was formally inaugurated. Citizens of Wissembourg, which since 1919 had been part of France, enjoyed the fine view on the north side of their town, of a large two-headed imperial eagle carved on one side of the "Weintor", clutching a huge swastika in its talons. In France this was seen as provocative. After the war ended, in 1945, the huge stone swastika was cut away. 

Frankenthal

 Unemployed in front of the municipal welfare office in the Horn's house on the market square, today's Erkenbert Museum. On July 1, 1929, the number of unemployed and their dependents in Frankenthal amounted to 1,726. 743 people were supported by the municipal welfare system. After the outbreak of the global economic crisis in October 1929, the situation intensified dramatically. On October 1, 1930, the number of unemployed and their dependents was already 4,688; In total, Frankenthal had 26,439 inhabitants in 1930. More than 26 percent of them were dependent on unemployment or welfare support. 

 In 1938 the Jewish synagogue, built in 1884, was burnt to the ground during the Reichskristallnacht. Today the family name "Frankenthal" is attested amongst people scattered in many countries - especially among Jews - and indicates an ultimate origin of the family in the town, though it might be centuries old and leaving no memory other than the name. During the war the prisoners of war were held here at Stalag XII B in Frankenthal. In 1940, a forced labour camp was operated for several months as an outside camp of the ϟϟ special camp Hinzert (concentration camp) in Mörsch, the prisoners of which were employed in the highway construction (today's A6). On September 23, 1943, Frankenthal was heavily destroyed by bombs and lost a large part of its older buildings. In 1945, at the end of the war, its industries in ruins, it was occupied first by the Americans and then by the French by way of ultimate humiliation. The city was rebuilt in the post-war period, like many others, in functional, but unadorned architecture. This is all the more melancholy when considering the description by the poet August von Platen in 1815 that Frankenthal is a "beautifully built town, one of the most beautiful in the whole of the Palatinate."

The Frankenthaler Brauhauskeller, where Hitler stayed in April, 1931. The day before his appointment as chancellor a procession of more than 2,500 SA and ϟϟ members as well as members of the Hitler Youth from Frankenthal, Ludwigshafen and Worms marched through the streets of the city. On the market square, today's town hall square, they marched past the Palatinate Gauleiter Josef Bürckel. The march, reported the "Frankenthaler Zeitung", attracted a large crowd, "also from abroad". A couple of days later an appeal by the Frankenthal local group of the Stahlhelm, a right-wing extremist paramilitary military association, was made in the "Münchner Kindl". The leader of the local group was the teacher and artist Martin Jais declaring how Germany had to free itself from the "disgrace" of the Versailles Treaty through "fight and sacrifice". Jais is still a respected artist in Frankenthal today whilst his right-wing extremist past is usually kept secret. On February 21, 1933 the Nazis organised a public meeting here, attended by 200 people, half of whom were women. Women participated in such a large number, because Tuesday evenings at the Brauhauskeller was always when the "knitting and Flickstunde" of the Nazi female members took place. That same evening supporters of the Christian Social Service (CSVD), a strongly Christian-Protestant-conservative party, gathered in the restaurant "Ax" on Speyerer Straße. According to the speaker, Professor Risch from Speyer, the cause of the economic crisis is the "removal of God from the acquisition and public life and the worship of mammon". The leader of the CSVD in Frankenthal was the well-known saddler and presbyter Jakob Schatz.

  Wormser Straße on May 1, 1933 and today, the Wormser Tor in the background. May 1 had been declared "National Labour Day" and a public holiday by the Nazis. It began with a service in St. Trinity Church with a sermon by Dean Haussner. The ϟϟ, SA, postal and railway employees, the workers and employees of Albert, KSB, KKK, the sugar factory, von Balcke, the brewery, the authorities and the city, the settlers of the Ostparksiedlung, the voluntary labour service, the unemployed and numerous other groups across the city all took part. At 14.00 there was a big May Day celebration in the festival hall involving shooting and sales booths set up in front of the hall. The day ended with a torchlight procession during which two 19-year-old boys who were members of the Reichsbanner tore down Nazi flags on several houses in the city and were arrested.

 

 Alzey

Another reichsadler in the Palatinate is this one, still allowed to grace the entrance of the Finanzamt. Hitler spoke in the town on June 14, 1932 during his presidential campaign. On Reichskristallnacht, the Alzey synagogue was destroyed and the fittings were burnt in front of the building. The ruin was torn down in the 1950s. A rescued Torah scroll can nowadays be found in the museum. On January 8, 1945 the town narrowly missed being destroyed when 36 Boeing B-17 bombers had been sent to take out a railway bridge in Alzey. Owing to bad weather and a landmark misinterpretation – the crew mistook the top of the old watchtower for the church steeple – the bombers ended up dropping their load on the Wartberg, a nearby hill, giving rise to the legend of the Wartbergturm – the old tower – as Alzey's saviour.

Mainz   

In 1929 and today. After the Great War the French occupied Mainz between 1919 and 1930 according to the Treaty of Versailles which went into effect June 28, 1919. The Rhineland (in which Mainz is located) was to be a demilitarized zone until 1935 and the French garrison, representing the Triple Entente, was to stay until reparations were paid.  In 1923 Mainz participated in the Rhineland separatist movement that proclaimed a republic in the Rhineland. It collapsed in 1924. The French withdrew on June 30, 1930. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January, 1933 and his political opponents, especially those of the Social Democratic Party, were either incarcerated or murdered. Some were able to move away from Mainz in time. One was the political organizer for the SPD, Friedrich Kellner, who went to Laubach, where as the chief justice inspector of the district court he continued his opposition against the Nazis by recording their misdeeds in a 900-page diary.  

Schusterstrasse then and now

In March, 1933, a detachment of Nazis in Worms brought the party to Mainz. They hoisted the swastika on all public buildings and began to denounce the Jewish population in the newspapers. In 1936 the forces of the Third Reich re-entered the Rhineland with a great fanfare, the first move of the Third Reich's meteoric expansion. The former Triple Entente took no action.  During the war the citadel at Mainz hosted the Oflag XII-B prisoner of war camp. The Bishop of Mainz, Albert Stohr, formed an organisation to help Jews escape from Germany.  

During the war, more than thirty air raids destroyed about 80 percent of the city's centre, including most of the historic buildings. Mainz was captured on March 22, 1945 against uneven German resistance (staunch in some sectors and weak in other parts of the city) by the 90th Infantry Division under William A. McNulty, a formation of the XII Corps under Third Army commanded by Patton who had used the ancient strategic gateway through Germania Superior to cross the Rhine south of Mainz, drive down the Danube towards Czechoslovakia and end the possibility of a Bavarian redoubt crossing the Alps in Austria when the war ended. With regard to the Roman road over which Patton attacked Trier, he said:

one could almost smell the coppery sweat and see the low dust clouds where those stark fighters moved forward into battle.  

The main railway station

From 1945 to 1949, the city was part of the French zone of occupation. When the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate was founded on August 30, 1946 by the commander of the French army on the French occupation zone Marie Pierre Kœnig, Mainz became capital of the new state. In 1962, the diarist, Friedrich Kellner, returned to spend his last years in Mainz. His life in Mainz, and the impact of his writings, is the subject of the Canadian documentary My Opposition: The Diaries of Friedrich Kellner.  Following the withdrawal of French forces from Mainz, the United States Army Europe occupied the military bases in Mainz. Today USAREUR only occupies McCulley Barracks in Wackernheim and the Mainz Sand Dunes for training area. Mainz is home to the headquarters of the Bundeswehr's Wehrbereichskommando II and other units.

 The Eisenbahnbrücke 1942 and today

The famous Weimar novelist Alfred Döblin reappeared in Germany in French uniform and became a literary censor in Baden-Baden. By his own testimony, towering piles of books were placed before him, written either during the war or just after. Suppression had not done wonders for German letters, he thought. With no pun intended (Günter Grass’s first successful novel, The Tin Drum, was not published until 1959), he wrote, ‘At first the only thing that grew on the ground was grass and weeds.’ He founded a literary journal, and formed part of the delegation that inaugurated the new University of Mainz. The journey to the inauguration ceremony was an adventure in itself. As they approached the cathedral city they saw the wrecks of factories ‘as if brought down by an earthquake’ and then the city centre: ‘But where was Mainz? All that one could see were ruins, faceless people, twisted beams, empty façades: that was Mainz.’ In the old barracks that was now the university Döblin watched civilians and military figures leafing through the translated transcripts of the speeches that morning. There were British and American uniforms scattered along the rows. An orchestra struck up the overture from The Magic Flute. Men came in wearing black gowns and mortar boards. Döblin was reminded of a high-school graduation in the United States. The president of the region gave a speech in which he described the new university as the key to the material and cultural revival of the region. 

MacDonogh (276-277) After the Reich- The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

 President Hindenberg in July 1930 at a swastika-bedecked Schillerplatz, the Befreiungsdenkmal now replaced with the Fastnachtsbrunnen. The statue itself, Benno Elkan's "Rhenania"  (representing a Rhineland freed from French brutality) was destroyed by the Nazis because of the Jewish background of the artist in late March 1933. Elkan then fled Germany and emigrated to England, where he lived until his death in 1960, becoming an Officer of the British Empire in recognition of his contribution to British art. In gratitude to the British for saving those targeted by continental European fascism, Elkan created a large Menorah featuring scenes from the Passion of the Jewish people. As a gift of the British Parliament, it is now before the Knesset in Jerusalem. 

 

When they took power, the Nazis destroyed the huge memorial to Gustav Stresemann at Fischtrplatz.

Hitler speaking at the fussballplatz June 13, 1932

 The marktplatz before the war, September 1942, and today

Annweiler am Trifels

  Down the hauptstrasse then and now. On the Sonnenberg behind the town lie the ruins of the castle of Trifels, in which Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned after he was captured by Duke Leopold V of Austria near Vienna in December 1192 on his return from the Third Crusade. Handed over to Emperor Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, he spent a period of three weeks of captivity at Trifels from March 31 to April 19, 1193. According to one legend, Richard was found by the troubadour Blondel de Nesle, who reported the king's location to his friends; in fact, Richard's location was not a secret. 

The Nazi era reconstruction in 1938-1942 utilised in part the preserved walls from the Middle Ages or those found by archaeological investigations in 1935-1937, but also in many cases rigorously ignored the original medieval findings and created essentially an architectural reinterpretation of the 20th century. Therefore the  present-day castle is in large parts not true to the mediæval original, being characterised by a large well tower outside the ring wall, linked to the castle by a bridge.

Neuwied

The Pegelturm and boathouse in a Nazi postcard and today. During the Nazi era, several of the town's Jews were deported and murdered whilst supporters of the traditionally strong free churches in Neuwied were persecuted. Roughly eighteen percent of the town was destroyed by bombs during the war. The most striking building is probably the Neuwied Dike, which the locals call the dyke wall which stretches a total length of just under five miles from the mouth of the Wied to the Engers-Urmitz railway bridge. The dike is designed to protect the city from flooding up to nine metres above normal water level; after the war American troops blew up the top of the dike and built a wooden makeshift bridge over the Rhine. This collapsed on February 24, 1947 as a result of heavy ice drift. On December 22 of that same year the Neuwied railway accident occurred, which was one of the worst train accidents in German post-war history. When two D-trains collided near Neuwied-Irlich, 41 people were killed and numerous others injured. Eventually Neuwied would regain its importance as a medium-sized industrial location.

Linking Weißenthurm and Neuwied over the Rhine, what is now known as the Raiffeisenbrücke replaces the destroyed Hermann-Göring-Brücke. 

Linz am Rhein 

In kreis Neuwied, the Rheintor at Burgplatz then and now, with a different flag flying. After the Treaty of Versailles came into force in 1920, Linz was initially part of the unoccupied territory in the Rhineland. The border to the ten-year occupation zone ran south of Linz near Ariendorf over the Linzer Höhe. As a result of the Ruhr crisis, Linz was occupied by French troops from February 1923 as part of the so-called "Einbruchsgebiet" in the southern Sieg district and northern Neuwied districtcleared the break-in area on November 17, 1924. Paul Freiherr Eltz von Rübenach, who had served as Reich Minister of Postal Services and Transportation from 1932 to 1937, died in the town in 1943. After the war Linz became a part of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1946.

Koblenz

View of Koblenz with the Deutsches Eck from Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. In 1925 the local Nazi Party was founded in Coblenz. On March 27, 1929 Gauleiter Robert Ley appointed the ambitious commercial teacher Gustav Simon to be the district leader, who moved to Koblenz and reestablished the divided local group. Even in the Reichstag elections on May 20, 1928, the Nazis had been able to celebrate a remarkable electoral success despite internal quarrels. From the outset they had achieved four times the Reich result with 10.4% of the votes and trumped the communists by more than 1,000 votes. Simon's tireless activities bore their first fruits in the local elections on November 17, 1929 when the Nazis were able to win a sensational 18.1% of the votes with a low turnout of only 55%, thus providing eight of the 44 city councillors. Unlike elsewhere, the Catholic denomination of the majority of Koblenz residents did not prove to be a factor of resistance to the Nazis. From June 2, 1930, the new party organ, the Koblenzer Nationalblatt, supported the party's aggressive agitation. A year later, Simon was able to record a personal triumph: for months, against the declared will of his angry former sponsor, Gauleiter Ley, he had worked to form a new district. Thus on May 31, 1931, the division of the Gau Rhineland was completed and Simon became Gauleiter of the new Gau Koblenz-Trier. Meanwhile, the city of Koblenz, now also the district capital, was struggling with increasing financial problems. The increasing number of the so-called welfare unemployed caused the burden of welfare to explode and further restricted the scope of local self-government financially.

The local Nazi Party celebrated Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933  with a large rally at Deutsches Eck. The first consequences of the change of power in Berlin were not long in coming in Koblenz either: the street terror spread with the KPD and SPD whilst moderates also felt the effects of the first measures of persecution. On February 13, Chief of Police Ernst Biesten, a staunch opponent of the Nazis, was forced to leave. In the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, the Nazis won 41.2% of the votes, whilst the Centre could only win 31.4% with an extraordinarily high turnout of 92.5%. The previous non-voters made a major contribution to the success of the right, which was rounded off by the 8.4% share of the vote for the electoral alliance Kampffront Schwarz-weiß-Rot. On March 8, the Nazi flag was illegally hoisted on public buildings in Koblenz, as it was everywhere in Germany. The hoisting on the town hall on March 8 at Jesuitenplatz shown on the right happened despite the express protest of Mayor Rosendahl, who was taken from his office by SA men under threat of violence to attend the ceremony from a window in the large meeting room. From a balcony opposite, Nazi city councillor Karl Carius and parliamentary group leader Ludwig Christ made diatribes about Rosendahl and declared the actual end of his term in office. Local elections were held on March 12, the day of commemoration, which also ended with a clear shift to the right: the NSDAP was the strongest party with 42%, ahead of the Centre with 34.3 percent of the vote, the German bloc black-white-red scored 10.7 percent. The Nazis were able to improve their seats on 19 out of 44 city councils, whilst the Centre only had 15 seats. Rosendahl went on vacation on March 15; on the same date he was placed on leave by decree of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Hermann Göring.

The Kaiser Wilhelm memorial with and without swastikas. 

The 46 foot high equestrian statue of Emperor William I in his parade uniform, followed by the female allegory of the Empire carrying the imperial crown of Germany on a velvet cushion, was unveiled in the presence of William II on August 31, 1897. The semi-circular pediment with its 33 foot high hall of columns survived the last world war.  
 After the Great War, the Rhineland was occupied by Allied troops. Koblenz was initially the American, then the French military administration. The last French soldiers left the city at the end of November 1929. Immediately tens of thousands of people gathered at the Deutsches Eck to watch the hoisting of the Reichsflagge at Ehrenbreitstein Fortress.  On July 22, 1930, the monument was once again the scene of celebrations after the end of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland. In preparation for this, a total of 28 mushroom lights were permanently installed on the bank and the monument. On this day, President Paul von Hindenburg visited the Deutsches Eck at the end of his journey through the free Rhineland. After a firework display on the Ehrenbreitstein at the conclusion of the celebrations, a catastrophe occurred near the memorial, when a narrow pontoon bridge overloaded with crowds broke in and drowned 38 people.
During the air raids on Koblenz the city centre was devastated. The Kastorkirche and the Deutschherrenhaus were victims of the flames, while the Deutsches Eck remained largely undamaged. Shortly before the end of the war American troops of the 3rd American Army approached the city from the Eifel and began artillery fire . On March 16, 1945, the equestrian statue was hit by an American artillery shell. Whether this was intentional remains unanswered. In connection with the blank claim that Eisenhower had demanded the destruction, said Mario Kramp, more likely was "the fear of the Americans that German soldiers were entrenched in the monument area."

The statue now hung down to the Rhine from the pedestal. Parts of the rare copper disappeared until finally the remaining statue was dismantled and melted down. Parts of the group of figures reappeared later, including the head of the emperor, which is now in the Koblenzer Middle Rhine Museum shown on the right. The French military government planned to dismantle the pedestal and replace it with a new monument for peace and international understanding. Due to lack of funds, this plan was not realised. On May 18, 1953, the remaining pedestal was converted into a "memorial to German unity". To demonstrate this unit, the coats of arms of all German lands as well as those of the former eastern territories such as Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia were placed on the pedestal. Four years later, the Saarland was added. Above the head of Kaiser Wilhelm is being hauled in the courtyard of blacksmith Hermann Schröder on Concordiastrasse, circa 1965. With the reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, the coat of arms series was supplemented by the names of the five new federal states.

In 1953 the monument was declared the Memorial to German unity by German president Theodor Heuss. The Germans remember the date since they sung their national anthem here for the first time on that occasion after the defeat in the Second World War. But the people of Coblenz wanted their ‘old Emperor William’ back. The former publisher of the Rhein-Zeitung, Werner Theisen, together with his wife Anneliese, on November 14, 1987, undertook to finance Khe reconstruction of the destroyed equestrian statue and to donate it to the city of Koblenz. For this he founded the citizens' initiative Deutsches Eck e. V. The Land Rhineland-Palatinate, as the owner of the German Corner, rejected the present on January 29, 1988, pointing out that it still had to remain a "memorial to German unity." A survey commissioned by Theisen in March 1988 among the citizens of Koblenz revealed that 80% agreed to a reconstruction of the monument.  The citizens' initiative and Theisen commissioned the reconstruction of the group of figures on February 28, 1989 at the Düsseldorf metal sculptor Raimund Kittl, without having previously agreed with the regional government of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The hauptbahnhof August 27, 1941 and today, with the fortress behind

Due to the reunification of Germany in 1990, the memorial lost its meaning. As a result, the CDU-led state government changed its mind and accepted the gift in September 1990. The new SPD-led state government under Rudolf Scharping came under public pressure from 1991 and tried to reverse the pledge. The project was discussed controversially in Koblenz and beyond. Whilst the advocates brought positive effects on the cityscape of Koblenz and the local tourism in the meeting and also pointed out that the empty pedestal alone no longer have any meaning, the critics criticised the outmoded imperial cult and the role of William as Anheizer (the "Kartätschen prinz") during the bloody course of the Märzerhebungen in Prussia in 1848 and as commander-in-chief in the suppression of the successful revolution in Baden and in the Palatinate. The inauguration of the restored monument took place on September 25, 1993 although donor Werner Theisen could not live to see that, as he had already died on May 5, 1993.

Deutschen Arbeitsfront (DAF) meeting March 1935 in front of the Kurfürstlichen Schloss  (Electoral Palace). 
 After the Great War, France occupied the area once again. In defiance of the French, the German populace of the city has insisted on using the more German spelling of Coblenz since 1926. During the war it was the location of the command of German Army Group B and like many other German cities, it was heavily bombed and rebuilt afterwards. Between 1947 and 1950, it served as the seat of government of Rhineland-Palatinate. After the war it was filled in with debris from the bombing of the city. During the war, the palace complex was reduced to a shell by bombs in 1944. It was rebuilt in 1950–51, the exterior being accurately reconstructed using the original plans and the interior finished in 1950s style, except for a few spaces in the centre section whose interiors were reconstructed in the classical style of the palace's original construction.

The palace bedecked with Nazi flags and an amphitheatrical Thingplatz theatre in the palace forecourt and today. During the Nazi era, the Thingplatz was one of the first of a projected 400 to be built; in March 1934 building materials were brought up from the Rhine by citizens, over an hundred workers began work in two shifts on June 8, a mystical cornerstone-laying ceremony took place on June 16, and the theatre was dedicated by Mayor Otto Wittgen on March 24, 1935. The theatre was oval, 330 feet long by 230 feet wide and approximately sixteen feet deep; it was constructed using 16,000 basalt pillars, seated 20,000 people and could accommodate a further 80,000 standees in the surrounding areas of the forecourt. The layout incorporated a glacial boulder and, under the palace portico, a memorial grotto with an eternal flame. The motto of the theatre was Leuchte, scheine goldene Sonne über dies befreite Land (Gleam, shine golden sun, over this liberated land), and a lur was installed on the palace roof, to be sounded twice daily. It was audible up to 3.1 miles away. The Koblenz Thingplatz was one of the most important in the effort to use the locations for mystical observances, particularly at the summer solstice. However, interest in the Thingspiel movement waned rapidly, and already at the end of 1937 a contest was organised to redesign the forecourt as a simple parade ground, doing away with the amphitheatre; in later years it was mainly used for the annual May Day ceremonies.  

 

Rheinzabern

Adolf Hitler Straße then and now. The town has a long history- the name itself is a corruption of the Latin term "Rhenanae Tabernae" which literally means "tavern" and "Rhine". Hence Rheinzabern was founded some 1950 years ago as "Rhenanae Tabernae" as a place of rest for travellers on Roman roads and was known for its Samian ware production. Remnants of the production are still visible and there is a local museum dedicated to pottery and Roman culture.

After the war the town became part of the French occupation zone within the then newly formed state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Ingelheim

Nazi rally outside the Burgkirche on the left and Binger Straße in 1939 and today, under renovation. After the war, Ingelheim emerged as the only unscathed town between Mainz and Koblenz.

Remagen

The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen—the last standing on the Rhine—captured by soldiers of the American 9th Armoured Division on March 7, 1945 during Operation Lumberjack. The Ludendorff Bridge was originally built during the Great War as a means of moving troops and logistics west over the Rhine to reinforce the Western Front. It was 1,066 feet long, had a clearance of 49 feet above the normal water level of the Rhine, and its highest point measured 96 feet. The bridge was designed to be defended by troops with towers on each bank with machine gun slits in the towers. The bridge carried two railway tracks and a pedestrian walkway over the Rhine between Remagen and Erpel and commissioned for military reasons in 1916, during the First World War, and named after General Erich Ludendorff on May 1, 1918; the inauguration took place on August 15 that year.

Due to difficulties in building the tunnel through the Erpeler Ley and the cut in Erpel, the rails could not be laid until mid-1919. The Cologne Railway Directorate took over the bridge on July 23, 1919, and operations including the feeder lines followed on September 1, 1919. The bridge was the last major construction project of the Prussian State Railways.

In the final phase of the Second World War, this was the first Allied crossing over the Rhine. It gained notoriety through the 1969 film The Bridge at Remagen. When Army Group B under Field Marshal Walter Model retreated to the right bank of the Rhine in 1945, the Wehrmacht leadership wanted all the Rhine bridges to be blown up. For the Ludendorff Bridge, however, less efficient explosives (300 kg instead of 600 kg of Donarit instead of dynamite) were used. When blown up, the bridge was briefly out of its bearings having been lifted but not destroyed, which made it possible for the Anglo-Americans to cross the Rhine at this point and accelerate their advance towards the Ruhr area. In the days after the conquest, Wehrmacht soldiers tried in vain to destroy the bridge. It finally collapsed on March 17, 1945, probably due to the failed detonation and the fighting of the previous days. Hitler had several officers who were held responsible for the destruction that did not take place convicted and shot by a court-martial. 

The unexpected availability of the first major crossing of the Rhine, Germany's last major natural barrier and line of defence, caused Eisenhower to alter his plans to end the war and possibly shortened the war in Europe. The ability to quickly establish a bridgehead on the eastern side of the Rhine and to get forces into Germany allowed American forces to envelop the German industrial area of the Ruhr more quickly than planned. The Allies were able to get six divisions across the bridge before it collapsed on March 17, 1945, ten days after it was captured. The collapse killed eighteen American army engineers.

 

Schifferstadt

  

My bike on front of the hotel Salischerhof on Burgstraße where I stayed. A yard away on the road are these stolperstein acknowledging local Jews forced into exile to England and the United States; a couple appears to have had swastikas scratched onto their surface.

Beilstein

 The Zehnthaus during the Third Reich and today. The municipality had been the setting for a number of Nazi-era films such as  Carl Froelich’s 1936 work Wenn wir alle Engel wären (“If We Were All Angels”) starring Heinz Rühmann- described by Hull (104) as "the best comedy of the year which contained a number of racy situations that would have curled the hair of an American censor- and the 1938 film Das Verlegenheitskind starring Ida Wüst and Paul Klinger. Not far from the castle above the town is an old Jewish Cemetery who graves- many dating back two centuries-  are engraved in Hebrew and topped with stones of remembrance. Beilstein's Jewish citizens co-existed peacefully within its business and social community for centuries. At various points in history, Beilstein was able to shield Jews from anti-Semitism and at one time Beilstein's population was nearly a quarter Jewish, but the Jewish population began leaving the area prior to Hitler's rise. Its synagogue was built in 1320 when German Emperor Henry VII allowed ten Jewish families to settle in Beilstein and build a synagogue which included a mikveh and women's gallery as well as the main worship hall. In 1925 the synagogue was sold for use as a barn and stable (which included a pigsty - with pigs slaughtered in the mikveh), and thus is one of the very few to have survived the war relatively intact. In the summer of 1942, Beilstein’s last Jewish family was deported and died in a Nazi concentration camp. In the early 1990s an artist whose father from the town survived the Holocaust bought and restored the building where it now serves as an art gallery; its third floor is maintained as a small museum preserving the memory of the city’s Jews.   

 

Laubenheim

The two memorials for fallen soldiers in the cemetery; the older, smaller monument to the Laubenheimer soldiers fallen during the Franco-Prussian War was originally on the market square but, under the Nazis, was moved here. The larger monument was erected for donations from the population and the local associations for the victims of the Great War and was consecrated on August 31, 1931, according to the log book of the warriors and soldiers comrades in Laubenheim on the Rhine "in a distinguished, worthy manner". The monument was built of limestone and bore on the front a panel with the names of the fallen. Above the table was the representation of a soldier's head with a steel helmet topped by a pyramid-shaped point with the Iron Cross. Under mayor Wilhelm Spies in 1960 it was covered with marble tiles. Instead of the nomenclature, a book with the names of the soldiers who had fallen in the two world wars and the Laubenheimer citizens who had been killed in the bomb attacks were inserted.

Kallstadt

The ancestral home of the Heinz and Trump families, two prominent business and political families in the United States. Donald Trump's paternal grandfather Frederick was born here on March 14, 1869, training as a barber before emigrating to the United States at the age of 16 where he continued his former trade. Several years later, in 1891, he moved to Seattle and began speculating in real estate. During the Klondike Gold Rush, Trump travelled to the Yukon Territory and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in the boomtown of Whitehorse. He eventually returned to Kallstadt and married Elisabeth Christ, the daughter of a former neighbour. Because he had fled Bavaria in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation forcing him and his family to return to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1892. He would die in 1918 of the Spanish 'flu. After the war the town exported coronation wine to Britain in 1953 by which time the Trump dynasty had become embarrassed about its German roots leading to former President Trump occasionally styling himself as a quasi-Viking from Karlstad, Sweden.