good map of war related damage of German cities

My source comes from a history book on places and personal visits of towns that escaped vast amount of damage by 1945....

Frankfurt-Höchst, Celle, Flensburg, Stade/Hostein, Lüneburg, Weimar, Heidelberg, Plön/Holstein, Sigmaringen an der Donau.

I think Büdingen, Gelnhausen, Limburg, Seligenstadt, Idstein, and Eltville can be added to your list.

In general the cities far away from the Eastern and Western front, from the Baltics to Bavaria, suffered the least in WW2. There are some major losses, like Dresden, Braunschweig or Nuremberg, but many cities survived WW2 relatively well. Later the Communist GDR, which didn't have the money to remodel entire cities, worked like a time capsule, while many places in Western Germany were massively changed in the 60s and 70s. This is most noticeable in the seaside resorts of the Baltic Coast.

I'm intrigued about the lack of damage in Thuringia, right around
Erfurt, with Erfurt Gotha and Weimar listed as limited damage.

Most of Thuringia is well preserved. What's special about these towns is the fact that the territory of Thuringia was splitted into many tiny duchies (like Saxe-Coburg-Gotha -> Windsors), and each of them had a tiny capital... with a big castle. The historic centre however is usually quite small. Notable exceptions here are Erfurt, Weimar and Mühlhausen.
Worthwhile towns are (higher is better):
Erfurt
Weimar
Naumburg (technically not Thuringia anymore, but anyway...)
Mühlhausen
Schmalkalden
Gotha
Eisenach
Bad Langensalza
Altenburg
Arnstadt
Rudolstadt
Saalfeld

BTW: in other parts of Central Germany you can find towns which are equally good preserved, but have a much bigger historic core with more valuable buildings. Saxony for example, to the east of Thuringia, was historically one of the richest German states, thus the medieval towns were bigger, and the houses more elaborate. The downside: Saxony was always rich, and some towns were heavily remodeled in th 19th century. This is most noticeable in Leipzig, which is Germanys best preserved big city.
In Saxony you should consider (higher is better):
Görlitz
Meissen
Leipzig
Freiberg
Bautzen
Halle (technically not Saxony anymore, but anyway...)
Pirna
Torgau
Zittau
Zwickau
Annaberg-Buchholz
Kamenz
Grimma

@rob: Thanks for sharing that source of information.

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I partially disagree that distance played a role. In the last months of war in which the most attacks were done the reach of most old and the modern bombers were already significantly enhanced and also the airfields were coming closer with rest of troops.

More important was the strategic role in the beginning: weapon or war related supply factories, traffic hubs, hubs of Third Reich (e.g. Nuremberg) but later also how to create the most personal damage and demotivation to German civilian population.

Example: Würzburg was very heavily bombed on March 16 1945 (3 mins video in German, maybe geo fenced):
- less than 10 minutes bombing of over 200 Lancaster bombers
- appr. 1,000 tons of bombs (explosive and fire bombs)
- over 5,000 identifie dead people plus more missed (likely fully burned)
- 90% of inner town buildings were destroyed

A general good source of photo material about that time is picture database of federal archive.

Have a good journey to Erfurt.

"Lack of damage...." The Americans quickly moved into Leipzig, Weimar (one of my top favourite towns in Germany),and liberated Buchenwald. There is film on US troops entering Leipzig and upon reaching the Völkerschlacht Denkmal ( one the 5 huge Prussian monuments) received hostile fire. They were in no mood to lose men flushing them out since they saw the war at an end already. To deal with this unexpected nuisance, the Americans just called on artillery fire to be directed at the monument.

Thanks for the interesting information.
We lived in Augsburg, Germany for four years, working for the US Army. I have a large photo book documenting the bombing damage from WWII for that city. According to the book 50% of all buildings in the city were destroyed or damaged during WWII.

There was an ME-109 factory just outside the city were you could still see bomb craters during the 80s.

Cities like Cologne, Frankfurt and Berlin, we were told that 90% of the buildings were destroyed or damaged.

We did a bus tour in 1989 that went through Dresden on to Poland and back through Czechoslovakia. It was amazing how much WWII bomb damage still existed in the old Communist countries. East Berlin still had a lot of damaged buildings. The Autobahn on the way to Dresden still had a bridge bombed out from the war and we had to divert to the other side for that single lane bridge.

We heard stories about why the famous cathedral in Cologne had little damage. Many allied bombers later admitted that they tried to avoid bombing the cathedral. The Germans are resilient people and they recovered quite well from all this damage. The Marshall Plan did help.
The Soviets refused to accept the Marshall Plan. The DDR was too busy funding the Stasi (1/6 of the entire DDR population worked for the Stasi).

Another story that we heard while in Germany was that during the war the British bombed at night and the Germans would turn on the city lights in Darmstadt (south of Frankfurt) to entice the British to bomb Darmstadt instead of Frankfurt. Apparently, that did work to some degree. Germans told us that the people in Darmstadt developed a lot of resentment against Frankfurt because of this policy.

Another story that we heard was that the Allies identified the I.G. Farben building in the north part of Frankfurt for US HQ after the way and avoided bombing that building and the area around the building. When I was in the US Army TDY in Frankfurt, I stated in a B&B in that area and was told that by the local people as well as some in the Army. That neighborhood did seem to have not be damaged with building dating to pre-war.

I know that the Allies bombed Munich and Augsburg from Italy and were more able to do that later in the war when they had control of more areas in Northern Italy.

For those with an interest in WWII damage and reconstruction there is another site worth checking. It's www.thirdreichruins.com. It has many photos take during or shortly after the war, and photos of the same places taken in later years.

Frankkfurt-Höchst was left untouched in the strategic bombing offensive.

Right behind the IG Farben building was a sort of slave laborer holding camp, so perhaps the Allies did not want to bomb these civilians that would have no access to a bombing shelter?

Anyway, 2 years ago, they found a 1200kg bomb in this same area and 60,000 people had to evacuate their homes on a Sun. morning at 8 and didn't get to come back till 21:00. The area included a hospital and 2 retirement homes. So, looks like the RAF tried to bomb here after all. The entire Westend neighborhood is pretty untouched as is the Northend, Bornheim, and Sachsenhausen. Frankfurt Höchst didn't get bombed because of the pharmaceuticals being produced there.
The RAF bombed at night because it was safer for the pilots, and the US bombed in the day time as it was more precise.

This week has been a good one for finding bombs. One went off in a field in the middle of the night near Limburg, 2 were found near Giessen, 1 found in Hanau, and 1 near the ECB in the east end of Frankfurt. They will take care of that one on 7 July. Last year they found 1 in the river near the Alte Brucke and blew it up, making for a spectacular fountain.
https://www.hessenschau.de/panorama/sprengung-der-bombe-in-frankfurt,video-89270.html

Find the war memorial or cemetery in any small German town. Between the two world wars half the male population or more was lost in some. A local Gasthaus still has the pictures on the wall of the three sons lost. You wonder how the wars were supported... Not so often visited by tourists in Garmish: Kriegergedächtniskapelle Garmisch.

I make a singular distinction between war sites, memorials, museums, military sites, etc vs Nazi sites, such as the Wannsee villa, Dachau, or the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, site of Hitler's failed coup, have tracked down 50-60 places as it pertains to WW1 and WW2 in England, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, ...haven't gotten to the sites in Finland, Poland, etc yet.

True, Laboe is a poignant place. I went there in 1977. Stade, Eutin, Flensburg, and Plön are also cities/towns in Schleswig-Holstein that escaped damage and destruction in the war.

Jeff, one thing I enjoy about visiting places in the US and in Europe is beautiful architecture, so I've been spending a lot of time on skyscraper city where there is a lot of discussion in some of the German sections about beautiful neighborhoods, cities, towns etc. so the research about why some places are just downright beautiful or not often does have something to do with the extent of war damage, not to take anything away from some of the great reconstruction work done post war.