LIst of historic German cities and big towns less damaged by World War 2

I'm not sure how much practical use the list has. For example, do you mean to suggest that Dresden or Cologne (both 99% destroyed) aren't valuable visits today? I loved both cities, which are good for days of visting. I do feel a little odd when I visit a completely demolished place (for example Frauenkirche in Dresden, which was rebuilt scrap by scrap), which is indistinguishable from the original. The Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg is another example.

There's also plenty of formal scholarship, which I would trust more than a list you found on the internet. For example,

https://books.google.com/books?id=945aCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA2&ots=7OI1kdAyl3&dq=erfurt%20reconstruction&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q=erfurt%20reconstruction&f=false

The problems with these lists:
- the people who create such lists are usually biased. They often don't know perfectly preserved small towns hundreds of miles away very well and rate a less impressive town nearby higher.
- if 20% of a town was destroyed in WW2 it could mean the train station + industrial area was destroyed, but not the historic old town
- even a perfectly preserved but historically poor town is less interesting than a historically rich town with a few losses

Here is a article by the German association of monument conservators which lists and describes 300 towns (use Google Translate):
http://www.zeit.de/2008/48/Karte-48/komplettansicht

PS: and the best preserved (historically big) town in Saxony is Görlitz.

@ Martin. Great resource. Thanks for posting this. We've spent some time in several of these beautiful cities and towns in many of these states.

I wonder why we fixate on WWII damage. Germany has been a battle ground since long before it was a unified country and the willingness to rebuild seems a major national characteristic. One of my favorite places to visit in Germany these last few years has been Sebalduskirche in Nürnberg, just to observe the the rebuilding of war damage by the community.

Wars are not all that require rebuilding. Bring electricity and plumbing into a building require structural change. New fashions (Baroque Age) will cause buildings to be rebuilt. I am sure that old buildings must be altered to meet changed building codes before they house guests and visitors.

We really can not walk into a medieval building in Germany, only something that looks like one. By the same token, we can not sleep in an unaltered inn where George Washington slept.

As someone already said, it is the historical significance of a place that holds more meaning for me.

I get rather tired of reading that Frankfurt was completely destroyed or flattened, but in reality it was only the inner city. A rather small area when compared to all of the neighborhoods that survived intact. A good portion of the city is chock full of turn of the century buildings. Sachsenhausen has medieval buildings, Höchst is on the Half-Timbered route and has one of the oldest churches in Germany. The inner city has several churches built in the 1200's- 1300's that were barely damaged (don't bother looking for them listed by Rick though, he ignores them). Even the Kaiserdom only needed a new roof (contrary to what is written in a certain blue book)

Cologne has gorgeous neighborhoods too. Go walk through the Belgian quarter the next time you are there.

So, why does it even matter? Rothenburg is super popular with tourists who ignore towns that weren't bombed at all, yet much of Rothbenburg was bombed. Go figure! Rome has rebuilt many of their structures. Does that take away from its beauty?

My information is taken from a text on modern German history, ie a noted and reliable source: undamaged cities and towns....Lüneburg, Celle, Flensburg, Heidelberg. Other places that escaped mass damage were Frankfurt-Höchst, Sigmaringen an der Donau, Meißen. There were from an historical perspective towns along the Soviet advance in West Prussia that escaped mass war destruction. I went to one of them in the lower Vistula area as a day trip in 2005.

I'm interested in this for historical purposes, realizing that there is constant reconstruction, renovation, etc involved in all older cities, war damaged or not. And of course some cities have been restored much better than others. Btw, not to pump up other sites, but skyscraper city is an amazing treasure trove of photos of cities, buildings and landscapes all over the world.

I'm going to take a stab at why we fixate on WWII-era damage. Probably because it was so extensive it left so many millions homeless, the immediate postwar goal was not always historical preservation, but rather getting a roof over people's heads as soon as possible. Compare, for instance, an apartment block from the Gründerzeit, with it's elaborate mason work and turrets, to it's postwar counterpart. Although they are at least often painted in bright colors, the facades are usually completely plain, and the overall structure of the building is rather blocky. The Thirty Years War was, proportionately, an even more destructive conflict for Germany, but the rebuilding occurred during the magnificent Baroque era.

And if we only fixate on cities, we miss the larger picture. The entire country wasn't carpet-bombed back to the stone-age. Many of the intermediate-sized towns escaped completely untouched, and these are everywhere in Germany.

@ rob in cal....Great that your interest is for reasons of history. Likewise with my reasons. I heartily suggest seeing Lüneburg. When I went there on my first full day in Germany in 1971 as a day trip from Lübeck, I was not aware of it having survived intact the horrors of WW 2. That was pretty obvious seeing the place. I went there because of the Prussian history museum, the Ulanen Denkmal is also there. The British Army's Tac HQ was there in 1945 after it crossed the lower Elbe at Lauenburg. The small towns outside of Hamburg, ie 30 mins to 1.5 hrs radius are totally off the American tourist radar.

The fact that parts of a damaged city have been restored, sometimes from original plans that escaped destruction, doesn't make them less interesting, in my opinion. In Viterbo, for example, rather than rebuild in the style current when the city was damaged, the government chose to restore the major sites to their medieval past, the height of Viterbo's importance. Warsaw, according to several sources, used paintings of the city by Canaletto when it restored its historic center.

On the flip side of this discussion, a very interesting site is Third Reich in Ruins.

I think the issue is some people's extreme ideas about "authenticity" - that if a building was severely damaged during WWII and then reconstructed it's somehow "fake" and not worth seeing. As other people have said on this thread, there are lots of things that can lead to heavy reconstruction other than war damage - just read up on how little of what people see now as Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan is his actual work!

What is interesting about Third Reich in Ruins is that the Munich section is absolutely filled with pre-war structures scattered about the central city in all directions which I had thought was completely destroyed. Clearly the damage was less extensive as everyone has been led to believe, at least there.

I think a lot of us were raised on photos of destroyed Germany and we took it to mean wholesale destruction. But the media always takes the picture at the angle of greatest effect. It's the same with tornado damage of towns: the undamaged portion of the city is not photographed and the 3 destroyed houses are photographed from every conceivable angle.

And a theory: Germans seemed to have built modern sooner than other places in Europe, i.e. even wandering around Bamberg it is clear that Germans were building wider streets earlier than in other places like France and the UK. Maybe this has tricked people into thinking large parts of Germany must be post war?

Tom_MN is on to something. Modern Bauhaus design originated prior to WWII and spread worldwide afterwards.

And although Bauhaus may be a very important step forward in the history of architecture and design, I don't think it's particularly well loved, or even known, by the general traveling public. Otherwise, Dessau would be one of Germany's top destinations. And the few who do visit Dessau probably go for the Garden Realm rather than the birthplace of Bauhaus.

I am on both sides of the fence on this one. Part of what attracts me to Europe is really old stuff, it just awes me to look at (for example) effigy tombs from the 12th Century like my wife and I saw recently at Jerpoint Abbey near Kilkenny in Ireland. We just don't have things that old in California. The people here then did not build in stone. \On the other hand, not going someplace because it was bombed heavily in one war or the other is misguided. We were in Nuremburg for a couple of nights in 2014 on the tail end of a river cruise and it was great (had previously visited briefly with a rental car from Rothenburg in 2006). Very underrated city, and for that matter Germany is a very underrated country to visit.