"...Rothenburg is pretty much a tourist town..."
Probably the single most touristy town in Germany for its size. In the linked article below, Rick himself acknowledges that "...Rothenburg is well on its way to becoming a medieval theme park." Towns with UNESCO WH zones and buildings (like Regensburg, Bamberg, Würzburg, Trier and others) are very worthwhile but mostly lack the tourist swarms and the tourist-vibe (and the Schneeball and Christmas ornament shops) that dominate Rothenburg's small street grid. The UNESCO towns get tourists of course, but their inhabitants are involved in all kinds of enterprises, whereas Rothenburg exists almost exclusively for the sake of tourism (which employs nearly everyone who works there.)
https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/germanys-fairytale-dream-town-rothenburg
Some of Rothenburg is well preserved, but a lot of it is pretty new. During WW II, most important towns and cities were bombed harshly, while less significant places were far less impacted. There are places you can go where damages were nil or very minor (Hannoversch Münden, which boasts more than 700 historic half-timbered buildings, comes to mind.) But Rothenburg was one of those less important places that actually got hit pretty hard - nearly half of the town you see today had to be reconstructed from wartime rubble. I've read that Rothenburg got targeted just because Hitler had popularized it as the "most German" of German towns.
