Attached are a few pictures I took from a war memorial in the desperately unattractive German town of Pforzheim in south-west Germany. On the 23rd February 1945 the RAF launched a massive area bombing raid against the town. The reasoning was that the town was a manufacturing centre of precision instruments for the Wehrmacht. For 20 minutes 367 Avro Lancaster bombers dropped 1825 tonnes of high explosive and phosphorous incendiary. 83% of the town was destroyed and 18,000 citizens were killed. The debris was piled up onto a hill overlooking the town, on top of which is a monument with pictures of the town before and after the raid. The memorial plaque records details of the destruction and describes it as:
"the horror of a war, engendered by national socialist Germany, which had now visited its destruction on our own city".
There is another smaller plaque, put up by the Dresden Trust, which states the regret felt by Great Britain of the damage caused and lives lost. A further horror is the license given to German town planners of the 1950s. Instead of looking to Nuernberg, which was busy artfully rebuilding the town as it used to be before the war, the Pforzheim planners took their cue from new "modern" towns like Harlow and Basingstoke and build a concrete monstrosity.
Memorial in ugly German town
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