History of Cologne - Third Reich

Third Reich

At the beginning of the Third Reich, Cologne was seen as a difficult territory by the Nazis because of deep-rooted communist and Catholic influences on the city. The Nazis were always struggling for control of the city.

Local elections on 13 March 1933 resulted in the NSDAP winning 39.6% of all votes, however the catholic Zentrum Party came in second with 28.3%, followed by the social-democratic SPD with 13.2% and the communist KPD with 11.1%. One day later, on 14 March, Nazi followers occupied the city hall and took over government. Communist and Social Democratic members of the city assembly were imprisoned and Mayor Adenauer was dismissed by the new powerholders.

It was planned to rebuild a large part of the inner city, with a main road connecting the Deutz station and the main station, which was to be moved from next to the cathedral to an area adjacent to today's university campus, with a huge field for rallies, the Maifeld, next to the main station. The Maifeld, between the campus and the Aachener Weiher artificial lake, was the only part of this over-ambitious plan to be realized before the start of the war. After the war, the remains of the Maifeld were buried with rubble from bombed buildings and turned into a park with rolling hills, which was christened Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park in August, 2004, as a memorial to the victims of the nuclear bombs of 1945. An inconspicuous memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime is situated on one of the hills.

On the night of 30/31 May 1942 Cologne was the target for the first 1,000 bomber raid of the war. The number of persons reported killed was between 469 and 486, around 90% of them civilians. More than 5,000 people were injured and more than 45,000 lost their homes. It was estimated that up to 150,000 of Cologne's population of around 700,000 left the city after the raid. The Royal Air Force (RAF) lost 43 aircraft out of the 1,103 bombers sent. At the end of World War II, 90% of Cologne's buildings were destroyed by Allied aerial bombing raids, most of them flown by the RAF.

On 10 November 1944 a dozen members of the anti-Nazi Ehrenfeld Group were hung in public. Six of them were 16-year-old boys of the Edelweiss Pirates youth gang, including Barthel Schink; Fritz Theilen survived.

Bookseller Gerhard Ludwig, who worked for the influential publisher Neven du Mont in 1941, was dismissed immediately when he got into trouble with the Gestapo for political reasons. Upon his return to Cologne after his release from Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1946, editor Neven du Mont spotted him and complained about the release of prisoners from the camps - he still saw them as "criminals".

The outskirts of Cologne were reached by US-troops on 4 March 1945. The inner city at the left bank of the Rhine was captured on 6 March 1945 in half a day, meeting minor resistance only. Because the Hohenzollernbrücke was destroyed on retreat by German pioneers, the boroughs at the right bank of the river remained under German control until mid of April 1945.