Writing the history of one’s hometown is no small feat, even after living and studying its history for 25 years. Aachen became my home in October 1999, when I was invited to teach at RWTH-Aachen University during my PhD studies. The university was already an esteemed institution known for business, engineering, and medicine. Working in the social and economic history department, alongside German colleagues, provided an eye-opening contrast to my experiences at British universities. Leading a research team on Aachen’s business history was transformative, revealing a far more intricate city than what its traditional histories typically suggest—those that often focus on Charlemagne or the siege of 1944.
Instead, my research delved deeper into a critical period between 1795 and 1955, an era that witnessed unprecedented change. Far from being a simple frontier city, Aachen functioned as a dynamic hub within a geopolitical triangle, involving Maastricht and Liège. This region shared more than dialects and customs; it shared collective war experiences, creating an interwoven tapestry of historical significance. Originally, I had intended to compare the wartime history of my birthplace, Manchester, with that of Aachen. But, while I could piece together a rich anthropological history of Aachen over two centuries, Manchester presented a different challenge. The urban reconstruction efforts in post-war Manchester, compounded by the redevelopment in the 1960s, effectively erased all traces of my family’s presence there. Generations of my relatives had lived, worked, and died in Manchester, yet there was no longer any physical marker to recall their lives, no churches where they were “hatched, matched, and dispatched.” In this sense, my personal loss mirrored Aachen’s history.
Aachen was declared a “dead city” by the U.S. Army in October 1944. I have pondered at several stages of research: ‘what does it mean for a city to die?’ This question became more poignant after the US Army requested me to lead staff rides of Aachen and the local battles. At that time, the US Army was locked in vicious insurgency conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only were the soldiers supposed to learn about urban street fighting, but there was also a renewed interest in military government and occupation. They were particularly interested in examining the challenges of military government after the city was captured in October 1944. The soldiers’ questions began to channel my ideas for a book.
The longer history, critical to my research, had not emerged as a viable approach simply because of the multiple threads without clear connections. Researching the British bombing of Aachen generated that central thread in two directions. First, the allied bombing started in May 1940 and concluded with the capture of the city, was a constant throughout the war. Second and more importantly, the RAF survey teams attempted an anthropological examination of the bombing. These engineers tried to analyse how Aachen’s municipal officials responded to the bombing and how the civilians were transformed. Thus, from two different perspectives, the US Army‘s engagement with its history and the RAF‘s attempts to understand its campaign, a deeper understanding of Aachen’s war emerged.
War Comes to Aachen explores the question of the ‘dead city’, tracing the city’s turbulent experience in the age of total war. The book spans from 1900 to 1955, with each chapter standing alone to recount a specific event, yet together forming a single narrative. Divided into thematic sections—total war, the anthropology of bombing, wars of destruction, and postmodern war—the book covers the significant moments in Aachen’s modern history: the Great War, the rise of Nazism, the bombings, ground warfare, and the Holocaust. The Aachen that entered World War II no longer exists. To elderly veterans, the city may have appeared superficially unchanged until they began to speak of what was lost in the bombings and street battles. Charlemagne’s church looms over the city, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, but the grand baroque landscape, which once hosted Napoleon and Bismarck, was obliterated. Concrete car parks and modern shopping malls now stand where two- and three-story terraced houses once thrived before the air raids of July 1943 reduced them to rubble.
In the first half of the 20th century, war engulfed Aachen in waves that irrevocably altered its character. In 1914, the city became a crucial launch point for the German Army’s assault on Liège, in Belgium. However, this swift advance soon descended into widespread atrocities. As the military pushed forward, Aachen’s municipal officials followed, tasked with enforcing a colonial-style regime over the occupied territories. By 1915, Germany not only waged a brutal war on the front lines but also imposed terror in the occupied lands. Thanks to its proximity to neutral Holland and its military hospitals, Aachen became a centre for prisoner exchange negotiations with Britain. By the war’s end, the city was overrun with retreating German troops and civilians fleeing potential Allied retribution. From 1918 to 1929, Aachen came under Belgian military occupation, embedding the memory of the Great War more deeply into its psyche than other German cities that had escaped such direct foreign rule.
Yet, despite these harsh experiences of war and occupation, Aachen’s electorate did not overwhelmingly turn toward the Nazis. Unlike cities along Germany’s eastern frontier, where imperial ambitions remained strong, Aachen’s colonial aspirations had been quashed by years of Belgian rule. Catholicism, too, played a pivotal role in holding back the Nazi tide. During the Great Depression, the Church had intervened with welfare initiatives, softening the blow of mass unemployment. Though not without its flaws—especially in its treatment of tenant farmers—Catholic welfare services served as a buffer against the rise of Nazi influence in the city.
However, it was the city’s elites who ultimately struck a compromise with the Nazi Party. By the end of 1934, the Jewish community in Aachen had been entirely isolated, their assets seized, and their presence erased from public life. The Nazis, buoyed by the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the construction of the Siegfried Line, solidified their control by the mid-1930s. When war erupted in 1939, Aachen initially felt little of its immediate effects.
1940 was not a repeat of 1914. This time, Aachen was not at the forefront of Germany’s military ambitions. Instead, Aachen reclaimed territory annexed by Belgium after the Treaty of Versailles, rekindling the old cycle of vengeance. The RAF’s first bombing of Aachen, in May 1940, was the beginning of over 120 strategic air raids that nearly obliterated the city. A devastating firebombing in 1943, followed by a blitz in April 1944, left the city paralysed. By September 1944, with the U.S. Army advancing, the German forces briefly occupied Aachen, imposed martial law, and evacuated its citizens in preparation for a fierce defence. Hitler, who had never visited Aachen and reportedly despised it, was prepared to let the city become a sacrificial offering to Nazism.
The American occupation of Aachen that followed presented significant challenges to the restoration of democracy. The U.S. Army raised a new postwar German police force, though nearly abandoned the effort due to the involvement of former Nazis. The first post-Nazi government also faced difficulties, with many officials having benefited under the Nazi regime. Franz Oppenhoff, the mayor appointed by the Allies, was murdered by an SS assassination squad in March 1945. Yet, despite these setbacks, the Americans succeeded in returning Aachen’s state assets and Charlemagne’s relics, in a ‘Monuments Men’ style operation that exposed the culture war underpinning the allied military government’s dealings with the city.
In June 1945, Aachen came under British administrative control, and the immense challenges of postwar reconstruction began. The social problems that the British inherited—issues such as smuggling and unrest—are largely absent from the historical record but significantly undermined attempts at denazification and recovery. War crimes investigations led to allied judgements, including the brutalisation of two Allied flyers by the citizens, which quietly disappeared from local memory. The most troubling omission, however, involved the events of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. The destruction of Aachen’s synagogue in 1938 was a pivotal moment in the city’s history. The destruction was a clear case of state sponsored arson, while the subsequent deportations from 1942 to extermination camps led to the killing of over 770 Jews. My reconstruction of that story, including the postwar allied investigations and court case, exposed the absence of cooperation between the US Army and British Army military governments in 1947, but also revealed Aachen‘s reluctance to confront its history. By 1950, when the newly formed West German Federal government took control, Aachen’s recovery could finally begin in earnest.
War Comes to Aachen is, at its core, a study of how Total War transformed the populace. Civilians were mobilised, conscripted, and evacuated by both the Nazis and the Americans, albeit for vastly different reasons. The mass evacuation of Aachen, a city of over 170,000 people, is rarely discussed in histories of Nazi Germany, yet it presented an enormous logistical and humanitarian challenge in the aftermath of the war. The scale of the tragedy of war is reflected in how families were still living in air raid bunkers, within the city limits, into the mid 1950s.
After weeks of brutal street fighting, the U.S. Army rounded up around 4,000 surviving civilians, evacuating them to a former German barracks, leaving Aachen practically empty—declared a “dead city.” By March 1945, when Churchill, Alanbrooke, and Montgomery visited, Aachen was still a ghost town. The next six years were difficult for the community, marked by rationing, rebuilding, and denazification. A 1947 map, known as the “Map of Rubble,” illustrated the staggering levels of destruction—60 to 80 percent of the city had been reduced to ruins. In 1956, when Churchill was awarded the Karlspreis (Charlemagne Award) in a gesture of reconciliation by the people of Aachen, his response was somewhat muted. Churchill’s histories of the war downplayed the bombing campaigns that had devastated the city. My books conclusions challenge Churchill’s narrative of his war.
In the broader context of military history, Aachen is often overlooked, despite the Allied media’s fanfare over its defeat in 1944. Stalingrad and Berlin loom large in the popular imagination, while cities like Aachen fade into the background, their populations reduced to mere statistics in the sweep of history. War Comes to Aachen aims to correct that narrative, offering a different approach. The story of Aachen has often been claimed exclusively by American historians or framed as “the Stalingrad of the West” by German veterans. Meanwhile, Britain had erased its role in both the bombing and the occupation from popular military history.
This book was written to reflect the people’s experience of Total War. The pre-1939 population—ordinary citizens, soldiers, officials, nurses, doctors, and teenagers—was often overlooked in official histories. Reconstructing their story meant navigating fragmented memories and obscure local publications. Though written for an English-speaking audience, the book is structured like many German city histories, with one notable exception: Aachen’s perpetration in the Holocaust is not drawn from German archives, which were largely destroyed, but from U.S. and U.K. sources. The rediscovery of these records has added a painful yet necessary dimension to the city’s wartime story.
A close friend aptly suggested, War Comes to Aachen may be a “sorrowful love letter” to my hometown. While that may be an overstatement, it does reflect the profound sense of loss felt for Manchester, and by extension, for all cities swept up in the tides of Total War. On a broader level, this book offers an alternative approach to military history—one that merges the combat record with the social consequences of war, reminding readers that the greatest casualty of conflict is not buildings, but the human spirit.
Modern Aachen, in many ways, is both a shadow of its former self and a vibrant, forward-looking city, its younger generations far removed from the war that shaped it. Everyday, people stride past sites of mourning and destruction on their way to work, often unaware of their significance. In a way, this is a positive sign that German society has moved on from its painful past. Yet, it is vital to remember—how a city with an integrated Jewish community with a meaningful anti-Nazi sentiment could still be swept into the horrors of war and the Holocaust, as a lesson of history.
Philip W. Blood is a historian and the author of War Comes to Aachen: The Nazis, Churchill and the Stalingrad of the West, published by Hurst.
