War Comes to Aachen

This book narrates the tumultuous era of total war through the fate of AachenImperial Germanys seat of power for 600 years, site of Charlemagnes coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, and a place with greater geopolitical significance for Adolf Hitler in 1944 than Stalingrad in 1943.This was a stark contrast with the events of the Great War: in 1918, the Imperial German Army had abandoned Aachen in a rout-like flight. In the Nazi period, however, Aachen became a major symbol of Germanys defiance against the Allies. For Hitlerhis mind warped after surviving the Stauffenberg bomb plotGermanys westernmost city became pivotal in his last-ditch defence of the thousand-year Reich.War Comes to Aachenweaves together the citys story from 1900, tracing its entrenched Catholic orthodoxy, its growth as an industrial urban centre, the demise of democracy, the rise of Nazism, the two world wars, and the Holocaust. The book surveys Churchills wartime leadership and the destruction of pre-war Aachen through the lenses of military history and the anthropology of aerial bombing. Philip W. Bloods absorbing history concludes with Allied efforts to reshape German society after 1945, and with the use of remembrance as a means of socio-political control.