Bombing of Nuremberg in World War II

Nuremberg was a favored point of attack for allied bombers in World War II even though it was only later included into the radius of action due to its location in the south of Germany.

The greatest damages occurred from the attack on 2 January 1945 in which 521 RAF bombers dropped 6,000 high-explosive bombs and one million incendiary devices on the city.

Nuremberg was an important production location for armaments and the densely populated medieval old town was a well-suited destination for the purposes of the area bombing directive of the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Daytime attacks on industrial and infrastructure targets were mostly carried out by the technically better equipped US Army Air Forces as part of the division of labor of the Allied air fleets in order to achieve a high degree of accuracy, which was technologically only possible to a limited extent.

[2] In the urban area, but not in the old town, which was most severely affected by the attack of 2 January 1945, there were numerous military targets:[3] The factories of MAN in the south of the city built diesel engines for submarines and relevant components for Panther tanks.

In addition the bombers targeted the Nuremberg motorcycle industry (Zündapp/Neumeyer, Hercules, Triumph, Victoria) and 120 other armament and companies that employed forced labor as well as the facilities of the German Reichsbahn: the marshaling yard in the south of the city and the main railway lines running over Nuremberg.

After Cologne, Dortmund and Kassel, Nuremberg had the largest amount of rubble per inhabitant among the major German cities.

[8] The Katharinenkloster Nuremberg, today called Katherinenruine, which was completely destroyed during the air raids in 1945, was not rebuilt but secured as a ruin in 1970/71.