Five places that were flattened between 1940 and 1945 and chose to come back — some copying the old town square line for line from paintings, some leaving one ruin standing on purpose so nobody could tidy the memory away.
The Luftwaffe raid of 14 November 1940 destroyed the fourteenth-century cathedral of St Michael and much of the medieval centre. The ruin was kept roofless on purpose and Basil Spence's new cathedral, consecrated in 1962, was built beside it rather than over it. The 1944 link with Stalingrad is generally counted the first modern town twinning.
Allied firebombing on 13–15 February 1945 burned out the historic centre. The Frauenkirche lay as a deliberate ruin through the GDR years; reconstruction ran from 1994 to 2005, using Canaletto's — Bernardo Bellotto's — views and some 3,800 salvaged original stones, which are the black ones in the wall today. Johann Friedrich Böttger's porcelain went on to be made at Meissen.
German forces razed the city systematically after the 1944 uprising, destroying roughly 85 per cent of it. The Old Town was rebuilt between 1945 and 1955, guided by Bernardo Bellotto's vedute, and inscribed by UNESCO in 1980 as an outstanding example of near-total reconstruction. The Palace of Culture and Science held the national height record from 1955 until Varso Tower's 310 metres in 2022.
The first atomic bomb used in war detonated above the city at 8.15 on 6 August 1945. The gutted Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall — Jan Letzel's 1915 building — was kept as the Genbaku Dome and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996; Kenzō Tange's Peace Memorial Park was laid out around it. The floating torii an hour away belongs to Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima.
The Battle of Manila, February–March 1945, left it among the most comprehensively destroyed Allied capitals of the war, alongside Warsaw. San Agustin Church, completed in 1607, was the only one of Intramuros' seven churches to survive and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the walled district around it has been reconstructed piecemeal since the 1950s.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.