Stuttgart, Germany was heavily damaged during WWII.  Most of the downtown area was screwed up pretty badly.   When the war ended, the troubles didn't.  People lived in bombed-out basements, drew water from puddles in bomb craters, and don't even ask where the bathroom facilities were;  they weren't.  People begged, scavenged, sold and traded, and did whatever they had to do in order to survive.  The main source of food was the American GIs who occupied the city and patrolled from the various "Kaserne" or barracks located there.  Adding to the misery was the fact that there were hardly any left in the country.   Most of the adult men had been  killed or were POWS who wouldn't be coming back from the warfronts for anywhere from a year to ten years.  Boys and old men were left to do the work of clearing the rubble and re-building.  

Although it wasn't like building a new city from scratch, the city leaders realized that they had a unique opportunity to make major improvements on their city.  One of the things they were able to improve was air quality.  Stuttgart's city center sits in a valley surrounded by steep hills.  Before the war, smoke and soot would settle into the valley.  By studying prevailing winds and planting trees in strategic locations, they were able to channel breezes through the valley and clear out most of the pollution.  

Unimaginable amounts of building materials were clogging the city, literally mountains of the rubble.  They hauled it out of the city center and piled it up on a hill just out of town...it was called "Birkenkopf".  Now it is the highest point in Stuttgart and is a memorial to all the things destroyed and lost in the war.  If you walk up the lovely trail to the top of the hill, you will see building stones, door frames, cornices, pillars, and all manner of remains.  

There were several historic buildings in the city.  The "new castle" was a palace on the order of Versailles.  It was slightly damaged.  The Crown Prince's Palace, on the other hand,  was almost totally destroyed.  The "Old Castle" was heavily damaged.  Churches, the City Hall, market halls, and hundreds of other old stone buildings were reduced to piles of rubble.  The clearing of the city was a daunting task,  let alone the thought of rebuilding.  But the folks of the city would not allow their heritage to be swept away.  They determined to rebuild the historic buildings exactly as they had been.  And they did.

When you look at the Old Castle today you can see where the old stone blocks have been fitted back in place and where new blocks had to be cut to replace the blocks that had been destroyed.  It gives it kind of a patchwork look, but the castle (now the Baden-Wurttemburg state museum) looks exactly as it did in its youth.

The New Castle is now the seat of state government and has been rebuilt as it was.  Unfortunately, the Crown Prince's Palace was so totally destroyed (and would have been in the way of the new traffic patterns in the city) that they kept one window cornice and hauled the rest away.  When the city was rebuilt, the cornice was placed where it had been when it still had a palace all around it.

The city center went through another remodel in the sixties when vehicle traffic was prohibited from its center,  creating a blocks- long pedestrian area.  Again in the eighties there was another remodel that re-routed streetcar tracks and cross-town routes.  Every time these changes occur, the Prince's cornice is removed during construction then replaced where it belongs after the work is completed.

As it was to the left...what's left below.

I have spent about seven-plus years in the Stuttgart area, more than any other part of Germany.  It is kinda my second hometown.  I have wandered around the city, admired the industry of the people, enjoyed their festivals and markets, eaten tons of their delicious food, and spent hours chatting with the people.  I won't go into the morality questions about the war and what they did and what we did and who got done to.  All of that happened before I was born.  The older folks 

I have talked to about those things are amazingly ingnorant of actual events they lived through.  They believed the propaganda of the time.  My landlord offered to go to blows because I mentioned that Rommel had killed himself rather than face the disgrace of public trial for his small part in the plot to kill Hitler.  My landlord had been an infantryman on the Eastern Front;  they had been told Rommel had been killed by an allied fighter plane.  But I digress...I was building up to the idea that I really loved my time in Germany.  And I love the people, the way they came back from a very real Hell after the war to become a thriving and industrious modern nation that not only stays on the edge of current technologies but also stays deeply committed to and rooted in their history and culture.  Whenever I hear someone talk about Europe and what kind of country Germany is...I conjure up the image of the Crown Prince's cornice...that's the kind ofcountry Germany is.