Memorial plaques in Frankfurt

May 31, 2018

After an overnight flight to Frankfurt, I had an 11 hour layover in Frankfurt, so I grabbed a train to the central train station (hauptbahnhoff) for a walking tour of the city. According to Benjamin, the walking-tour guide, the station was spared from American bombing because the US wanted to use Frankfurt as a base of operations in the post-World War 2 era (1).

We stopped to visit a memorial placed in memory of a victim of the Nazi regime placed outside where they had lived. I had read about these recently. An artist has hand-crafted thousands of metal plaques to be placed in the ground outside the homes of people killed during the Nazi era. They were hand-crafted to contrast with the mechanized, industrialized killing by the Nazi regime.

(1) He also asserted that the bombers spared the main cathedral to serve as a point of reference for their bombing runs. I am a bit skeptical because bomb-target technology was not quite that precise in 1944, particularly to avoid targeting the cathedral in the city center.

Barge on Main River

Frankfurt train station

Memorial plaque, Frankfurt