The rail center, Nuremberg, once the seat of Nazi culture, is now a dead city. The huge Krupp tank factory is destroyed as are hundreds of partially finished tanks on the assembly line. Industrial Magdeburg has been gutted by dive bombers of the U.S. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.(1) "Air views of Leipzig reveal it to be a city of skeleton buildings and rubble. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The visitor to the city, the report continued, ‘can walk for hours and see no small thing, not a stick of furniture, a rag or scrap of paper to suggest that there was even any life here. A much-quoted article in the London Times called the city a wilderness of shattered stone. 2 Berlin, in particular, quickly became home to a phalanx of international reporters, most of whom made at least passing comment on the ghostly burned-out shells of the buildings at the centre of town. 1 The pervasiveness of this rhetoric meant that even an experienced reporter such as Percy Knauth from Time magazine was genuinely awed by the evidence that ‘in the Battle for Berlin a lot of our American bombardiers … did not even aim’. This belief had its enduring and enigmatic symbol in the famous Norden bombsight that could, its advertising fatuously reiterated, put a ‘bomb into a pickle barrel’.
Especially in the United States, there had been an enduring belief in the unearthly accuracy of Allied bombing, especially in the daylight raids of the USAAF in Europe. Even for those who were to some extent inured to destruction by the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, the shattered ruins of Germany were shocking, not least because of the realization that such conditions were due, in large part, to the aerial bombing campaign. For the men and women of the Western Allies, soldiers and civilians alike, the devastation wrought in the cities of Germany was stupefying.
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