All the shells in today's reconstructed grotto were donated by small-town Bavarians. Deeper inside the palace, observant visitors notice messy scars on many of the old royal portraits. In , when bombs were imminent, Nazi commanders gave the hasty order to slice the portraits out of each frame in the Gallery of the Wittelsbach Family, and hide them all away.
As Germany put itself back together after the war, cities established commissions to debate how they'd rebuild their cities. Should they restore the old towns, or bulldoze the mess and go modern? While Frankfurt voted to bulldoze hence its Manhattan-esque feel today , Munich voted — by a close margin — to rebuild its old town, with the help of Nazi photographs.
Strict regulations maintain Munich's Old World ambience. For example, buildings cannot exceed the height of the church spires. Today, Munich has no real suburban-style shopping malls. But its downtown is vital, filled with people who come to shop. Although the capital of a very conservative part of Germany, the city of Munich has long been a liberal stronghold in the chaos following World War I, it was briefly the world's first non-Bolshevik "people's republic".
This tradition of outside-the-box thinking also helps make Munich livable. Since , Munich's mayors have mostly come from the liberal and labor-friendly Social Democratic Party. Fearing that fast food chains will replace the old fashioned market stalls and quaint eateries that make Munich's Viktulienmarkt one of Europe's most charming squares, the city subsidizes the stalls' rent so they can survive on the some of Germany's most expensive real estate.
The city's policies are pedestrian friendly, too. You'll find most of the town center closed to car traffic, with plenty of bike lanes and green spaces. On summer Mondays, the peace and quiet makes way for " blade Monday " — when streets in the center are closed to cars and as many as 30, in-line skaters swarm around town in a giant party on wheels. Talking softly and hearing birds rather than motors, and surrounded by glorious art and architecture, it's easy to forget you're in the center of a big city that was rubble such a short time ago.
During World War II , Allied bombing raids left their devastating mark on Germany, killing more than , civilians and laying waste to entire cities, from Berlin to Hamburg to Dresden. By studying daily records at the Radio Research Center in Slough, in the United Kingdom, a team of researchers tracked how the concentration of electrons in the ionosphere changed around the time of Allied air raids in Europe. These included major bombing raids of German cities between , as well as those bombs dropped in support of the major Allied landing at Normandy that began on D-Day , June 6, The researchers who conducted the new study found that when Allied bombs hit the ground, the shockwaves reached as far as 1, kilometers or miles into the air.
This heated up the upper atmosphere and caused the concentration of electrons in it to drop, resulting in a temporary weakness in the ionosphere.
According to their findings, published in the European Geosciences Union journal Annales Geophysicae , each bombing raid released the energy of lightning strikes.
Evidence showed that even though the bombs exploded in Germany, the changes could be seen in the ionosphere above Slough, hundreds of miles away. Temporary or not, these findings have implications for understanding the impact of other, natural events on the ionosphere, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and thunderstorms.
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