Thread by @MikeStuchbery_

For a couple of reasons I've been spending time in the city of Pforzheim lately. Here's a rather unassuming view that I've been taking in with my coffee. It's also a view that is the result of twenty awful minutes in 1945. /1

Pforzheim is about forty minutes from Stuttgart by regional train. Some people commute to the largest city. For centuries, however, it was considered a centre of learning, and later, of jewelry-making and the creation of precision instruments. Its wealth made it gorgeous. /2

While Pforzheim had been bombed during the course of World War Two, by the time 1945 dawned, it had escaped the fate of cities, such as Stuttgart, almost totally levelled. However, its reputation as a centre of precision engineering, and railway connections was to doom it. /3

Pforzheim, codenamed 'Yellowfin', was attacked by 379 bombers of the RAF on the 23rd of February, 1945. That evening, at ten to eight, bombs began to fall, and did for the next twenty minutes. A mixture of explosive and incendiary bombs were used. /4

The centre of Pforzheim, full of wooden buildings and medieval architecture, was annihilated. A firestorm swept through, exploding those buildings that had escaped the high explosive munitions. A column of smoke eight kilometres high rose over the city. /5

Such was the intensity of this firestorm, that civilians attempted to escape it by throwing themselves in the two rivers that flow through the town - the Enz and the Nagold, drowning in the process. /6

While the centre of Pforzheim simply ceased to exist - all that was left was a sloping hill of smoking rubble - the human cost was intolerable. It is believed that over 17,000 were killed in the space of one evening. /7

Indeed, some, including @dwnews, have likened what happened to Pforzheim in the space of twenty minutes to the firestorm that destroyed Dresden. /8 dw.com/en/pforzheim-t…

The centre of Pforzheim today bears no real relation to what the prewar centre of town looked like. The rubble was removed and they functionally started again. What is prominent though is the 'Place of the 23rd of February 1945' - a permanent memorial. /9

Every time I arrive, and walk through the centre of the city, I simply cannot believe that it took only twenty minutes to wipe a city off the map and kill a third of its population. It's beyond my comprehension - and something I keep coming back to again and again. /10

It's obscene, that's what it is. Appalling and obscene. Nobody comes out of it in any redeeming way. It is a stain on our recent history, and something we must never, ever forget. /FIN