Eight decades ago, U.S. Army soldiers raised the American flag in the center of Nuremberg. They stood atop a bunker adorned with Nazi symbols, now in the hands of Allied forces after five days of fierce urban combat.
By April 1945, the invasion of Germany was well underway. After crossing the Rhine River, American soldiers were pushing forward. Soviet troops were already well into Germany, and both forces were moving towards Berlin. To do so though, they had to eliminate the remaining bastions of Nazi military power. The city of Nuremberg, in the southern part of the country, was one such place. It ended up being some of the most intense urban combat that U.S. forces in Europe experienced.
At this point in the war, advancing Allied forces had a doctrine to avoid being bogged down in urban warfare, preferring to encircle and besiege Nazi-held cities and advance forward, rather than suffer heavy casualties that they knew would come from building-to-building combat. But the push into Germany proper meant that Nazi strongholds had to be taken. Nuremberg in particular was a target due to its importance in Nazi propaganda, having been the site of major rallies by the party prior to the war. Berlin was the capital of Germany but Nuremberg was seen as the Nazi’s political center.
As such, the Nazis had significant defenses set up. Nuremberg had been heavily bombed by American forces, reducing large portions of the city to rubble, which the German forces used to place anti-tank guns and machine gun nests throughout the streets. Despite being outnumbered, the conditions of urban combat meant they could put the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and 45th Infantry Division through hellish conditions. In the first two days the two Army divisions swept across the city’s outskirts, capturing suburban towns and passes. On April 18 they entered Nuremberg proper, and that was when the main phase of the battle began.
“The 3rd Division entered the city with the [7th Infantry Regiment] on the right, the 15th [Infantry Regiment] in the center, and the 30th [Infantry Regiment] on the left. The advance was slow and methodical,” a Combat Studies Institute paper on the battle recounted. “There was heavy German resistance from the basements of buildings, foxholes in the city parks, and prepared 88mm gun emplacements. The 7th Regiment encountered heavy small arms, automatic weapons, and bazooka fires. The Germans fought fanatically and had to be rooted out of every house and building.”
The 45th Infantry Division, moving in from the east, reported similar resistance, with house-to-house fighting becoming the norm. By April 19, American troops were at Nuremberg’s old city, where the Nazis were headquartered out of. Still, the Germans were able to continue to fight back, prompting additional American bombardment of the already wrecked city.
On April 20, soldiers from the 30th Infantry Regiment reached Adolf Hitler Platz in the center of the city, where they raised the American flag. At 11 a.m. the Germans officially surrendered. Nuremberg had fallen. According to the Army, there were more than 800 casualties in the fighting. German losses were unknown.
“Success at Nuremberg was not the result of any spectacular tactical event. Rather, victory was a direct result of battle-hardened U.S. veterans refusing to be denied,” the same Combat Studies Institute report concluded. “The fighting involved building-to-building, room-to-room, and at times hand-to-hand-combat.”
Nuremberg was more than just a symbolic win. Allied intelligence at the time suggested that the Nazis were looking to pull their remaining forces south into Austria to regroup as an insurgency, with Nuremberg as one of the last bastions on the way out of southern Germany.
The capture of Nuremberg also paved the way for the U.S. military’s post-war trials. Seven months after the city fell to the U.S. Army, the Allies began trying high-ranking Nazi officials and officers for their roles in war crimes. The Allies chose to hold the tribunals in Nuremberg, again citing its symbolic importance to the now-defeated Nazi Germany. They weren’t the first war trials — that actually took place in May 1945, prior to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal — but were the largest and highest level of such prosecutions.