The dark epoch of National Socialism

However, the nationalist tendencies increased upon the withdrawal of the occupying powers. Whilst it was understandable that there were such tendencies in the first flush of excitement that accompanied the liberation celebrations, their influence increased towards the end of the 1920s. When Adolf Hitler was appointed as Reich chancellor in January 1933 only a few people surmised that this would make the start of probably the most sinister and disastrous epoch in Germany's history.

As everywhere else in the German Reich the inhumanity of the regime also found expression in its atrocities in Bonn. Sick people or people who were supposedly sick were sterilised in so-called "Genetic health courts" and a lot of fringe groups in society fell victim to the measures, which reached their peak in the destruction of “life unworthy of life”, the euthanasia programme of the National Socialist regime. The majority of the members of Bonn's Jewish community already left their homeland at the start of the National Socialist dictatorship as anti-Semitic riots soon broke out. Only seven of the 400 Jewish citizens who endured life in Bonn until 1941 survived the extermination camps.

In 1936 Adolf Hitler's standing in the Rhineland increased still further due to the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the areas along the Rhine that had been demilitarised in accordance with the Versailles Treaty. The allies’ failure to act strengthened him in terms of his rearmament plans. The Second World War broke out on 1 September 1939 when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland.

Of the 8,000 citizens who died in the course of the war 6,000 died as war combatants or went missing. 2,000 were victims of the massive bomb attacks which the city was exposed to in the last year of the war and which devastated large parts of it. Following Germany’s surrender on 8 May probably no-one would have suspected that Bonn would be selected to be the seat of government and the provisional capital of the Federal Republic of Germany just four years later.