Remagen

• 1. Introduction

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  Remagen is a small town on the western bank of the Rhine in Germany, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, roughly an hour's drive from Cologne and just south of Bonn. It sits quietly in a landscape of castles and churches, with a ferry crossing every ten to fifteen minutes in summer. Yet this modest town has accumulated a remarkable density of history. A Roman fort once anchored this riverbank. A medieval legend placed a miraculous shipwreck here. And on the 7th of March 1945, soldiers from the American 9th Armored Division arrived at a railroad bridge they had every reason to expect would be rubble. It was still standing. That surprise would change the final weeks of World War II in Europe. What makes a small town on a river become the site of so many pivotal moments? And what did the people of Remagen do with the ruins left behind?

• 2. Roman Roots

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  The Roman Empire planted a border fort at a place called Rigomagus, about twelve miles north of what had been the first bridge ever built across the Rhine, at Neuwied. That earlier bridge was no ordinary construction; it was driven into the riverbed on timbers set at a slant to fight the current. Caesar's troops crossed to the eastern bank and spent nearly three weeks there before returning and destroying the bridge to deny it to German raiders. A second bridge was similarly demolished by the builders once they had finished with it.

  The fort at Rigomagus was part of a network ordered by Drusus, commander of the Roman army along the Rhine. Some Roman construction survived the centuries, including a gateway, and the site eventually drew history-minded tourists. The town appears by name on the Peutinger Map, a 4th-century Roman road document, which is a rare distinction for a small settlement on the river's edge.

  A local legend then attached a second founding story to the place. In 1164, a ship carrying relics from Milan to Cologne reportedly stopped dead in the river, unable to move against the current, until it drifted toward the Remagen shore. The remains of Saint Apollinaris were carried ashore, and the ship sailed on. Those remains were placed in a chapel already incorporated into the old Roman fort, beginning a succession of churches on that site. The Apollinaris Church standing today was built between 1839 and 1842 on the site of that medieval Church of St. Martin, and a dirt trail still leads pedestrians past fourteen roadside Stations of the Cross to reach its doors.

• 3. The Ludendorff Bridge

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  Karl Wiener, an architect from Mannheim, designed the Ludendorff Bridge during World War I. Its purpose was to move troops and supplies westward across the Rhine to reinforce the Western Front. When finished, the bridge stretched 325 meters in length, cleared the normal water level by 14.8 meters, and rose to a highest point of 29.25 meters. Defensive towers on each bank were fitted with machine gun slits. The bridge carried two railway tracks and a pedestrian walkway.

  By World War II, one of those tracks had been planked over to allow motor vehicles to cross. The bridge sat among twenty-two road and railroad crossings of the Rhine, a number that suggests how vital the river was as both a barrier and a corridor. German military planners understood the Rhine as the last major natural defensive line protecting the interior of Germany, and so did the Allies pushing toward it in early 1945.

• 4. The Crossing That Changed the War

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  During Operation Lumberjack, American forces from the 9th Armored Division reached Remagen on the 7th of March 1945. The soldiers were astonished. The Ludendorff Bridge was intact. German defenders had failed to demolish it, and it stood as the only one of twenty-two Rhine crossings still standing. U.S. forces seized it immediately.

  Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower revised his plans because of this single unexpected fact. The bridge gave American forces a foothold on the eastern bank that no one had anticipated. From there, they moved to encircle the German industrial region of the Ruhr faster than their original timetable allowed. Six divisions crossed the bridge in the days that followed.

  On the 17th of March 1945, ten days after its capture, the bridge collapsed. The death toll recorded in the source ranges across accounts: one figure gives eighteen U.S. Army Engineers killed; another puts the number at twenty-eight killed and ninety-three injured. By that point, a pontoon bridge had already been built nearby, and the Ludendorff Bridge had been taken out of service for repairs when it fell. The military crossing it had made possible was already complete.

• 5. Memory and Memorial

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  Hans Peter Kürten became Mayor of Remagen in 1968, the same year a film about the bridge appeared on American screens. He had already been thinking for years about how to mark the site. The path to a memorial was not smooth: negotiations with the German Federal Railways alone lasted seven years before the city could acquire the old railway property. Letters sent to government officials about preserving the bridge towers and building a Memorial to Peace generated no response.

  In the summer of 1976, workers removed the bridge support pilings that still stood in the river. Kürten had the stones placed on the riverbank with an idea: small pieces of the original bridge material, sealed in synthetic resin and paired with a certificate of authenticity, could be sold. On the 7th of March 1978, he made the plan public. The response exceeded anything he had prepared for, and sales generated more than 100,000 Deutsche Marks, roughly 50,000 euros.

  The towers that once held machine gun slits now stand as the Peace Museum. There has been no new bridge built across the Rhine at Remagen since the Ludendorff Bridge fell. Residents and those in surrounding areas have consistently opposed construction, arguing that a bridge at this point would damage the view of the river.

• 6. The Station at Rolandseck

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  About five kilometers north of Remagen stands a 19th-century railway station at a place called Rolandseck. Before it became a cultural landmark, Johannes Brahms gave concerts there. Clara Schumann performed there. Franz Liszt played there. George Bernard Shaw staged plays there. The young poet Guillaume Apollinaire is said to have fallen in love there.

  After World War II, the building was neglected and slated for demolition. In 1964, a Bonn art dealer named Johannes Wasmuth stepped in and returned it to use as a venue. Performers including Martha Argerich, Stefan Askenase, and Yehudi Menuhin, artists including Hans Arp and Oskar Kokoschka, and the mime Marcel Marceau all appeared there after its revival. The station now houses the Arp Museum, devoted to the work of the artist Hans Arp, making the old building one of the more unusual museum settings along the Rhine.

• 7. Prisoners and the Postwar River

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  In 1945, the United States military established one of several enclosures along the western bank of the Rhine near Remagen. These were part of the so-called Rheinwiesenlager, a network of open-air camps used to hold captured German soldiers. The conditions were severe. Estimates place the death toll across all the camps at several thousand. Of those, 1,212 are now buried at the Bad Bodendorf Cemetery, a count specific enough to give some measure of the scale of what happened in the fields beside the river where the famous bridge once stood. The town that had become an Allied crossing point became, within the same season, a place of mass captivity and death for the soldiers who had tried to defend it.