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Wesel sits where the Lippe River meets the Rhine, a location that made it commercially vital for a thousand years and militarily irresistible in 1945. The city that Allied bombers found was a prosperous Hanseatic port that had rivaled Cologne for influence along the lower Rhine. The city they left, after weeks of bombing that preceded the Rhine crossing in March 1945, had 97 percent of its buildings destroyed. The population of nearly 25,000 had collapsed to 1,900 by May of that year. Wesel then rebuilt itself quietly and without much romantic attachment to what had been lost.

The deeper history is better than the wartime story suggests.

Peter Minuit, the man who bought Manhattan from the Lenape people for sixty guilders' worth of trade goods in 1626, was born here. Konrad Duden, whose dictionary standardized German spelling, also came from Wesel. The Willibrordi-Dom cathedral survived the bombing in skeleton form and was rebuilt. The old citadel, a 17th-century Baroque fortress, anchors the southeastern edge of the old town. The Rhine crossing here is still dramatic, even by the modern bridge that replaced the war's damage, and the river's width at this point gives you a genuine sense of why armies cared so much about controlling it.