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Sometimes there are bitter reactions when homes of people persecuted by the Nazis are requisitioned, while former party comrade get their apartments back through good connections.
US-amerikanischer Stimmungsbericht (31 July) (our translation from a German collection of American reports on the mood)
Compared to the destruction in Mannheim, which had been reduced to rubble, the question of reconstructing the Heidelberg bridges seemed almost secondary. And yet they were on the agenda of the first city council meeting on 7 May 1945, when the population could only cross the Neckar on foot over a wooden bridge built by the Americans. Rebuilding the bridge at Bismarck Square for car and tram traffic was therefore urgently necessary. On 21 November a makeshift bridge was opened. The Old Bridge, by contrast, was to be rebuilt “unchanged down to the last detail”.
The Americans had meanwhile made it passable for vehicles by means of trussed girders. After the financing models of special stamps and a tram surcharge had proved unsuccessful, the new Lord Mayor Ernst Walz saw it as the “psychologically right point in time”, in early 1946, to launch an appeal. In the local newspapers (Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung) he asked “all residents and friends of the city” for financial assistance. The Old Bridge was, admittedly, not an “irrefutable traffic necessity”, but an “attractive element of the Heidelberg cityscape” and a “German cultural landscape experience”. The names of all donors were to be published. He skillfully linked Old Heidelberg Romanticism and German cultural patriotism with an appeal to the population’s bad conscience and readiness to make atonement. There was an application for exemption in the case of individuals whose assets had been confiscated in the course of denazification. The appeal was a success and raised 1.5 million Reichsmark. On 26 July 1947 his successor Hugo Swart was able to solemnly inaugurate the new Old Bridge.
