🇩🇪 Germany · South (Bavaria and the Black Forest)
Nuremberg is a city that carries two opposing histories and looks both of them in the eye. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was one of the richest and most cultured cities in Europe: unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, keeper of the imperial regalia, birthplace of the genius of the German Renaissance Albrecht Dürer and of a craft and clockmaking industry admired across the continent. Five centuries later, Nazism chose it as the stage for its colossal party rallies and for the racial Laws of 1935, and from that choice came its near-total destruction in January 1945 and, afterwards, the Nuremberg Trials that laid the foundations of international criminal law.
That is why visiting Nuremberg is a double experience. There is the storybook old town — patiently rebuilt after the war — with its imperial castle crowning the hill, the lanes of half-timbered houses, the Dürer House, the great Gothic churches and the Hauptmarkt where the country's most famous Christmas market beats. And there are, on the outskirts, the Nazi party rally grounds with their Documentation Centre, and in the Palace of Justice Courtroom 600, where in 1945-46 the leaders of a regime were tried for the first time for crimes against humanity. Nuremberg hides nothing: it explains it.
This guide covers both faces with the same seriousness: how to see the castle, the churches and Dürer's city; how to understand, with respect and without spectacle, the memorial sites that make Nuremberg unique in Europe; what to eat (the famous Nürnberger Rostbratwürste, finger-sized sausages, and Lebkuchen); and how to get around. It is a city on a human scale, honest about its past and surprisingly warm, best enjoyed on foot and worth coming back to.
Nuremberg is documented from 1050 and grew at the foot of an imperial castle until it became one of the great free cities of the Holy Roman Empire. From 1424, and for almost four centuries, it guarded the imperial regalia (crown, sceptre and orb), and in its golden age, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was a hub of the German Renaissance: the painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer lived and worked here, and humanism, printing, clockmaking and goldsmithing flourished. The Protestant Reformation caught on early in the city, which turned Lutheran in 1525. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the shifting of trade routes plunged it into a long decline, until in 1806 it ceased to be a free city and passed to Bavaria. In the twentieth century its name became tied forever to Nazism: the regime chose it as the seat of its annual party rallies (Reichsparteitage) and there proclaimed, in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights. For that symbolic role, Allied aircraft bombed it heavily and on 2 January 1945 destroyed it almost completely. When the war ended, the victors chose Nuremberg precisely to try the main Nazi war criminals: the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946, in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice, inaugurated modern international criminal law. The city was carefully rebuilt, recovered its old town and today is a centre of remembrance and human rights. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Southern Germany: Bavaria and the Wittelsbach dynasty, with Ludwig II's fantasy castles; Munich, birthplace of Nazism but also of the White Rose resistance; Nuremberg, imperial city of the Nazi rallies and of the trials that condemned them; and the legendary Black Forest.
Read the history of South (Bavaria and the Black Forest) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few German cities sum up the grandeur and the misery of European history as well as Nuremberg. Before its name was tied forever to Nazism and to the trials that condemned it, Nuremberg was for centuries one of the richest, most cultured and most prestigious cities on the continent. And it all began at the foot of a sandstone rock crowned by a castle.
Nuremberg is first documented in 1050, in a charter of the emperor Henry III mentioning the castle (Nourenberc) below which the city would grow. Its position at a crossroads of central European trade routes made it prosper quickly, and its bond with imperial power was early and close: the Kaiserburg, the imperial castle, became one of the itinerant residences of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, who had no fixed capital and travelled from city to city. Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, practically every medieval emperor stayed in Nuremberg at some point.
In 1219, the emperor Frederick II granted it the status of free imperial city (Reichsstadt): it answered directly to the emperor and not to any prince or local lord, which gave it enormous political and economic autonomy. The city was governed by a council of patrician families and came to control a considerable territory of its own. In 1356, the Golden Bull of the emperor Charles IV — the fundamental law regulating the election of the emperor — established that each new sovereign had to hold the first imperial diet of his reign in Nuremberg, confirming it as a kind of unofficial capital of the Empire.
The supreme symbol of that role came in 1424, when the emperor Sigismund entrusted Nuremberg with the perpetual custody of the imperial regalia (Reichskleinodien): the crown, the sceptre, the orb, the sword and the relics used to crown the emperors. For almost four centuries, those sacred objects of imperial power were kept in the city and displayed once a year, drawing pilgrims and cementing Nuremberg's prestige as the symbolic heart of the Empire.
Between the end of the fifteenth century and through the sixteenth, Nuremberg lived its golden age and became one of the great hubs of the northern European Renaissance. Its wealth came from long-distance trade and, above all, from a craft industry of the highest quality: the city was famous for its goldsmiths, clockmakers, makers of scientific instruments, armourers and engravers. The first pocket watches (the so-called 'Nuremberg eggs') were made here, along with globes and navigational and astronomical instruments sold all over Europe. Printing, which arrived soon after Gutenberg, made Nuremberg a publishing centre of the first rank.
That material splendour translated into an extraordinary cultural flowering. The figure who embodies it is Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), born and died in the city, the greatest artist of the German Renaissance. A painter, draughtsman and theorist, Dürer raised woodcut and copperplate engraving to a technical perfection never seen before and spread across the continent works such as 'Knight, Death and the Devil', 'Melencolia I', the 'Rhinoceros' and his striking self-portraits. He was also a European intellectual who travelled to Italy, studied perspective and proportion and wrote treatises on art. Around him shone the sculptor Veit Stoss, the bronze caster Peter Vischer, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer and, later, the shoemaker and poet Hans Sachs, the mastersinger whose figure Richard Wagner would immortalise.
Nuremberg was also one of the first great cities of the Empire to embrace the Protestant Reformation. In 1525, after years of debate, the city council officially adopted Lutheranism, and Nuremberg became a bastion of Protestantism and a refuge for reformers. That religious turn coexisted with loyalty to the emperor, in a sometimes difficult balance. It was a city of science and art, but also one with shadows: the Jewish community, which had been significant in the Middle Ages, had already suffered a devastating pogrom in 1349 — at the height of the Black Death — on whose site the present Frauenkirche was built, and a final expulsion in 1499. That history of splendour and intolerance is part of the same story.
The splendour did not last forever. From the sixteenth century, the discovery of the Americas and the opening of new sea routes shifted the axis of European trade from the interior of the continent towards the Atlantic, and inland cities such as Nuremberg began to lose weight against the great ports. But the decisive blow came with the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), the catastrophic religious and political conflict that devastated the Holy Roman Empire.
Nuremberg, a Protestant city, suffered enormously. Although it managed to avoid outright sacking by paying heavy sums, it was surrounded by armies and endured hunger, plague and the collapse of trade. In 1632, its surroundings were the setting for a long and disastrous confrontation between the troops of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein's imperial forces, with thousands dead from combat and disease. The city came out of the war impoverished and in debt, and it never recovered its former rank. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it went through a slow decline, keeping its beauty and its craft industry but increasingly on the margins of great European politics.
The end of its independence came with Napoleon. The reorganisation of Germany driven by the French emperor dissolved the old Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and in that process Nuremberg lost its standing as a free imperial city — which it had held for almost six hundred years — and was absorbed into the newly created Kingdom of Bavaria. With it, the imperial regalia were taken to Vienna to keep them out of French hands. Under Bavarian administration, and into the nineteenth century, Nuremberg experienced a second rebirth thanks to the Industrial Revolution: in 1835 Germany's first railway, the Ludwigsbahn, opened between Nuremberg and neighbouring Fürth, and the city became a major industrial centre (metalworking, toys, Faber-Castell and Staedtler pencils, engines). By the start of the twentieth century it was a prosperous industrial city that looked proudly on its medieval past.
Nuremberg's glorious past — its standing as an imperial city, its medieval old town, its link with German identity — was precisely what Nazism wanted to appropriate. From the mid-1920s, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) chose Nuremberg as the seat of its annual rallies, drawn by that historical symbolism and by its central location. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the city was given the propaganda title of 'City of the Reich Party Rallies' (Stadt der Reichsparteitage).
Between 1933 and 1938, every September, Nuremberg was the setting for the Reichsparteitage: mass gatherings of hundreds of thousands of party members, the SA, the SS and the army, choreographed in detail as gigantic propaganda spectacles. The images of those rallies — the parades, the torches, the seas of flags, the 'cathedral of light' of searchlights designed by Albert Speer — were filmed by Leni Riefenstahl in 'Triumph of the Will' (1935) and became the most widely circulated image of Nazi totalitarian power. To house them, the regime planned a colossal rally ground (Reichsparteitagsgelände) of eleven square kilometres in the southeast of the city, with stadiums, grandstands and monumental avenues, largely unfinished. What survives of it is the enormous Congress Hall (Kongresshalle), inspired by the Roman Colosseum, and the Zeppelin grandstand, from which Hitler harangued the masses.
But Nuremberg's role in the history of Nazism was not limited to the staging. At the rally of September 1935, the regime proclaimed there the Nuremberg Laws (Nürnberger Gesetze), two racial laws that marked a turning point in the persecution of Jews: the 'Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour', which banned marriages and relations between Jews and 'Germans of Aryan blood', and the 'Reich Citizenship Law', which stripped Jews of citizenship and of their civil rights. These laws gave pseudo-legal cover to the systematic exclusion that would lead to the Holocaust. That they bore the city's name was no accident: they were passed precisely in that setting loaded with symbolism. Nuremberg was thus, in the eyes of the world, inseparably associated with the regime and its ideology. Today, the Documentation Centre installed in the Congress Hall analyses that past with historical rigour, not to display it but to explain it and to prevent.
The prominence Nazism had given Nuremberg came at a terrible price. As a symbol of the regime and as an important industrial and armaments centre, the city became a target of the first order for Allied aircraft during the Second World War. It suffered numerous raids over the course of the conflict, but the definitive blow came on the night of 2 January 1945, when a massive attack by the British Royal Air Force flattened the medieval old town in a little over an hour.
The historic centre — one of the best preserved medieval ensembles in Europe, with its half-timbered houses, its Gothic churches and its lanes — was reduced to rubble. It is reckoned that around 90% of the old town was destroyed, and much of the rest of the city was left in ruins too. Thousands of people died and tens of thousands were left homeless. When American troops took the city after hard street fighting, between 16 and 20 April 1945, Nuremberg was a field of ruins. In a gesture loaded with symbolism, the Allied soldiers blew up the great swastika crowning the Zeppelin grandstand at the rally grounds.
Postwar reconstruction was long and the subject of intense debate. Unlike other German cities, which chose to rebuild in a modern key, Nuremberg decided to recover the layout, the silhouettes and many of the emblematic buildings of its medieval old town, though with twentieth-century techniques and materials. The great churches, the castle, the Dürer House and the walls were raised again, respecting the historic street plan. The result is not a genuine medieval centre but a careful recreation that gives the city back its old atmosphere and that visitors often walk through without realising that almost everything they see was rebuilt after 1945. It is one of the most remarkable urban reconstructions in Europe.
With the war over, the victorious powers faced an unprecedented question: what to do with those most responsible for a regime that had unleashed a world war and carried out the systematic extermination of millions of people? The answer was to create an international tribunal to try them, and the place chosen was, once again, Nuremberg. The choice carried obvious symbolic weight — the city of the party rallies and the racial laws would now be the city of justice — and also had practical reasons: its Palace of Justice had come through relatively intact, it was spacious and it had a large prison attached.
Between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, in Courtroom 600 (Saal 600) of that Palace of Justice, the International Military Tribunal made up of judges from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France tried 24 of the leading figures of the Third Reich — among them Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer — on four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The trial, followed by the world's press and documented with the regime's own evidence and film, ended with twelve death sentences, prison terms and three acquittals. This main trial was followed by twelve subsequent trials of doctors, judges, military officers and industrialists.
The significance of the Nuremberg Trials goes far beyond the specific sentences. It was the first time in history that the top leaders of a state were brought before a court for their acts, rejecting the defence that they were 'only following orders' or that a head of state was untouchable. From them came the so-called 'Nuremberg Principles', which enshrined concepts such as 'crime against humanity' and individual criminal responsibility, and which became the cornerstone of modern international criminal law. Without Nuremberg you cannot understand the later tribunals for the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, nor the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Today the city fully embraces that legacy. Courtroom 600 can be visited, together with the Memorium Nürnberger Prozesse, a centre explaining the trial and its reach. And Nuremberg, which in the twentieth century gave its name to laws of exclusion and hatred, has reinvented itself as a 'city of peace and human rights': since 1995 it has awarded an International Human Rights Prize and it has built, at the entrance to its Germanic National Museum, the Way of Human Rights. The same city Nazism chose as its stage is today a place where Europe learns to look its darkest history in the eye.