Rothenburg (pronounced ROTE-un-berg) (no "TH" sound in German) claims to be the only complete medieval walled city still in existence. In the 1200's, Rothenburg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire and at the intersection of major trade routes. It was rich and prosperous until finally ransacked, and then the plague broke out. For several hundred years it lay untouched, no one was interested because it was so poor.
If it looks familiar in the pictures it may be because you saw it in Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang. It was called (I'm not making this up - Vulgaria)
It looks just like you would imagine a walled fortress to look like. Huge walls with gun turrets in the walls and points from which to shoot on top of the walls themselves. All the houses have red tile roofs, so look really cool. It is a beautiful, magical, city.
Back in the middle ages an important job was night watchman. He primarily watched for attack and fires. The night watchman still walks the town every night, but now he's more tourist attraction / comedian than actual watchman. Each night he takes a group walking through the town and tells stories of olden times in Rothenburg (in English). He's the guy in the cloak. He was great, and very funny despite not being a native English speaker.
The most interesting story he told was set back in the 1940's, late in WWII when a group of Nazis hid in Rothenburg from the advancing allied troops. The allies found them and bombed the city. When the ground troops arrived they threatened to attack the city. The Assistant Secretary of War at that time was named McCoy and he heard about this. He'd grown up with a picture of Rothenburg on the wall in his mother's home in the US. She had visited it, and loved the city. He convinced the local military commander to give the Nazis the opportunity to surrender before they attacked. While all this was happening on the outside of the walls, on the inside the Nazi commander gave instructions to die rather than surrender. But then he was called away, just before the allied troops arrived. The guy that was second in command knew the war was lost and surrendered his troops without any additional destruction to Rothenburg. But, sadly, one corner of the city had been destroyed by the bombing. Someone had the idea to ask for help, so a world wide appeal was launched in the media for money to help repair this beautiful, ancient city. What they did was to 'sell' a meter section of the wall for a certain level of donation. The money poured in, the corner of the city was rebuilt, and today you can walk the walls and see the names of those contributors.
Another neat story he told about the watchman's job was that they had responsibility for locking up the city and letting people in who came late. In one of the pictures you can see a rounded door in the walls, with a smaller little door in the left side. (covered in metal grillwork now) That was called "the manhole." If you came back after the gates were locked, you had to convince the guard you were friendly and then climb in through the manhole. Obviously an enemy force couldn't make too aggressive an attach through such a little door. That worked pretty well until heavy cannons became more common hundreds of years later, at which time they'd just destroy the door, or the wall, and enter.
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