}} and
Stiftskirche to the right.
bombing during
World War II. What was left of the building was used to build the current City Hall. factory in
Untertürkheim. Today, this building is the seat of
Mercedes-Benz Group. '' from 1921 featuring the state capital, Stuttgart at
Schlossplatz replica to restoration, 1956 from the Königstraße, 1965
Antiquity Originally, the most important location in the
Neckar river valley was the hilly rim of the
Stuttgart basin at what is today
Bad Cannstatt. Thus, the first settlement of Stuttgart was a massive
Roman Castra stativa (
Cannstatt Castrum) When the Romans were driven back past the
Rhine and
Danube rivers in the third century by the
Alamanni, the settlement temporarily vanished from history until the seventh century.
Middle Ages In 700,
Duke Gotfrid mentions as document regarding prop. Archaeological evidence shows that later
Merovingian era
Frankish farmers continued to till the same land the Romans did. Cannstatt is mentioned in the
Abbey of St. Gall's archives as "
Canstat ad Neccarum" () in 708. The
etymology of the name "
Cannstatt" is not clear, but as the site is mentioned as
condistat in the
Annals of Metz (9th century), it is mostly derived from the Latin word
condita ("foundation"), suggesting that the name of the Roman settlement might have had the prefix "
Condi-". Alternatively, Sommer (1992) suggested that the Roman site corresponds to the
Civitas Aurelia G attested to in an inscription found near
Öhringen. There have also been attempts at a derivation from a Gaulish
*kondâti- "confluence". In
AD 950,
Duke Liudolf of
Swabia, son of the current
Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, decided to establish study for his cavalry during the
Hungarian invasions of Europe on the
Nesenbach river valley south of the old Roman castrum. Nevertheless, the existence of a settlement here (despite the terrain being more suited for that original study) during the
High Middle Ages is provided by a gift registry from
Hirsau Abbey dated to around 1160 that mentions a "Hugo de Stuokarten". In 1251, the city passed to the
Ulrich I von Württemberg as part of Mechthild von Baden's
dowry. His son,
Eberhard I "the Illustrious", and made much territorial gain. With peace restored at last, Eberhard began repairs and expansion to Stuttgart beginning with the reconstruction of
Wirtemberg Castle, ancestral home to the House of Württemberg, in 1351 and then began expansion of the city's defenses. 1371 were important years for Stuttgart: Eberhard I moved the seat of the county to the city to a
new and expanded castle, the
collegiate church in
Beutelsbach, where previous members of the Württemberg dynasty had been buried prior to its destruction in 1311, he was no friend of the powerful
Swabian League nor of his own subjects, Despite this and his rivalry with the Swabian League, his undoing would actually come in the form of his unhappy marriage to
Sabina of Bavaria. In 1515, Ulrich killed an imperial knight and lover of Sabina's by the name of Hans von Hutten, obliging her to flee to the court of her brother,
William IV,
Duke of Bavaria, who successfully had Ulrich placed under
Imperial ban twice. When the Emperor died in 1519, Ulrich struck, seizing the Free Imperial City of
Reutlingen, prompting the League to intervene. That same year, Ulrich was soundly defeated and he was driven into exile in France and Switzerland following the League's conquest of Württemberg. who then granted it to his brother,
Ferdinand I, thus beginning the 12 year ownership of the county by the
Habsburgs. Duke Ulrich himself died two years later, and was succeeded by his son,
Christoph. He had grown up in a Württemberg in turmoil and wished to rebuild its image. To this end, he once again began a construction boom all over the Duchy under the direction of Court Architect Aberlin Tretsch; knowing full well that the time of the Reisekönigtum was over, Christoph and Tretsch rebuilt and remodeled the Old Castle into a
Renaissance palace, and expanded the Prinzebau. The
Thirty Years' War devastated the city, and it would slowly decline for a period of time from then on.
Eberhard Ludwig. For the first time in 1654, Duke Eberhard Ludwig moved the seat of the Duchy out of the declining city of Stuttgart in 1718 to
Ludwigsburg, founded in 1704, while the
namesake Baroque palace, known as the "Versailles of Swabia", was still under construction. When Eberhard Ludwig died, his nephew
Charles Alexander, ascended to the throne.
Castle Solitude in 1763,
Castle Hohenheim in 1785, and the
Karlsschule in 1770. The rule of Charles Eugene also saw the tutoring and origins of
Friedrich Schiller in Stuttgart, who studied medicine and completed
The Robbers here.
Kingdom of Württemberg and German Empire King
Frederick I's Württemberg was given high status in the
Confederation of the Rhine among the College of Kings, and the lands of nearby secondary German states. Within Stuttgart, the royal residence was expanded under Frederick although many of Stuttgart's most important buildings, including
Wilhelm Palace, Katharina Hospital, the
State Gallery, the Villa Berg and the
Königsbau were built under the reign of
King Wilhelm I. In 1818. King Wilhelm I and
Queen Catherine in an attempt to assuage the suffering caused by the
Year Without Summer and following famine, introduced the first
Cannstatter Volksfest to celebrate the year's bountiful harvest. and two years later the
Württemberg Mausoleum as completed on the hill where
Wirtemberg Castle once stood. From the outset of the 19th century, Stuttgart's development was once again impeded by its location (population of the city at the time was around 50,000), but the city began to experience the beginning of economic revival with the opening of the
Main Station in 1846. Prior to then, the signs of rebirth in Stuttgart were evidenced by the construction of such buildings of
Rosenstein Castle in 1822–1830, the
Wilhelmspalais 1834–1840, and the foundations of the
Staatsgalerie in 1843,
University of Stuttgart in 1829, the
University of Music and Performing Arts later, in 1857. Stuttgart had a role to play during the
revolution of 1848/1849 as well. When internal divisions of the
Frankfurt Parliament began the demise of that congress, the majority of the Frankfurt Congress voted to move to Stuttgart to flee the reach of the Prussian and Austrian armies in Frankfurt and
Mainz. Even though the Congress may have had contacts with revolutionaries in
Baden and
Württemberg, the Congress, not popular with the content citizens of Stuttgart, were driven out by the King's army. Stuttgart's literary tradition also bore yet more fruits, being the home of such writers of national importance as
Wilhelm Hauff,
Ludwig Uhland,
Gustav Schwab, and
Eduard Mörike. From 1841 to 1846, the Jubiläumssäule was erected on the
Schlossplatz before the New Palace according to the plans of
Johann Michael Knapp to celebrate the rule of King Wilhelm I. 19 years later, the
Königsbau was constructed by Knapp and court architect
Christian Friedrich von Leins as concert hall. Another milestone in Stuttgart's history was the running of the first rail line from Cannstatt to
Untertürkheim on 22 October 1845. The advent of
Industrialisation in Germany heralded a major growth of population for Stuttgart: In 1834, Stuttgart counted 35,200 inhabitants, rose to 50,000 in 1852, 69,084 inhabitants in 1864, As a result, it is considered to be the starting point of the worldwide
automotive industry and is sometimes referred to as the 'cradle of the automobile', In 1912,
VfB Stuttgart was founded. During
World War I, the city was a target of air raids. In 1915, 29 bombs struck the city and the nearby Rotebühlkaserne, killing four soldiers and injuring another 43, and likewise killing four civilians. The next major air raid on Stuttgart occurred on 15 September 1918, when structural damage caused houses to collapse, killing eleven people.
Weimar Republic At the end of the First World War,
November revolutionaries declared a "social republic" in Stuttgart on 9 November and set up a provisional revolutionary government. A week later King
Wilhelm II released all civil servants from their oath of allegiance to him and formally abdicated on 30 November. A
constituent assembly elected in January 1919 wrote a republican constitution for Württemberg which became effective on 25 September 1919. It established the
Free People's State of Württemberg with its capital at Stuttgart as a part of the
Weimar Republic. In 1920, Stuttgart temporarily became the seat of the German National Government when the administration fled from
Berlin from the
Kapp Putsch. Also in 1920,
Erwin Rommel became the company commander of the 13th Infantry Regiment based in Stuttgart and would remain as such for the next nine years.
1940s Due to the practice of
Gleichschaltung, Stuttgart's political importance as state capital became totally nonexistent, though it remained the cultural and economic centre of the central
Neckar region. Stuttgart, one of the cities bestowed an
honorary title by the Nazi regime, was given the moniker "City of the
Abroad Germans" in 1936. The first prototypes of the
Volkswagen Beetle were manufactured in Stuttgart, according to designs by
Ferdinand Porsche, by a design team including
Erwin Komenda and
Karl Rabe. The
Hotel Silber (), previously occupied by other forms of
political police, was occupied by the
Gestapo in 1933 to detain and torture political dissidents. The hotel was used for the transit of prisoners of conscience including
Eugen Bolz,
Kurt Schumacher, and
Lilo Herrmann to
concentration camps. The nearby court at Archive Street () 12A was also used as a central location for executions in Southwest Germany, as the headstone located in its atrium dedicated to the 419 lives lost there recalls. Participants of the
Kristallnacht burned the
Old Synagogue to the ground along with the relics contained within and also destroyed its
Jewish cemetery. The next year the Nazi regime began the arrests and deportation of Stuttgart's Jewish inhabitants, beginning with the entire male Jewish population of Stuttgart, to the police-run prison camp at
Welzheim or directly to
Dachau. Other Jews from around Württemberg were brought to Stuttgart and housed in the ghetto on the former Trade Fair grounds in
Killesberg. As the Memorial at
Stuttgart North records, between 1941 (the first train arrived 1 December 1941, and took around 1,000 men to
Riga) and 1945, more than 2,000 Jews from all over Württemberg Stuttgart, like many of Germany's major cities, was ravaged throughout the war. For the first four years of the war, successful air raids on the city were rare because of the capable defence of the city by
Wehrmacht ground forces, the
Luftwaffe. Despite opinions among some Royal Air Force members that day-time air raids on the city were suicidal,
French-American tensions The ground advance into Germany reached Stuttgart in April 1945. Although the attack on the city was to be conducted by the
US Seventh Army's 100th Infantry Division, French leader
Charles de Gaulle found this to be unacceptable, as he felt the capture of the region by
Free French forces would increase French influence in post-war decisions. Independently, he directed
General de Lattre to order the
French 5th Armored Division,
2nd Moroccan Infantry Division and
3rd Algerian Infantry Division to begin their drive to Stuttgart on 18 April 1945. Two days later, the French forces coordinated with the US Seventh Army and VI Corps heavy artillery, who began a barrage of the city. The French 5th Armored Division then captured Stuttgart on 21 April 1945, encountering little resistance. The city fared poorly under their direction; French troops forcefully quartered their troops in what housing remained in the city, rapes were frequent (there were at least 1,389 recorded incidents of rape of civilians by French soldiers), and the city's surviving populace were poorly rationed. The circumstances of what later became known as "The Stuttgart Crisis" provoked political repercussions that reached even the
White House.
President Harry S. Truman was unable to get De Gaulle to withdraw troops from Stuttgart until after the final boundaries of the zones of occupation were established. The French army remained in the city until they finally relented to American demands on 8 July 1945 and withdrew. Stuttgart then became capital of
Württemberg-Baden, one of the three areas of Allied occupation in Baden-Württemberg, from 1945 until 1952.
Baden-Württemberg The military government of the
American occupation zone established a
Displaced persons camp for
displaced persons, mostly
forced labourers from Central and Eastern European industrial firms in the area. There was, however, a camp located in
Stuttgart-West that, until its closure and transportation of internees to
Heidenheim an der Brenz in 1949, housed almost exclusively 1400 Jewish survivors of the
Shoah. An early concept of the
Marshall Plan aimed at supporting reconstruction and economic/political recovery across Europe was presented
during a speech 6 September 1946 given by
US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes at the Stuttgart
Opera House. His speech led to the unification of the British and American occupation zones, resulting in the 'bi-zone' (later the 'tri-zone' when the French reluctantly agreed to cede their occupied territory to the new state). In 1948, the city applied to become the capital of the soon to-be
Federal Republic of Germany, and was a serious contender against
Frankfurt,
Kassel, and
Bonn. All these cities were examined by the
Parlamentarischer Rat, but ultimately Bonn won the bid when the Republic was founded on 23 May 1949. Klett's Stuttgart saw two major media events: the same year the partnership with Strasbourg was finalized, then
French president Charles de Gaulle visited the city and
Ludwigsburg Palace in the ending moments of his state visit to Germany, and
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited the city 24 May 1965. On 25 April 1952, the other two parts of the former German states of
Baden and
Württemberg,
South Baden and
Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged and formed the modern German state of
Baden-Württemberg, with Stuttgart as its capital. Since the 1950s, Stuttgart has been the third largest city in
southern Germany behind
Frankfurt and
Munich. The city's population, halved by the Second World War, began sudden growth with the mass influx of
German refugees expelled from their homes and communities by the Soviets from the late 1940s until 1950 to the city.
Economic migrants, called "
Gastarbeiter", from Italy, and later Greece and Turkey but primarily from
Yugoslavia, came flocking to Stuttgart because of the economic wonder called the "
Wirtschaftswunder" unfolding in
West Germany. These factors saw the city reach its (then) peak population of 640,000 in 1962. In May 1965
Queen Elizabeth II made a
state visit to Stuttgart and nearby
Marbach and
Schwäbisch Hall. Her great-grandfather
Duke Francis (1837–1900) had been a member of the Württemberg royal family. In the late 1970s, the municipal district of Stammheim was centre stage to one of the most controversial periods of German post-war history.
Stammheim Prison, built from 1959 to 1963, came to be the place of incarceration for
Ulrike Meinhof,
Andreas Baader,
Gudrun Ensslin, and
Jan-Carl Raspe, members of a communist terrorist organization known as the
Red Army Faction, during
their trial at the
Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart in 1975. Several attempts were made by the organization to free the terrorists during the "
German Autumn" of 1977 that culminated in such events as the
kidnap and murder of
Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of
Lufthansa Flight 181. When it became clear, after many attempts to free the inmates including the smuggling of three weapons into the prison by their lawyer, that the terrorists could not escape and that they would receive
life sentencing, the terrorists killed themselves in April 1977 in an event remembered locally as the "
Todesnacht von Stammheim", "Night of Death at Stammheim". The trauma of the early 1970s was quickly left behind, starting in 1974 with the
1974 FIFA World Cup and the opening of the
Stuttgart S-Bahn on 1 October 1978 with a scheduled three routes. from 17 to 19 June 1983, ten European heads of state and representatives from the
European Union met in Stuttgart for a summit and there made the
Solemn Declaration on European Union. In 1986, the
European Athletics Championships of that year were held in the
Neckarstadion.
Mikhail Gorbachev, while on a trip to
West Germany to offer a spot for a West German astronaut in a Soviet space mission, visited Stuttgart 14 June 1989 and was the honored guest of a sumptuous reception held at the
New Palace. Since the monumental happenings of the 1980s, Stuttgart has continued being an important centre of not just Europe, but also the world. In 1993, the
World Horticultural Exposition, for which two new bridges were built, and
World Athletics Championships of that year took place in Stuttgart in the Killesburg park and Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion respectively, bringing millions of new visitors to the city. At the 1993 WCA, British athlete
Sally Gunnell and the United States Relay team
both set world records. In 2003, Stuttgart applied for the
2012 Summer Olympics but failed when the German Committee for the Olympics decided on
Leipzig to host the Olympics in Germany. Three years later, in 2006, Stuttgart once again hosted the
FIFA World Cup as it had in 1974. Stuttgart still experienced some growing pains even long after its recovery from the Second World War. In 2010, the inner city become the focal point of the
protests against the controversial Stuttgart 21.
US military in Stuttgart Since shortly after the end of World War II, there has been a US military presence in Stuttgart. At the height of the
Cold War over 45,000 Americans were stationed across over 40 installations in and around the city. Today about 10,000 Americans are stationed on 5 installations (Patch Barracks, Panzer Kaserne, Kelley Barracks, Robinson Barracks, and Stuttgart Army Airfield) representing all branches of service within the
Department of Defense, unlike the mostly Army presence of the Occupation and Cold War. In March 1946 the
US Army established a unit of the
US Constabulary and a headquarter at Kurmärker Kaserne (later renamed
Patch Barracks) in Stuttgart. These units of soldiers retrained and policing provided the law and order in the American zone of occupied Germany until the civilian German police forces could be re-established. In 1948 the headquarters for all Constabulary forces was moved to Stuttgart. In 2008 a memorial to the US Constabulary was installed and dedicated at Patch Barracks. The US Constabulary headquarters was disbanded in 1950 and most of the force was merged into the newly organized
7th Army. As the Cold War developed US Army
VII Corps was re-formed in July 1950 and assigned to Hellenen Kaserne (renamed
Kelley Barracks in 1951) where the headquarters was to remain throughout the Cold War. In 1990 VII Corps was deployed directly from Germany to
Saudi Arabia for Operations
Desert Shield and
Desert Storm to include many of the VII Corps stationed in and around Stuttgart. After returning from the Middle East, VII Corps units were reassigned to the United States or deactivated. The VII Corps Headquarters returned to Germany for a short period to close out operations and was deactivated later in the United States. The withdrawal of VII Corps caused a large reduction in the US military presence in the city and region and led to the closure of the majority of US installations in and around Stuttgart which resulted in the layoff of many local civilians who had been career employees of the US Army. Since 1967, Patch Barracks in Stuttgart has been home to the US
EUCOM. In 2007
AFRICOM was established as a cell within EUCOM and in 2008 established as the US
Unified Combatant Command responsible for most of Africa headquartered at Kelley Barracks. Due to these two major headquarters, Stuttgart has been identified as one of the few "enduring communities" where the United States forces will continue to operate in Germany. The remaining U.S. bases around Stuttgart are organized into US Army Garrison Stuttgart and include Patch Barracks,
Robinson Barracks,
Panzer Kaserne and Kelley Barracks. From the end of
World War II until the early 1990s these installations excepting Patch were almost exclusively Army, but have become increasingly "Purple"—as in joint service—since the end of the Cold War as they are host to
United States Department of Defense Unified Commands and supporting activities. ==Geography==