The landscape of Groningen has been shaped by the Second World War in more ways than one could imagine. Culturally, almost a quarter of the city center was lost, while the physical heart of Groningen was bombed to pieces. What has now blossomed once again into the vibrant center of the city has had to overcome great adversity.
Cultural landscape
The biggest change concerning the cultural landscape in Groningen was caused by the Holocaust. Because of the Holocaust, the Jewish community in Groningen vanished almost completely. With this, the once so lively Jewish quarter became quiet.
Before the war, about 2900 Jewish people were living in the city of Groningen. They were quite well integrated into the rest of the Groninger society, among other things because of the emancipation decree of 1796. However, as a Jewish war survivor told a Dutch newspaper, the Jewish people stayed a different group within it. Most poorer, more traditional Jewish people were living in the Jewish quarter, which was located around the Folkingestraat. The Folkingestraat was a busy street and maybe even the most important street for the Jewish society in Groningen. Here, you could find the synagogue and many small firms and traders. However, there were not only Jewish people in this centre of the Jewish quarter as more than half of the shops in the street were owned by non-Jewish people. Most richer, more secularised Jewish people were living outside of the Jewish quarter. A third group of Jewish people living in Groningen consisted of German-Jewish refugees. However, the Groninger Jews saw the German Jews in the first place as German, and not as one of “them”.
In August 1942, the transportation of Groninger Jews started. In less than a year, almost every Jewish person had been deported from Groningen and murdered. After the war, there were only 225 Jewish people left in the whole city of Groningen. The Folkingestraat became even more impoverished, as did the rest of the Jewish quarter. There was little activity afterwards, especially compared to the street before the war. The synagogue had become too big for the people who survived the war and stayed in Groningen. Therefore, it was sold and became the place of a dye-house, and later a church building.
Only after the construction of the Groninger Museum and the bridge besides it did the Folkingestraat become more lively. The street is now home to a variety of shops. Not so much reminds us of the street this has been before the war, except for five artworks and some memorial road bricks. The synagogue has been restored. Part of the building is used as synagogue again and there are tours and exhibitions.
Tangible landscape
Chronologically going through staggering archival imagery, it becomes clear that the Liberation itself had the biggest toll on the built integrity of the city. Unlike in other cities, the use of artillery seems to have been limited, in part to avoid harm to civilians. Without shelling or bombing the city, infantry forces had to ‘clear buildings room by room’ – something attested to by the following excerpt:
This type of battle might have spared large parts of the city from further destruction, leaving the structure of houses intact, but in need of repair. Every loss of life and home is tragic, but residential parts of Groningen stayed largely intact – this is felt just by going on a walk through some of them.
Going for a walk through the main square, the Grote Markt, tells a different story. The inhomogeneous architecture on the square and in parts of the streets leading into it hints at more excessive destruction than seen in other parts of the city. Due to German strongholds around the square, it was necessary for liberation forces to use flamethrowers and tanks against the buildings, leaving the Grote Markt stripped – the majority of it turned into rubble, and the rest left burning, with some fires spreading throughout the city.
The War Diary of a Canadian Infantry somewhat understates the damage done, saying that ‘the city was captured undamaged except for several fires that burned some of the houses’. It’s hard to wrestle yourself back to accept this after seeing how much of the square was lost, and in what way. However, out of an estimated 32,000 buildings at the time, 270 were destroyed. The city truly was largely left in tact, illustrated by the fact that some other cities were in whole affected like just the square was in Groningen – Rotterdam suffering a loss as large as Groningen itself, with more than 30,000 buildings leveled.
Rebuilding the city square was not an easy task, and in hindsight, the city council has shown understanding of the taste-splitting sense the Grote Markt conveys today, saying: ‘In the 1950s, several broad buildings were constructed on the east façade and the street alignment was pushed backward. The Grote Markt thus changed from an intimate and monumental square into an (in retrospect) over-spacious and cheerless zone with an ugly car park behind it.’
Some of the buildings originally built closely following the war have been torn down in recent years to give way to newer ones, again erasing some of the continuity of the ‘old’ square that was kept. New buildings crossed the outline of the prewar square for the first time, now protruding into it. The square is evolving past both its prewar and postwar history, and citizens today might have more to say in the process than they did in the efforts directly after the war. It’d be nice to do justice to the ones who lost their beloved town square, and hopefully there are ways to do that.
The price of the war for the city was paid not just in lives but in brick and mortar. In the history that was lost in the people as well as the edifices surrounding the emotional and physical heart of the city. World War 2 truly changed the landscape of Groningen.
Written by Niko, Finn, and Mika
Groningen Social Geography 
