I was in the U.S. Army in Germany in the 1970's. A couple of towns in the area where I was stationed, including the one I was in, were leveled by the RAF, in particular one raid on December 4, 1944, when 4000 civilians were killed. Back then, the Germans memorialized the event by stopping all traffic for about 30 minutes on December 4. U.S. military traffic was strictly required to observe the ocassion, though some Germans ignored it and went about their business.
In Heilbronn, you could buy black and white postcards of the city after the raid, taken at ground level. For about a half mile, not a single brick or masonry stone was standing on top of another. The metal stairs leading up to the old town hall survived more or less intact. The store where I purchased the postcard was opposite the town hall, more or less in the spot where the photograph was taken, and by that time, the town hall and the rest of the town had been almost entirely rebuilt.
I remember bivouacking near the tiny town of Rimbach, near the Oder River. It was a town of about 2000 inhabitants, in the center of the town was a small graveyard. It has a memorial to the war dead from two world wars, about 200 individuals, if I recall correctly. (I counted the number of columns and the number of rows.) German war memorials were not martial in tone, but solemn and dignified.
I was raised an Army Brat in 1950s Japan. There were still broad stretches of scorched and pulverized land near where we lived in Sagamihara and Yokohama.
In Yokohama, about two blocks north of our house was a field of broken concrete that our maid said had been a pharmaceutical plant before it was hit in a bombing raid. Among the chunks of concrete were dozens of tiny vials of medicines and hundreds of tiny lizards that had made a home there.