Why the Nazis spared Lemberg

The survival of Lviv, known then as Lemberg, through the Second World War is one of the city’s most striking historical paradoxes. She stands today as a largely intact Central European metropolis whose architectural layers record centuries of political and cultural transition. Yet her survival is not the product of mercy or accident alone. Rather it is the outcome of a complex set of strategic, administrative and ideological circumstances within the shifting Nazi occupation of Galicia. To enquire why the Germans did not obliterate Lemberg requires close attention to the purposes of the occupation, the relative brevity of German control, and the contrasting fates of other cities that suffered deliberate destruction.

A starting point is the political context of eastern Galicia in 1941. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and seized Lemberg from the Soviet Union, the city was incorporated into the Generalgouvernement rather than into the directly annexed eastern territories. This administrative choice mattered. The Generalgouvernement was governed by the civilian apparatus of Hans Frank rather than by the SS-led colonisation authorities that operated further east. Although the occupation was brutal, and the Jewish population of Lemberg was subjected to annihilation, the city itself was understood as an asset to be exploited rather than a battlefield to be razed. Her infrastructure, industry and transport links served the occupiers’ purposes. Lemberg was a logistical hub on the Wehrmacht’s supply lines towards the east; destruction would have undermined the very campaign upon which Hitler and his generals were fixated.

The city’s built environment was also of a character that rendered mass destruction counter-productive. Lemberg was not a fortified stronghold in the way that Warsaw, Königsberg or Breslau later became. She lacked the defensive lines that might have encouraged Hitler to order a ‘Festung’ designation, under which garrisons were instructed to fight to the last street regardless of civilian cost. The Wehrmacht did not prepare Lemberg for a protracted defence and did not perceive her as pivotal to the survival of the eastern front. As the tide of war turned and German forces retreated, their priority was withdrawal rather than apocalyptic resistance. The absence of a fortress order removed one of the most common triggers for the deliberate devastation seen elsewhere.

Another factor was chronological. The Germans occupied the city for only three years, from June 1941 to July 1944. For much of that period, they expected to hold eastern Europe indefinitely. Their ideological project for Galicia was one of ruthless Germanisation and demographic engineering, not a temporary foothold destined to be abandoned in flames. Local administration, public order and economic exploitation all required the functioning urban infrastructure of Lemberg. Buildings were seized, not dynamited; usable workshops, housing blocks and cultural institutions were requisitioned or repurposed. Where the German authorities destroyed, they destroyed lives, not stone.

The retreat of 1944 presents a further puzzle. Why did the Germans not demolish Lemberg as they withdrew before the Red Army? Part of the answer lies in the internal collapse of command coherence in the final months of the occupation. German forces in Galicia were under intense pressure, suffering from logistical chaos and strategic confusion. The retreat was rapid, and the Wehrmacht lacked both the time and the resources to implement large-scale demolition plans. Engineering units needed for systematic destruction were either absent, overcommitted elsewhere, or focused on blowing bridges and railways rather than levelling a major city. Moreover Lemberg was not earmarked for ‘scorched earth’ treatment on the scale sometimes found in Belarus or eastern Poland, where partisans and front-line movements had created conditions ripe for punitive devastation. The German military simply lacked the capacity and perhaps the desire to expend energy on a project that would yield them no tactical gain.

There is also a more subtle, ideological explanation. Lemberg occupied an ambiguous position in the Nazi worldview. Although east of the traditional German cultural frontier, she was nevertheless a city with substantial Austro-Hungarian architectural traces. Many Nazi officials regarded Lemberg not as a symbol of Slavic resistance but as a place that had once belonged to a civilised Central European realm. In private correspondence some administrators lamented the decline of this former Habsburg jewel under Soviet rule. This sentiment did not translate into benevolence, nor did it spare the city’s populations from genocide and repression. But it may have contributed to an absence of zeal for levelling the urban fabric. Lemberg was not seen as the sort of ideological enemy city that Nazi fantasy reserved for annihilation.

One must contrast the fate of Lemberg with that of Warsaw. The Poles’ capital was systematically destroyed following the uprising of 1944, an act driven by ideological rage, punitive intent and a desire to extinguish a symbol of national defiance. No such rebellion occurred in Lemberg under German rule. Resistance existed but did not reach the scale or symbolism that would have provoked a similar response. Nazi policy in the region was centred upon ethnocide rather than urban obliteration. The Germans were exterminating communities, not trying to erase a city that, in their eyes, had useful administrative and economic value.

Therefore, the reasons for Lemberg’s physical survival are multiple. They include the absence of a fortress order; the city’s usefulness as a logistical and administrative hub; the comparatively short duration of German occupation; the chaos of the German retreat; and the ideological particularities through which the Nazis viewed Galicia. None of these factors reflects any measure of restraint or compassion. The Germans devastated the human fabric of Lemberg: her Jewish population was almost entirely exterminated; her Polish and Ukrainian populations suffered severe repression; her intellectual life was decapitated through arrests and executions. The city’s stones survived, but her people endured horrors as great as those experienced anywhere under Nazi rule.

Yet the survival of the stones matters. Lviv’s Old Town, with its Renaissance facades, cobbled squares and baroque churches, offers to the modern visitor a visible continuity broken in so many other European cities. That continuity is not a gift from the occupiers but a consequence of the contingent and often accidental patterns of war. Lemberg was not destroyed because she was not chosen for destruction, because the occupiers had other priorities, and because the end came too quickly and too chaotically for the Germans to pursue their more nihilistic impulses. Her survival is thus a reminder that the Second World War’s urban fates were shaped as much by the particularities of occupation and retreat as by the overarching brutality of the regimes involved.