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rootinier
Interesting that this made it to the front page of Hacker News.
donretag
Pardon my ignorance, but how involved was Munich in the entire WWII conflict? It was not too close to the front (especially to the west) and the closest bordering nations were allies.
[dead] excuse-me
In terms of being a target - less so than the industrial cities of North-West Germany. It's a lot further away, so more dangerous to mount a raid and you can put a smaller payload on target, but it's still an important enemy city as well as a communications hub.

On the ground it got off relatively lightly - by the time it was reached the war was pretty much won and it was essentially surrendered without a fight.

icegreentea
Munich was targeted by many air raids throughout the war. This was the era were an air raid was hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs. In the start, there would have been an attempt at 'precision'. Initial allied air raids nominally targeted factories and other industrial chokepoints. Turns out their accuracy was so low that at some point they just switched over to bombing the city in general.

Also, towards the end of the war, the western and eastern "fronts" basically swept through all of Germany. Munich was attacked by American forces near the end of the air (they also liberated the near by concentration camp while they were at it). Fighting was not as fierce as other urban battles.

mhd
74 air raids, 60k bombs plus a few million incendiary devices, about 90% of the city center destroyed.

There was lots of industry (BMW, Dornier) in Munich, a few important airports and it was the Capital of the Movement, i.e. the place where the whole Nazi BS started[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

jlgreco
I am guessing either this type of bomb wasn't designed to create shrapnel, or they removed the casing beforehand somehow?
hendrik-xdest
They did not. I've read in a German newspaper today that a piece of the metal casing has been found 300 meters off, near one of the main roads of Munich. They coated the bomb in straw and sandbags to minimize the shrapnel as best as possible, though.
mhd
The did say that they found "Splitter" as far as 300m away, but that could apply to both shrapnel and just pieces of the casing.
jlgreco
Ah, I was thinking the straw/sand was more to dampen the shock-wave somehow. Interesting, I would have though that the shrapnel from a bomb that big would have been far more devastating even with sandbags; I guess they probably used more than I was picturing in my head. Fascinating stuff.