Nazis burned down synagogues at two locations in the city. The next day, they started systematic deportation of Jews, and sent 150 Jews to Dachau concentration camp. On October 22, 1940, during the "Wagner Buerckel event", the Nazis deported 6000 local Jews, including 281 from Heidelberg, to Camp Gurs concentration camp in France. Within a few months, as many as 1000 of them (201 from Heidelberg) died of hunger and diseases. Among the deportees from Heidelberg, the poet Alfred Mombert (1872�1942) left the camp in April 1941 thanks to the Swiss poet Hans Reinhart. From 1942, the deportees that had survived internment in Gurs were deported to Eastern Europe, where most of them were murdered.
On March 29, 1945, the Wehrmacht left the city after destroying three arches of the old bridge, Heidelberg's treasured river crossing. They also destroyed the more modern bridge downstream. The U.S. Army (3rd Infantry, 7th Army) entered Heidelberg on March 30, 1945. The civilian population surrendered without resistance.
Some historians suggested Heidelberg escaped bombing in WWII because the U.S. Army wanted to use the city as a garrison after the war. As Heidelberg was neither an industrial center nor a transport hub, it did not present a target of opportunity. Other notable university towns, such as T�bingen and G�ttingen, were spared bombing as well. Allied air raids focused extensively on the nearby industrial cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen.
The U.S. Army may have chosen Heidelberg as a garrison base due to its excellent infrastructure, including the Heidelberg-Mannheim Autobahn (freeway), which connected to the Mannheim-Darmstadt-Frankfurt Autobahn, and the U.S. Army installations in Mannheim and Frankfurt. The intact railroad infrastructure was more important in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when most heavy loads were still carried by train, not by truck. Heidelberg had the untouched "Grossdeutschland Kaserne" Wehrmacht installation. The US Army
