The military government of the
American occupation zone established a
Displaced persons camp for
displaced persons, mostly
forced labourers from Central and Eastern European industrial firms in the area.
[108] There was, however, a camp located in
Stuttgart-West that, until its closure and transportation of internees to
Heidenheim an der Brenz in 1949, housed almost exclusively 1400 Jewish survivors of the
Shoah.
An early concept of the
Marshall Plan aimed at supporting reconstruction and economic/political recovery across Europe was presented
during a speech 6 September 1946 given by
US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes at the Stuttgart
Opera House.
[109]
His speech led to the unification of the British and American
occupation zones, resulting in the 'bi-zone' (later the 'tri-zone' when
the French reluctantly agreed to cede their occupied territory to the
new state). In
1948, the city applied to become the capital of the soon to-be
Federal Republic of Germany, and was a serious contender against
Frankfurt,
Kassel, and
Bonn. All these cities were examined by the
Parlamentarischer Rat,
[110] but ultimately Bonn won the bid when the Republic was founded on 23 May 1949.
[110] The city's bid for capital failed primarily because of the financial burdens its high rents would place on the government.
The immediate aftermath of the War would be marked by the controversial efforts of
Arnulf Klett, the first
Oberbürgermesiter of Stuttgart, to restore the city. Klett favored the idea of a
modernist Automotive city with functional divisions for residential, commercial and industrial areas according to the
Athens Charter.
Klett demolished both ruins and entire streets of largely undamaged
buildings without rebuilding them to their original visage, a move that
earned him much scorn from his contemporaries. In the 150th year since
his death (
1955), the last remnant of the alma mater of
Friederich Schiller, the Karlsschule, was removed in favor of an expansion to the
Bundesstraße 14. Klett also dramatically expanded the
public transportation of Stuttgart with the
Stuttgart Stadtbahn and, in
1961, initiated a
city partnership with the French city of
Strasbourg as part of an attempt to mend
Franco-German relations. It would be finalized in 1962 and is still active today.
[111] Klett's Stuttgart saw two major media events: the same year the partnership with Strasbourg was finalized, then
French president Charles de Gaulle visited the city and
Ludwigsburg Palace in the ending moments of his state visit to Germany,
[112] and
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited the city 24 May
1965.
[113]
On 25 April
1952, the other two parts of the former German states of
Baden and
Württemberg,
South Baden and
Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged and formed the modern German state of
Baden-Württemberg, with Stuttgart as its capital.
[114] Since the 1950s, Stuttgart has been the third largest city in
southern Germany behind
Frankfurt and
Munich. The city's population, halved by the Second World War, began sudden growth with the mass influx of
German refugees expelled from their homes and communities by the Soviets from the late 1940s until 1950 to the city.
Economic migrants, called "
Gastarbeiter," from
Italy, and later
Greece and
Turkey but primarily from
Yugoslavia, came flocking to Stuttgart because of the economic wonder called the "
Wirtschaftswunder" unfolding in
West Germany.
[115] These factors saw the city reach its (then) peak population of 640,000 in 1962.
In the late
1970s, the municipal district of Stammheim was center stage to one of the most controversial periods of German post-war history.
Stammheim Prison, built from
1959 to
1963, came to be the place of incarceration for
Ulrike Meinhof,
Andreas Baader,
Gudrun Ensslin, and
Jan-Carl Raspe, members of a communist terrorist organization known as the
Red Army Faction, during
their trial at the
Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart in
1975. Several attempts were made by the organization to free the terrorists during the "
German Autumn" of
1977 that culminated in such events as the
kidnap and murder of
Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of
Lufthansa Flight 181.
When it became clear, after many attempts to free the inmates including
the smuggling of three weapons into the prison by their lawyer,
[116][117] that the terrorists could not escape and that they would receive
Life sentencing, the terrorists killed themselves
[g] in April 1977 in an event remembered locally as the "
Todesnacht von Stammheim," "Night of Death at Stammheim."
The trauma of the early 1970s was quickly left behind, starting in
1974 in Germany with the
1974 FIFA World Cup and the opening of the
Stuttgart S-Bahn
on 1 October 1978 with a scheduled three routes. From 17–19 June 1983,
ten European heads of state and representatives from the
European Union met in Stuttgart for a summit and there made the
Solemn Declaration on European Union.
[118] Three years later in
1986, the
European Athletics Championships of that year were held in the
Mercedes-Benz Arena.
Mikhail Gorbachev, while on a trip to
West Germany to offer a spot for a West German astronaut in a Soviet space mission,
[119] visited Stuttgart 14 June
1989 and was the honored guest of a sumptuous reception held at the
Stuttgart.
Since the monumental happenings of the 1980s, Stuttgart has continued
being an important center of not just Europe, but also the world. In
1993, the
World Horticultural Exposition, for which two new bridges were built,
[121] and
World Athletics Championships
of that year took place in Stuttgart in the Killesburg park and
Mercedes-Benz Area respectively, bringing millions of new visitors to
the city. At the 1993 WCA, British athlete
Sally Gunnell and the
United States Relay team
both set world records. In
2003, Stuttgart applied for the
2012 Summer Olympics but failed in their bid when the German Committee for the Olympics decided on
Leipzig to host the Olympics in Germany. Three years later, in
2006, Stuttgart once again hosted the
FIFA World Cup as it had in 1974.
Stuttgart still experienced some growing pains even long after its
recovery from the Second World War. In 2010, the inner city become the
focal point of the
protests against the controversial Stuttgart 21f. During the
sexual assaults perpetrated by gangs of migrant men across Germany in 2016, at least 72 complaints were filed to city police of which 17 were sexual assault reports.
[122] One assailant, a 20 year old asylum seeker from
Iraq, was detained for the sexual assaults of two girls as part of a group of other participants in the attacks.
[122]
