Qualla: Kleve

Kleve: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Brian Horrocks gave the order in February 1945 and lived with it for the rest of his life. Lieutenant-General Horrocks knew Kleve. He knew it was a very old German town, that Anne of Cleves had been born there, that civilians were still living in it. He also knew that the Siegfried Line ran through it and that his men would have to fight their way over high ground at Nutterden, and that the German reserves would come through Kleve. So he said yes, take it out, and when the bombers droned overhead that night he felt, as he later put it, like a murderer. After the war the nightmares came. They were always about Kleve.

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Kleve: Anne's Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kleve - or Cleves, in the older English spelling - sits where a low promontory rises above the Rhine plain near the Dutch border. The name itself probably comes from the Middle Dutch word for cliff, after the bluff on which the Schwanenburg Castle was built. From the eleventh cen...

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Kleve: Spas, Huguenots, and a Hunting Prince

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Dutch ran Kleve for a stretch in the seventeenth century, and a remarkable governor named Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen left his mark on it. He rebuilt the Schwanenburg in baroque style, threw up a new palace called the Prinzenhof, and laid out gardens whose geometry ripple...

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Kleve: Knickebein

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before Horrocks's bombers, Kleve had been a point on the aerial map. During the early years of World War II, the Luftwaffe used two radio transmitters - one at Kleve, one at Stolberg - to guide bombers toward British targets. The system was called Knickebein, German for croo...

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Kleve: Horrocks's Order

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By early 1945, the Siegfried Line had to be broken before Allied armies could push into the German heartland, and the high ground at Nutterden was the key to that break. The German reserves would have to come up through Kleve. Horrocks calculated, with the cold arithmetic of comm...

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Kleve: What Was Rebuilt

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Schwanenburg was reconstructed, brick by careful brick, and so was the Stiftskirche, the old Catholic parish church. Built on high ground, they can still be seen from the surrounding villages, as if the medieval town were trying to remember its own outline. The spa villas alo...

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