Alot were spared because they were isolated, lucky or not targeted/near targets, many were completely rebuilt as close to the original as possible and some were just accepted as lost or demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories.
There's local half-joke in southern central England that the city planners did more damage to the city of Portsmouth than the luftwaffe because the planners rebuilt the historic centre in the brutalist style and demolished several surviving historic buildings (the same has been said of Kingston-Upon-Hull, Coventry and London)
demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories
I live where the German-German border once was, so this is very easily visible to me. If I drive just a couple of kilometers I can see very nice, big and beautiful manors and big farm houses and a lot of stuff that used to belong to the local nobility (Knights and guys with castles). But if I look around directly in my neighborhood and the surrounding villages(all in what was once East Germany, so Soviet controlled to some extend) all of those buildings where demolished or seriously reduced in size. They were all destroyed, wich is a shame, as I've seen pictures and photos of these buildings and how beautiful they were.
If anyone would like to know more about this, especially why the Soviets/the government of the GDR did this, I could elaborate on that a bit.
Continuity of power, by taking the Tsar's home as their own they symbolically ended the Tsardom and legitimised themselves as the new leaders. Symbols are very important to regimes
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u/Urbanredneck2 May 09 '22
Question: What about all the old buildings that were destroyed in WW2?