I have heard this many times, that many of Germany's cities were so completely destroyed that they are still rebuilding sections today. (Not huge sections of city blocks, but still rebuilding parts). Is this true? When I went to Europe two years ago I noticed a surprisingly large number of bullet holes and bomb damage on some buildings and bridges in Paris (Not structural, obviously) And noticed some in Berlin, but not as much. I did, however, notice quite a large number of construction cranes. Thanks!
There were some ruined buildings deliberately left in that state as war memorials, for example the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gedaechtniskirche in Berlin or the Frauenkirche in Dresden.
The latter was then rebuilt after reunification, being finished in 2004 and resanctified in 2005. My name is on a brick somewhere in it, having donated some money in 1996.
In other places, mostly in Berlin, war-damaged areas fell along the borders of the allied zones and ended up inaccessible for 40 years - Potsdamer Platz was an important Berlin hub before the war, but ended the war as a blasted wasteland, then had the wall built right across it. Once the wall came down it was redeveloped.
Bullet holes have been left in other high-profile buildings such as the Reichstag, either as memorials or simply because they couldn't fill the holes without making it look even worse.
So yes, in a way, the physical legacy of World War Two remains, but usually for exceptional reasons rather than simply "it was so comprehensively wrecked that it's taken 70 years to rebuild".
Plus of course they still occasionally find unexploded bombs when digging, just as we do here in the UK, and presumably the same goes for France, Poland, Russia - everywhere that saw bombing/shelling.
Also, exclude the tearing down of many ugly Soviet buildings in East Berlin. I guess that is a result of WWII but I'm talking about actual war-time damage. East Germany was too poor to do a lot of reparations but I'm wondering if those sections are repaired by now.
Berlin has so many construction cranes because it has been undergoing a construction boom since the reunification of Germany. Bonn was the de-facto capital of West Germany, because in 1949 that was the location where the constitution of West Germany was negotiated. West Germany considered Berlin to be the de jure capital of Germany, but realized West Berlin would not be a practical location for their capital city. Bonn was chosen to be the de facto capital city because it is not to far north or to far south. It is on the Rhine river, so it is near the western edge of Germany. Bonn was not the largest city in West Germany, but it was comparatively lightly damaged during World War II. It remained the capital of the united Germany until 1999 and as late as 2012, six departments of the German Federal government are still based in Bonn. However, since 1999, many departments of the German federal government have built new headquarter buildings in Berlin. When these new offices are ready, that government agency moves to Berlin. Thus, Berlin has seen its population grow since 1999 and Bonn has shrunk to a city that has only 311,000 people living within the city limits.
Source: A TIME magazine article about the building boom in Berlin from 2012. There have been several articles about the Berlin Building boom in Der Spiegel, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week over the last three years. The rapid rise in real estate values in Berlin is a common current concern of these articles. It is not rebuilding the damage from World War II that is causing this spate of construction activity, but rather the relocation of Germany's federal government back to their traditional capital city.