In the city of Kaiserslautern, southwest Germany

 In the late 1940s, the Kaiserslautern area became the largest U.S. garrison outside the United States (known as the Kaiserslautern Military Community).

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(in southwest Germany's state of Rhineland-Palatinate at the edge of the Palatinate Forest.) In Kaiserslautern, the summers are comfortable and partly cloudy and the winters are very cold, snowy, windy, and mostly cloudy.

Kaiserslautern is a scenic city in the wooded hills of the Palatinate Forest. This landscape had been a royal estate since the days of Charlemagne, and the “Kaiser” in the city’s name comes from the Holy Roman Emperors Frederick I (Barbarossa) and Rudolf I, who resided here in the 12th and 13th centuries.

+ The city is home to Ramstein Air Base, one of the largest U.S. overseas military installations and the headquarters of U.S. air forces in Europe. Several of the city’s old buildings survive despite severe damage in World War II.

+ The cultural heart of the western Palatinate, Kaiserslautern has a variety of schools and museums. The university in the city was founded in 1970 as part of the Trier-Kaiserslautern University joint campus, which became autonomous in 1975. In the year 2000, K-Town (as Kaiserslautern is affectionately known by those of us who spent a good bit of time here) hosted the inaugural Rhineland-Palatinate garden show, thus conceiving a magical themed park, with dinosaurs and a genuine Japanese garden. For culture the Pfalzgalerie is replete with high-profile Impressionist, Expressionist, and contemporary German works.

+ The historic center of Kaiserslutern dates to the 9th century. It is 459 km (285 mi.) from Paris, 117 km (73 mi.) from Frankfurt am Main, 666 km (414 mi.) from Berlin, and 159 km (99 mi.) from Luxembourg.

+ Kaiserslautern is now home to about 100,000 people. Additionally, some 45,000 NATO military personnel are still based in the city and its surrounding district (Landkreis Kaiserslautern), contributing approximately US$1 billion annually to the local economy.

+ In World War II, Allied bombing destroyed more than 85% of this city. The railway and several main roads were primary targets, with the heaviest attacks occurring on 7 January 11 August, and 28 September 1944. On 20 March 1945, as the last of the 1st Army crossed the Rhine river at Remagen, the U.S. 80th Division, 319th Infantry, part of the 3rd US Army, seized Kaiserslautern without resistance. The city became part of the French occupation zone after the war. The establishment of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate was ordered on 30 August 1946 as the last state in the western occupation zones by ordinance No. 57 of the French military government under General Marie-Pierre Kœnig. Little reconstruction took place until the currency reform of 1948. The pace of the economy remained slow until 1952, when construction for newly established garrisons of American troops brought economic growth to the area.