Kleve, Germany

Kleve's most famous native was Anne of Cleves (1515–1557), daughter of John III, Duke of Cleves and (briefly) the fourth wife of Henry VIII of England. Several local businesses are named after her, including the Anne von Kleve Galerie.

The ducal dynasty became extinct in the male line in 1609, leading to a succession crisis in the duchies: the War of the Jülich Succession (1609–1614). After the Thirty Years' War ended in 1648, the succession dispute was resolved with Cleves passing to the elector of Brandenburg, thus becoming an exclave of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, later Brandenburg-Prussia.

During the Thirty Years' War the city had been under the control of the Dutch Republic, which in 1647 had given Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen administrative control over the city. He approved a renovation of Schwanenburg Castle in the baroque style, constructed a baroque palace, the Prinzenhof, and commissioned the construction of extensive gardens that greatly influenced European landscape design. Significant amounts of his original plan for Kleve were put into effect and have been maintained to the present, a particularly well-loved example of which is the Forstgarten (Forest Garden). In 1685, a commune of French Huguenots was established in the town, and French church services were held in the castle. In 1701, Cleves became part of the Kingdom of Prussia.

During the War of the First Coalition, Cleves was captured by French Revolutionary troops on 19 October 1794. In 1795 it was incorporated into the Roer department, which became part of the Cisrhenian Republic in 1797, which in turn was formally annexed by the French First Republic in 1802, becoming the French First Empire in 1804. Prussia retrieved the city in 1815.

The mineral waters of Kleve and the wooded parkland surrounding it made it a fashionable spa in the 19th century. At this time, Kleve was named "Bad Cleve" (English: Spa of Cleves). It was not until 1935 when the German spelling of its name was officially changed from Cleve to Kleve.

During World War II Kleve was the site of one of the two radio wave stations that served the Knickebein aircraft navigation system. Luftwaffe bombers used radio beams from Kleve and a second station at Stolberg to navigate to British targets. The Knickebein system was eventually jammed by the British. It was replaced by the higher frequency X-Gerät system, which used transmitter stations located on the channel coast of France.

Kleve was heavily bombed during the Second World War, and over 90% of buildings in the city were severely damaged. During a raid on 7 October 1944 a Halifax bomber crashed into the Schwanenburg Castle. Most of the destruction was the result of a raid late in the war in 1945, conducted at the request of Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks in preparation for Operation Veritable. Horrocks recounted his decision in the 1973 television documentary The World at War:

"Then they came to me and they said, 'Do you want the town of Cleve taken out?' By 'taken out' they meant the whole of the heavy bombers putting on to Cleve. Now, I knew that Cleve was a very fine old historical German town. Anne of Cleve, one of Henry VIII's wives, came from there. I knew that there were a lot of civilians in Cleve, men, women and children. If I said no, they would live. If I said yes, they would die. A terrible decision you’ve got to take. But... everything depended on getting a high piece of ground at Nütterden. The German reserves would have to come through Cleve, and we would have to breach the Siegfried Line and get there. And your own lives, your own troops, must come first, so I said yes, I did want it taken out. But when all those bombers went over, the night just before zero hour, to take out Cleve, I felt a murderer. And after the war I had an awful lot of nightmares, but always Cleve."

Horrocks later said that this had been "the most terrible decision I had ever taken in my life" and that he felt "physically sick" when he saw the bombers overhead.

As a result of the bombing, and subsequent fighting in the town (notably by the 129th Brigade of the 43rd Wessex Division, which entered the town in error on 10 February), relatively little of the pre-1945 city remains. Those structures spared include a number of historic villas built during the heyday of the spa Bad Kleve, located along the B9 near the Tiergarten. Of those buildings destroyed, many were reconstructed, including most of the Schwanenburg and the Stiftskirche, the Catholic parish church. Constructed on high ground, many of these landmarks can be seen from the surrounding communities.