Long before the war that made Kissinger's name, Krefeld had a different name: the Velvet and Silk City - Samt- und Seidenstadt. Mennonites arriving from neighboring Catholic territories in the early seventeenth century had found refuge here under the more tolerant Dutch House of Orange-Nassau, which then controlled Krefeld. They built congregations and businesses. By 1763, one Mennonite family - the silk merchants Von der Leyen - employed half of Krefeld's population of 6,082 in their factories. The Von der Leyen residence, built from 1791, is the current City Hall. The town's prosperity came off the silk loom, and its skyline, until the bombs of 1943 came, was the skyline of a textile city: long brick weaving sheds, the chimneys of dye works, and the merchant houses where the profits accumulated.

In 1683, a group of thirteen German-speaking families - most of them Quakers from Mennonite backgrounds, three of them from the Op den Graeff family that had led Krefeld's congregation since 1609 - boarded a ship called the Concord and sailed for Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn. They founded Germantown, now absorbed into Philadelphia, and became the seed of what would be called the Pennsylvania Dutch identity. Five years later, in 1688, four of the Germantown settlers - including Abraham Op den Graeff, born in Krefeld - signed what is now recognized as the first organized religious protest against slavery written in colonial America. The argument they made was theological and practical: as people who had themselves fled religious persecution, they could not justify enslaving anyone. The petition was ignored at the time. The Op den Graeffs' little Krefeld church, hidden in a back yard since 1693 and rebuilt after the war, still meets - about 800 members strong.

In 1928, two silk industrialists named Hermann Lange and Josef Esters commissioned a young Berlin architect to design their adjoining family houses on a quiet street in Krefeld. The architect was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Haus Lange and Haus Esters became one of the most important early built statements of what the world would soon call International Style. Long, low brick rectangles. Floor-to-ceiling glass facing the garden. No ornament. The two houses are nearly twins, separated by a fence, deeply private in front and entirely open at the back. They were intended as homes for families, not as monuments to modernism, but they came out as both. After decades of use as private residences, they were turned over to the city. Today, Haus Lange and Haus Esters serve as a contemporary art museum - the rooms originally designed for silk-industry families now show installations and exhibitions, and the architecture itself remains the most consistent thing on display.

Krefeld's Jewish community went back to 1617. By 1812, under French rule, it counted 196 families and ran three banks. Under Napoleon the town was made the capital for the surrounding Jewish communities, totaling over 5,000 people. A synagogue had stood since 1764. In 1846 a Jewish representative was elected to the municipal council. By 1897 Jews made up 1.8 percent of the population. On December 11, 1941, after Hitler's order to deport German Jews east, a transport list recorded 1,007 Jews from Krefeld and nearby Duisburg being loaded onto a train. They traveled for more than two days in freezing conditions, without drinking water, to the Skirotava railway station near Riga - the site that would become the Jungfernhof concentration camp. Almost immediately on arrival, most were taken to the Rumbula forest and shot. The synagogue site in Krefeld is now a memorial. The 1764 building did not survive. Of the people who had worshipped there, almost none did either.

On the night of 21-22 June 1943, British bombs destroyed much of eastern Krefeld and the city center burned in a firestorm. The Hauptbahnhof - the central railway station - somehow survived with only minor damage, and the trains kept running, but most of the medieval town did not. When Kissinger arrived less than two years later to administer the wreckage, he was working with a population that had lost both its homes and the moral fiction that had been imposed on them. The town rebuilt. The Lange and Esters Houses survived. So did Linn Castle in its preserved old town, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, and the German Textile Museum that keeps the silk story alive. Krefeld today is the headquarters of Fressnapf, Europe's largest pet-food retailer, and a quietly diverse city of around 230,000. The first electric inter-city rail line in Europe ran here in 1898 and is still operating - called the K-Bahn after the K used on the trains, and still known by that letter, more than a century later.