Kreuznach. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized power in 1933, some, among them the trade unionist Hugo Salzmann, organised resistance to National Socialism. Despite imprisonment, Salzmann survived the Third Reich, and after 1945 sat on town council for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The Jews who were still left in the district after the Second World War broke out were on the district leadership's orders taken in 1942 to the former Kolpinghaus, whence, on 27 July, they were deported to Theresienstadt. Bad Kreuznach, whose spa facilities and remaining hotels once again, from 1939 to 1940, became the seat of the Army High Command, was time and again targeted by Allied air raids because of the Wehrmacht barracks on Bosenheimer Straße, Alzeyer Straße and Franziska-Puricelli-Straße as well as the strategically important Berlin-Paris railway line, which then led through the town. The last Stadtkommandant (town commander), Lieutenant Colonel Johann Kaup (d. 1945), kept Bad Kreuznach from even greater destruction when he offered advancing American troops no resistance, and yielded the town to them on 16 March 1945 with barely any fighting. Shortly before this, German troops had blown up yet another part of the old bridge across the Nahe, thus also destroying residential buildings near the bridge ends. After 1945 Bad Kreuznach was occupied by US troops in March 1945 and thus stood under American military authority. This even extended to one of the Rheinwiesenlager for disarmed German forces, which lay near Bad Kreuznach on the road to Bretzenheim, and whose former location is now marked by a memorial. It was commonly known as the "Field of Misery". Found in the Lohrer Wald (forest) is a graveyard of honour for wartime and camp victims. Under the Potsdam Protocols on the fixing of occupation zone boundaries, Bad Kreuznach found itself for a while in French zone of occupation, but in an exchange in the early 1950s, United States Armed Forces came back into the districts of Kreuznach, Birkenfeld and Kusel. Until the middle of 2001, the Americans maintained four barracks, a Redstone missile unit, a firing range, a small airfield and a drill ground in Bad Kreuznach. The last US forces in Bad Kreuznach were parts of the 1st Armored Division ("Old Ironsides"). In 1958, President of France Charles de Gaulle and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed in Bad Kreuznach to an institutionalisation of the special relations between the two countries,