Osnabrück, Germany

Osnabrück sits on the Hase River in Lower Saxony with roughly 170,000 residents. Charlemagne founded the city in 780 and established the Diocese of Osnabrück five years later for the Saxon missions. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia was signed inside the 1487 Town Hall, or Rathaus, earning the place its "City of Peace" nickname alongside parallel treaties signed in Münster. Erich Maria Remarque, born here in 1898, drew on his own war experience for All Quiet on the Western Front. Daniel Libeskind's 1998 Felix Nussbaum House holds the paintings of an artist murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.