About ten years ago, I drove a van to Prague overnight. It was the first time that I'd ever been in Germany.
There were two of us taking turns. We were just entering Germany as it got dark and we started seeing signs for Cologne and other Ruhr cities, we had even seen a sign for Venlo* in the Netherlands. The other chap was a good bit younger than me and the war was just something in the distant past to him.
We headed south and started seeing more "targets", like Weisbaden, and then we went past the airport in Frankfurt - and there was a searchlight sweeping the sky for some reason. I said to him that, if the engine missed even a single beat, I was going to turn south for Switzerland. He had no idea what I was talking about, but then we saw signs for Nuremburg and Schweinfurt and it got really spooky for me.
I grew up on RAF stations and knew many people that had been on raids to all these places - it seemed quite odd to be just driving through them unmolested.
*Major nightfighter base.