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The 22-hectare botanical Palmengarten (Palm Garden; 2123 3939; www.palmengarten-frankfurt.de; Siesmayerstrasse 61 & Palmengartenstrasse; Bockenheimer Warte; adult/student/family €5/2/9.50; 9am-6pm Mon-Sat Mar-Oct, 9am-4pm Nov-Feb), founded in 1868, has rose gardens, historic tropical hothouses, a playground for kids, a little pond with rowboats and a mini-gauge train. It hosts open-air concerts in summer.

BOCKENHEIM

To see some strikingly ugly 1960s buildings that have aged badly and may not be around for long (and a few solid Wilhelmian ones), head to the old campus of Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität (Frankfurt University), along the streets south of Bockenheimer Warte ( Bockenheimer Warte) – named after a medieval guard tower – between Gräfstrasse and Senckenberganlage. The university’s departments are moving to the Westend, 1.5km to the northeast, but the area is still a centre of student life. Leipziger Strasse ( Bockenheimer Warte or Leipziger Strasse) is Bockenheim’s lively main shopping street.

A solid neo-baroque building from the early 1900s houses Frankfurt’s fine natural history museum, the Senckenberg Museum ( 754 20; www.senckenberg.de; Senckenberganlage 25; Bockenheimer Warte; adult/student/senior/family €6/3/5/15, audioguide €3; 9am-5pm Mon, Tue, Thu & Fri, to 8pm Wed, to 6pm Sat, Sun & holidays), which has full-sized dinosaur mock-ups out front – great for the kiddies – and, inside, exhibits on palaeontology (including fossils from the Grube Messel site, Click here, outside Frankfurt), biology and geology. Most have English signs.

NORDEND & BORNHEIM

The heart of this lively, youthful area – well-off but not stuffy – is Berger Strasse (www.bornheim-mitte.de, in German; Merianplatz, Höhenstrasse or Bornheim Mitte), Frankfurt’s longest street, with the U4 line running underneath. Lined with eateries, cafes, wine bars, pubs and shops, it’s ideal for a leisurely, well-irrigated stroll.

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IG-FARBENHAUS – KEEPING THE ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ RUNNING SMOOTHLY

Set in Frankfurt’s leafy Westend, the monumental, Bauhaus-influenced IG-Farbenhaus (Furstenbergerstrasse 200; Holzhausenstrasse; 6am-8pm or later Mon-Sat), seven storeys tall and slightly curved, was erected in 1931 as the prestigious headquarters of IG-Farben, the mammoth German chemicals conglomerate whose constituents included Agfa, BASF, Bayer and Hoechst. White-collar staff based in this building carried out the banal work of coordinating the production of the company’s most notorious product, Zyklon-B, the killing agent used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

After the war, IG-Farbenhaus served briefly as the headquarters of General Dwight D Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and later as the headquarters of US occupation forces and as a CIA bureau. Known as the ‘Pentagon in Europe’, the ‘Casino’ building was bombed by the Red Army Faction terrorist group (Click here) in the 1970s.

In 1995, with the Cold War over, US forces handed the building back to Germany’s federal government. After refurbishment, it became the focal point of the new Westend campus of Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität (Frankfurt University) – and thus a bastion of the spirit of free inquiry and humanism that Nazism tried so hard to extinguish. Inside, you can check out the famed paternoster lifts and exhibits on the building’s history.

Facing the southwest end of the building, the Wollheim Memorial (www.wollheim-memorial.de), in a little pavilion marked ‘107984’, screens 24 interviews (also viewable on the excellent website) with former slave labourers who worked in IG-Farben factories such as IG Auschwitz, so big that it had its very own corporate concentration camp, Buna/Monowitz. Slave labourers who lived to write about their experiences with IG-Farben include Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.

Photo panels installed in the IG-Farbenhaus gardens show German Jews enjoying life in the years before the Holocaust, unaware of what was to come.

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Explora ( 788 888; www.explora.info, in German; Glauburgplatz 1, Nordend; Glauburgstrasse;