Berlin: After The War, Before The Wall

A blind man (right) and his companion sit in the rubble of a Berlin street shortly after the end of the war. 
 
The war in Europe ended in May 1945 after the Soviet Red Army, supported by Allied air power, stormed into central Berlin, capturing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s bunker and hoisting the communist flag onto landmarks in the German capital.

An overview of central Berlin shot from an American plane shortly after the Allied victory in Europe.
 
Germans referred to the stillness that followed the raging battles for Berlin as “Stunde Null” (Hour Zero), the moment of "an absolute break with the past and a radical new beginning."
 
 
 

Soviet officers examine bindings inside Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.
 
A pastor freed by Soviets from the Nazi prison, known as “the house of horror,” later wrote: “What I experienced as sadism during those last one and a half weeks cannot be described here.”

A car drives down a gutted Berlin street.
 
Much of the damage was from British, American, and French bombing raids that killed tens of thousands of civilians. 
 

Homeless civilians and a dead German soldier

A Soviet soldier described Nazi troops in the final hours of the war emerging from basements with hands aloft “smiling like obedient dogs.”
 

The flame and shrapnel-scarred Reichstag
 
By the end of the war, Berlin’s population plummeted, largely due to people fleeing the advancing Soviet troops.
 

A German man looks at the phrase “Victory or Siberia” painted on a building.

For many who remained, the grim maxim proved accurate. Millions of Germans were shipped east by the Soviets and some 357,000 died in labor camps or secret police prisons.
 

Potatoes being doled out to Berliners.

Soviet soup kitchens handed out large amounts of food, but shortages in the immediate aftermath of the war brought many Berliners to the brink of starvation.
 

Berliners slicing meat from a dead horse in May 1945.

Soviet officers at the Kaiser Wilhelm monument in May 1945. It was later demolished by East Germany’s communist government.
 

A woman left homeless by the war rests on a public bench.
 
Russian journalist Vasily Grossman, who witnessed the fall of Berlin, described seeing in local faces “not only personal suffering but also that of [citizens] of a destroyed country.”

A portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin hangs in central Berlin in the summer of 1945.
 

People forage for food and fuel for cooking fires in a dumping ground near a Berlin airport. The foragers were known as “hamsters,” a name coined in 1918 -- the last time Germany was devastated by war.
 

A man picks nuggets of coal out of a slag heap.
 

Civilians walking along a decimated Berlin street.
 
Thousands of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers, forcing many female Berliners to hide in the evening during “hunting hours” and emerge only in the early morning when Soviet troops were asleep.

American troops with German girls at Berlin’s Wansee lake in July 1945, shortly after the Americans arrived in the city. Such fraternizing with well-supplied ex-enemies would have been scandalous but, as one woman at the time noted, “first comes food, then comes morals.”
 

Women salvaging bricks from the rubble of their city for reuse.
 
Many Russians were struck by the orderliness with which many Germans attempted to return to normality. Vasily Grossman described “the ruins being tidied and swept…as if they were indoor rooms.”
 

A man hacks chunks of wood from a tree stump in Berlin’s famous Tiergarten.

A newly arrived British soldier inside the Reichstag after it had been scrawled with messages from Soviet soldiers.
 
On June 5, 1945, the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and France declared “supreme authority” over Germany and split the country, and the capital, into different zones of occupation. Thus the stage was set for the ideological battle in Europe between communism and the free world that would soon take shape as the Cold War.