Berlin 1945

Berlin, in May 1945: World War II is over in Europe. The Soviet army has conquered Berlin, a city reduced to rubble, and now under martial law. Soldiers from America, Great Britain, and France will move in a few months later. Broken tanks and makeshift barricades are littering the streets, tenements and churches were turned into bombed-out shells, tunnels have been flooded and train tracks destroyed. German soldiers are been hauled off to POW-camps in Siberia, while old men are cutting up dead horses for food, women are trading clothing for survival, and children are left to their own devices in the ruins. And the victors, Russian soldiers of the Red Army, look as much exhausted as the defeated. These rare pictures have been taken by photographers of the Red Army and by Germans in their employ immediately after the surrender. They are published for the first time in the United States, allowing a glimpse into an era of destruction and desperation, but also survival and rebuilding. These photos depict a grotesque normalcy, beyond the well known iconography of heroic liberations and optimistic rebuilding. -Spiegel Online At times eerie and at times prosaic, the photographs, many taken by victorious Soviet Red Army soldiers, show ordinary people doing extraordinary things in order to rebuild their lives, literally and figuratively, amid the ruins of a defeated city. -Jason Walsh, correspondent, Christian Science Monitor These never-seen pictures of Berlin in ruins are so forceful, because for those Berliners, destruction was an everyday experience. We see it all: the unfathomable rubble, the homeless and the hungry, the German soldiers marched off to prison camps. And then: the beginnings of recovery and return of the human spirit. Even if you think you've seen it all before on the European war, Berlin 1945 is likely to surprise you. -Greg Mitchell, The Nation magazine, and author of Hiroshima in America