Everybody knows what happened in Berlin in 1945. We all know that Berlin was the Capital of Nazi Germany and, because of that, the city paid a high price for being the capital of a country going to war against half the world.
After the war was over, most of the city laid in ruins. We have seen pictures of the aftermath, read about it and posted here about it. But this post is from the first really interesting movie we found that shows how bad Berlin looked after the Battle of Berlin and the end of the Second World War.
Berlin 1945 in Video: the Destroyed German Capital
It’s fascinating to watch this color footage of the summer of 1945. Just a brief few weeks after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, you can see that the day to day life of Berlin is starting to come back into shape. Among the piles and piles of rubble, among the buildings that cannot hold a family anymore and the remains of the battle that shaped the city int he years to come.
If you pay attention to the people in this short movie, you are going to find only the old, the woman and the young. Everyone else was displaced, sent to war or died in the years before. This is the first time that we see the rubble women working to clear the streets and the buildings. Then you start to understand a little better the importance of the Trümmerfrau in post war Germany.
During this 30 minutes video, you’re going to see how the Berlin Reichstag looked after the war, how destroyed the Brandenburg Gate and the area surrounding it was. It is pretty hard to recognize how Alexanderplatz looked like in those days after the war but you are going to see it here. You are going to see, also, the Kurfürstendamm, the Führer Bunker, and Reich Chancellery.
This video from Berlin in 1945 is an important document showing how this city coped with its destruction. And how its people managed to survive through one of the biggest battles in history. We should be thankful for the Berlin Channel on youtube for putting this together.
We hope something like this never happens again.
