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, most of the city lay 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 in the years to come.
If you pay attention to the people in this short movie, you will find only the old, the women, 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.
In this 30-minute video, you’ll see how the Berlin Reichstag looked after the war and how it destroyed the Brandenburg Gate and the surrounding area. It is pretty hard to recognize how Alexanderplatz looked in those days after the war, but you are going to see it here.
You are also going to see the Kurfürstendamm, the Führer Bunker, and the Reich Chancellery.
This 1945 video from Berlin is an important document showing how this city coped with its destruction and how its people managed to survive one of the biggest battles in history. We should be thankful to the Berlin Channel on YouTube for putting this together.
We hope something like this never happens again.
