Brettin - Berlin 1945: World War II: Photos of the Aftermath

Berlin 1945. World War II: Photos of the Aftermath

Pictures from Berliner Verlag and the Soviet Army Archives

Text: Michael Brettin, Ph.D

Photo Editor: Peter Kroh

Translator: Cindy Opitz

Editor: Eva C. Schweitzer

Cover Design: Jennifer Durrant

2014 by Berlinica Publishing LLC

255 West 43rd St., Suite 1012,

New York, NY, 10036, USA

Printed in the United States

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Law. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN Print: 978-1-935902-02-7

ISBN Ebook:

978-1-935902-04-1

978-1-935902-05-8

978-1-935902-06-5

LCCN: 2014933316

www.Berlinica.com

A testimony of the final battle, of death, destruction and hopelessnessbut also about life resurrecting between rubble and ruins. These photos depict a grotesque normalcy, beyond the well known iconography of heroic liberations and optimistic rebuilding.

DER SPIEGEL ONLINE

A touching and breathtaking selection of images from the immediate postwar era. 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. Berlin 1945 is a historical archive that acts as a window on the aftermath of total war.

JASON WALSH, CORRESPONDENT, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Every picture is a story about the destitution of war and postwar, but also the unshakeable optimism that made survival possible amidst the impossible. These never-seen pictures of Berlin in ruins are so forceful, because for those Berliners, destruction was an everyday experience. This view of history does not leave anybody untouched. untouched.

LITERATURMARKTINFO.DE

Few areas of World War II history remain as unexplored as the subjects in this haunting book. Berlin 1945 brings to life people the world has too often relegated en masse to the ranks of accessories to Hitlers crimes. For historians and history buffs alike, this look at postwar Berlin will prove invaluable.

WILLIAM KERN, MANAGING EDITOR, WORLDMEETS.US

A veritable gold mine of historical and, above all, photographical treasures, with something for everyone in this book, and everything in it, from death to birth, from joy to sadness, from optimism to resignation.

LUKE MCCALLIN, AUTHOR OF THE MAN FROM BERLIN AND THE GREGOR REINHARDT SERIES OF HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

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 youve 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 (WITH ROBERT JAY LIFTON)

This book features heart-wrenching photographs, most never seen before, of Berlin after World War II. They reveal a city in ruins and were taken when half of its five million inhabitants had left or been killed and hundreds of thousands of refugees from the East were stranded among its bombed-out buildings. Berlin fell in the first few days of May 1945, conquered by the Soviets. When the Red Army marched in, it brought photographers along to document the war. Among them were Mark Redkin and Jewgenij Chaldej.

The latter took the iconic photographs of the Red Flag flying over the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. But the photographers also captured images of shelled rubble, rotting corpses, and lost children. The Soviets ruled Berlin for two months before being joined in July 1945 by American, British, and French troops. At that point, the corpses had been buried, the fires quenched, and the Red Cross had set up soup kitchens.

The first broadsheet to be licensed by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) was the Berliner Zeitung (Berlin News), just two weeks after the capitulation of Berlin, followed by the tabloid BZ am Abend (Berlin Evening News) on July 15, 1945. The SMAD also had its own army paper, Tgliche Rundschau (Daily Review). The papers printed these photos taken by Soviet soldiers, along with photos taken by Germans, most notably Otto Donath. Born in Berlin in 1898, Donath died there in 1971, after a long career as a gifted photographer. He had worked for the German Army during the war. Afterward, he documented the everyday moments of life in the city.

Berliner Zeitung and BZ am Abend were part of Berliner Verlag, the largest news publishing company in East Berlin, owned by the Communist-run government of the German Democratic Republic. In 1973, Berliner Verlag moved into a new building on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. The photos from 1945 and the post-war yearsblack-and white, with hand-written notes scribbled on the back, sometimes indicating the name of the photographeralso moved to the companys new home. Somehow, the Tgliche Rundschaus archive ended up there as well, presumably after the paper ceased publication in 1955.

The image archives were located on the second floor, where the photosmany rumpled, stained, scratched, and printed on pulpy, low-quality paperwere stored in drawers on long rows of metal shelving. Eventually, they were forgotten. Then the Berlin Wall was torn down, and Berliner Verlag was sold, first to the newspaper arm of the media giant Bertelsmann, and later to M. DuMont Schauberg, a Cologne-based media company.

One day in the late 1990s, Peter Kroh, then photo editor of the BZ am Abendwhich meanwhile has been renamed Berliner Kurier (Berlin Courier)grew curious and decided to take the elevator down to the second floor and have a look in those drawers. Kroh sifted through thousands of photos, many of them not properly categorized or credited. There were even doubts as to whether they were all authenticespecially a photo of Hitlers corpse. Nevertheless, Kroh knew that he had found a treasure trove and soon decided to publish them in a book. Berlin nach dem Krieg (Berlin After the War) was published in German in 2005.

This new book, Berlin 1945, contains many of the same photos as its German-language predecessor, along with some additional images. The author of the text is Dr. Michael Brettin, managing editor of the Sunday issue of Berliner Kurier. Berlinica Publishing would like to thank Dr. Brettin, Peter Kroh, and Berliner Verlag, especially Michael Weniger, the current photo editor of the Berliner Kurier, who all made it possible to shed light on a part of the history of World War II that has never been shared before in America.

The first Soviet soldiers arrive in Berlin in April 1945. They conquer and occupy the city and are there to stay. Their Western Allies arrive three months later.

AT SOME points in history, people or generations must face extreme situations. Questions of responsibility fade into insignificance, along with swirls of memory. All that remains is the challenge of making it through a day. This book shows people who lived ordinary livesgood lives, we dare imagineuntil they were swept up into the 20th centurys vortex of conflict. We see them trying to recover from unimaginable trauma, grasping that they have survived and trying to imagine what might come next.