Berlin at War (57 page)

to the Gestapo.

The beautiful surroundings of the Invaliden Cemetery, where the myth of the

‘heroic death for the Fatherland’ was most effectively propagated.

The grim reality: the corpses of Berliners killed in air raids laid out in a sports hall ready for burial, autumn 1944.

Central Berlin burning fiercely: Jerusalem Strasse, July 1944.

Berliners struggle through the rubble-field that had once been their street:

Stallschreiberstrasse in Kreuzberg, February 1945.

Distributing soup and sympathy to those bombed out,

August 1943.

The Zoo flak tower:

‘like a fantastic monstrosity from a lost world’.

Barricades being constructed in March 1945: few of them offered any real obstacle to the Soviets.

‘A terrifying sight’: Red Army soldiers advance across a Berlin street, April 1945.

‘What will become of us?’ Civilians nervously watch the arrival of Soviet T-34 tanks: Mehringdamm in Kreuzberg, April 1945.

German soldiers captured trying to evade the Red Army by disguising themselves.

A feast for the unfussy: Berliners butcher a dead horse.

The end of the Thousand Year Reich: contemplation, recrimination and hope.

enemies of the state

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The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941

galvanised the communists anew. Whereas they had previously been

restricted to spouting rather weak and unconvincing slogans about