Eighty years after the Battle of Berlin, Kate Bettes explores the physical damage still visible around the city…
Each morning, coffee in hand, I ease into the day by gazing out of my window—a comforting ritual as I slowly wake up. Yet it was only recently that I noticed something glaringly obvious: the exterior façade of my apartment is pocked with bullet holes.
I immediately imagined sending a photo to my acquaintances or my parents, and how they might suggest (or in my parents’ case, insist) that I move to a safer neighbourhood; how I would have to explain that the damage, however striking and contemporary it seems, has actually been there for decades—around eighty years, to be exact.
The large mortar divots and bullet-chipped plaster date from the Battle of Berlin—the cataclysmic final offensive of World War Two in Europe, when Nazi soldiers, along with the Hitler Youth and hastily conscripted children, made their futile last stand against Soviet troops advancing on the city from the south and the east.
As anyone who has lived in Berlin will tell you, these architectural wounds aren’t an unusual sight. Once you’re shown or spot an example, you can’t help but begin scouring buildings during your walks for a mortar shell-specked wall or an eerie patch of machine gun fire.
Despite the renovations that have taken place throughout the city in the decades since the final battle, the damage can still be found hidden away in courtyards, on the façades of residential tenements, and even on state-run buildings, including the Reichstag, the Martin-Gropius-Bau and some of the buildings that make up the Museuminsel.
“The Red Army fought block by block, house by house, to break the last of the Nazi resistance,” says Matthew Menneke, founder and guide at On The Front Tours. “With every street corner contested, firefights raged from building to building. German snipers and machine-gunners turned residential blocks into strongholds, and Soviet tanks and infantry blasted their way through in brutal urban combat.”
By the time the fighting stopped on 2 May 1945, Berlin was a broken city. It’s estimated that around 125,000 civilians and 80,000 Soviet soldiers died, with many more wounded on both sides. Eleven percent of the city was completely destroyed, and many remaining structures bore the scars.
“You can almost read the battle in the walls,” Matthew says. “In some places, clusters of bullet impacts on lower facades hint at firefights where German soldiers fired from ground-floor windows and doorways, and Soviet troops answered with intense return fire.”
An example of this is the Leibnizstraße S-Bahn bridge near the Charlottenburg S-Bahn station. One of the steel columns supporting the rail has an enormous shell hole in it. “It is the site of fighting between April 30 to May 1 when German forces attempted a breakout toward the west in the direction of Spandau,” says Matthew. “A Soviet T-34 tank likely fired at a German position under the bridge, its 85mm armour-piercing round going right through the steel girder. After drilling through the first beam, it struck a second beam, leaving a dent, and then exploded against a brick wall behind.”
Wartime …