secondworldwarineurope: After the Fall: Photos of Hitler’s Bunker and the Ruins of Berlin, 194
secondworldwarineurope:After the Fall: Photos of Hitler’s Bunker and the Ruins of Berlin, 1945Russian soldiers and a civilian struggle to move a large bronze Nazi Party eagle that once loomed over a doorway of the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 1945.At the Reichstag, evidence of a practice common throughout the centuries: soldiers scrawling graffiti to honor fallen comrades, insult the vanquished or simply announce, I was here. I survived. Berlin, 1945.An image almost too perfectly symbolic of Berlin in 1945: A crushed globe and a bust of Hitler amid rubble outside the ruined Reich Chancellery.An American soldier, PFC Douglas Page, offers a mocking Nazi salute inside the bombed-out ruins of the Berliner Sportspalast, or Sport Palace. The venue, destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in January 1944, was where the Third Reich often held political rallies.Oberwallstrasse, in central Berlin, saw some of the most vicious fighting between German and Soviet troops in the spring of 1945A new view of a photograph that appeared, heavily cropped, in LIFE, picturing Hitler’s bunker, partially burned by retreating German troops and stripped of valuables by invading Russians.Desk inside Adolf Hitler’s bunker, Berlin, 1945.A Russian soldier stands in Adolf Hitler’s bunker, Berlin, 1945.An SS officer’s cap, with the infamous death’s-head skull emblem barely visible. (source)fot: William Vandivert -- source link
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