On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party were wiped out along with the slogan "Long live Hitler", leaving the scarred Brandenburg Gate to float like a ghost above the world's largest ruins of Berlin. The city's water, electricity, gas, and transportation have been completely cut off, food has been almost nil, there are no medicines in overcrowded hospitals, people lack coal to heat the cold, women in mourning clothes are lining up to receive dwindling rations, and savings and pensions are in ......Unlike in 1918, there was no revolution in the defeated Berlin and in Germany as a whole, because the Nazi Party, the Junker aristocracy, the officer corps and the civilian service, the core of the state, were imprisoned as war criminals and had no way to do anything (the failure of the July 20, 1944 incident made it impossible for the Germans to use "plotting behind the scenes" as an excuse and object of hatred), and the German state and its capital ceased all activities like an unconscious patient. In the ruins, the survivors were in a trance, stunned, and lost all normal emotions. The Berliners did everything they could to survive in this situation: all the trees in the Tiergarten Forest were cut down, and even the planks on the park benches were removed for fuel. All the liquor and alcohol were hidden, the women desperately tried to make themselves look sick, and the men of the Weding and Kreuzberg districts, where the workers had gathered, suddenly turned back into loyal German ** officers, and when they saw the red five-pointed star on their heads, they stretched out their clenched right fists and shouted "Red Front!".Children help their father and brother cut dead horse meat or go around looking for wood and coal.
On November 7, 1945, the Soviet Red Army erected a monument to their fallen comrades in the Tiergarten Forest, where there was no longer a single tree, using marble elements removed from the ruins of the Reich Chancellery. Curiously, this monument was erected within the British occupation zone. According to the administrative boundaries of Berlin before the war, the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France divided the occupied areas in Berlin, of which the Soviet-occupied zone was the largest, including 12 of the 23 districts. The western boundary of the district, Hermann Goeringstrasse and the Brandenburg Gate, also became the dividing line between the Soviet and British territories. British and American troops entered Berlin on 4 July, and a month later the French army entered its occupied territory.
On July 15, Truman**, who had been on his way to Potsdam for the meeting of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, landed at the heat-stricken Gato airport, and on the plane, the bleak scene of Berlin passed before his eyes, revealing the wreckage of bombed-out bridges, railways, and factories, and herds of people searching for food in the ruins like animals, and disease and hunger threatening them everywhere. In the center of the city, Truman's motorcade bypassed the Brandenburg Gate and drove up what was once Unter den den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse, and after half a month of Soviet shelling, the real street had been buried under the rubble several meters thick when Berlin surrendered. The Soviets cleared a barely passable road with bulldozers, and the Germans cleaned it up and piled up two or three stories of rubble along the roadside. In the unbearable heat of the heat, the stench of corpses and exploding sewers was unbearable. Truman did not get out of the car, but said to the person sitting next to him, "This (war) is a terrible thing." That afternoon, Churchill was also alone in the ruins of Berlin, spending half an hour hanging the wreckage of the Reich Chancellery, and he was heard standing next to the ruins of Hitler's bunker and muttering, "If they win this war, it will all fall on us." ”
The former capital of the Millennium Empire left behind millions of hungry citizens, and soon after the war a spontaneous black market formed around the Brandenburg Gate, where the common people took the last pieces of jewelry, carpets, porcelain and good clothes salvaged from the ruins in exchange for flour and coal, and American officers and soldiers came here to exchange occupied marks, cigarettes and chocolates for Laika cameras, etchings of Dürer, the famous Meissen porcelain, the Iron Cross, and all sorts of other German goodies. Speculators stockpiled food, tires, penicillin and cigarettes. Because people were convinced that the Reichsmark banknotes in their hands would soon become worthless, American cigarettes became the most popular currency in Berlin and even Germany, and some people counted some of the prices in the black market of Brandenburg Gate at that time: 50 grams of coal, 14 cigarettes, 1 gram of **32 cigarettes, 1 pair**48 cigarettes, 1 kilogram of coffee 160 cigarettes, 1 set of Meissen porcelain 2000 cigarettes, 1 Leica camera 4200 cigarettes, 1 "Bechstein" 10,000 cigarettes for the grand piano, 1 mink coat and 40,000 cigarettes ......
Vernon Walters, the official translator of the United States (later deputy director of the Intelligence Bureau), accompanied the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Avril Harriman, on his visit to the Ruhr area after the war. In devastated Essen, they visit a family of Germans living in basements, and when they come out, Walters asks Harriman, "Do you think they can rebuild their home?"Harriman replied, "Yes, they can do it." Do you see a pot of flowers on the table in the basement?Any nation, when they are in such a miserable situation, and do not forget to put a pot of flowers on the table, will surely be able to stand up again from the ruins. "The reconstruction of Berlin was no less difficult and tortuous. The Second World War left 75 million cubic meters of ruins in Berlin, accounting for 1 7 of the ruins in all of Germany. Berlin was originally a plain city, but after World War II, there were eight more than 100-meter-high dirt mountains, all of which were built by building blocks cleaned by Berlin women with their hands, and later people built astronomical observatories, ski slopes and other facilities on the mountains. In the Friedrich People's Park in Kreuzberg, there are also two "shrapnel hills", which are made up entirely of shrapnel fired by German and Soviet anti-aircraft guns in Berlin at the end of World War II, which shows the huge amount of work to rebuild Berlin.
In order to alleviate the food crisis, Arthur Werner, the first mayor of Berlin appointed by the administration of the occupation forces of the four countries after the war, announced a campaign to grow vegetables in 1946, and all the usable ruins in the city of Berlin were reclaimed to grow cucumbers, pumpkins, potatoes and other vegetables. In the autumn of 1946, a pumpkin weighing 27 kilograms, a Brussels sprouts weighing 3 kilograms and a tomato bearing 76 fruits were awarded a prize by the city of Berlin at the "Harvest Thanksgiving Festival" held in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
However, this idyllic activity was only superficial, and the battle between the four victorious allies over Berlin was much more intense than the award of a pumpkin. In the early post-war period, Stalin resolutely opposed any attempt by Germany, and several political parties formed with the approval of the Soviet army formed a union of the city of Berlin and administered the whole of "Greater Berlin". Stalin saw Berlin as a testing ground for the future administration of the whole of Germany, but in the autumn of 1946 local elections in Germany and Berlin there was a large-scale trend. In June of the following year, US Secretary of State Marshall proposed a "plan for the revival of Europe," and relations between the Soviet Union and the West worsened. Marshall insisted that Germany's economic unification precede political unification, as the Soviet Union's unlimited printing of money in its occupied territories had already caused severe inflation. After the war, the United States gave the Soviet Union a set of banknote plates for printing the "Occupation Zone Mark", but the Soviet side printed it uncontrollably and distributed it to the Soviet troops in Germany as arrears of wages. Since the banknotes had no value in the Soviet Union, the officers and soldiers desperately wanted to spend them before returning home, thus driving up the prices of Berlin to bizarre heights: a watch bought by an American soldier at the Army Consumer Co-op for $15 could be sold to the Soviets on the Brandenburg Gate black market for 1,000 marks, while the U.S. military finance department still sold it for 10The exchange rate of 1 exchanged the marks in the soldier's hand for 100 dollars, and the United States and Britain lost $800 million in just two months. Later, although the "Occupation Mark" was abolished, the monetary situation in Germany was still in a mess, and the old Reichsmark was close to waste paper due to inflation (the black market for 1 cigarette ** reached 2.).30,000 Reichsmarks, which is equal to $2,300 at the official exchange rate, but in fact these marks can only be exchanged for $23), the American "lucky" brand cigarettes became the common currency in Germany, and farmers and merchants hoarded goods on the black market**, where consumer goods were scarce and speculators made a fortune.
The currency reform program proposed by Ludwig Erhard, a professor of economics in West Germany, to solve this financial chaos angered the Soviet side, because the Soviet Union could not gain anything from it. On June 17, 1948, the Soviet delegates withdrew from the four-party meeting of the Allied Control Committee on Germany, and the next day the Allies announced the formal implementation of a currency reform plan in the Western occupation zone, which had been merged into one, and issued 500 tons of new currency printed in the United States to circulate in West Germany and West Berlin. The old Imperial Marks in people's hands are exchanged for new Marks at a ratio of 10:1, with a limit of 40 marks per person. On 24 June, the Soviet Union announced the closure of all railways, roads and waterways from the Western occupation zone to West Berlin for "technical reasons", leaving only three air corridors. On June 28, the first U.S. C-47 transport plane loaded with food landed at Berlin-Tempelhof Airport.
Over the next 324 days, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South African air forces flew 277804 sorties non-stop, transporting 2323738 tons of supplies, including nearly 1 million tons of coal, to West Berlin. On May 11, 1949, the Soviet Union announced the lifting of the blockade of West Berlin, and on September 30, the "Berlin Airlift" ended. Four months earlier, the US-British-French occupation zone in West Germany had adopted the Basic Law, according to which the "Federal Republic of Germany" was proclaimed on 20 September 1949, and West Berlin became a state of the "Federal Republic". On 7 October, the "German Democratic Republic" was proclaimed, and the Brandenburg Gate was suddenly transformed from a gate connecting the two royal palaces to a border separating the two countries.
Since then, the two parts of Berlin have gone their own way. Berlin has two laws, two sets of laws, two currencies, and two very different social systems. In West Berlin, the influence of the Social Democrats was still strong, with the party's Ruth becoming mayor and Landesberg president of the city council. In East Berlin, the United Socialist Party, formed by the merger of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, became the ruling party, pursuing a planned economy and a policy of public ownership.
The post-war reconstruction of Berlin continues. The reconstruction of East and West Berlin followed a completely different approach from the very beginning. In 1949, the mayor of West Berlin symbolically planted the first post-war tree in the Tiergarten Forest. Destroyed in 1950 by order of the Socialist Unity Party on Museum Island**, the 517-year-old palace of the Hohenzollern family is the largest baroque palace north of the Alps, but it also represents something unpleasant: Prussian, militaristic, militaristic, militaristic. Only a few architectural components and statues of the palace building have been demolished. The equestrian bronze statue of Frederick the Great, another "symbol of Prussian militarism" at the entrance of Humboldt University, was removed in 1950 and was not moved back until 1986, when East Berlin celebrated its 750th anniversary. In May 1950, the wreckage of the Victory Goddess and the carriage was torn down by members of the East German Youth Union for the Free Germans, and for the first time since Napoleon's time, the Brandenburg Gate lost its crown and was replaced by a bare flagpole.
Despite partial damage, Göring's Air Force building survived the war and became the office of the East German Council of Ministers, and the adjacent Wilhelmstrasse was renamed "Otto Grotivvoße", while Hermann Goeringstrasse was restored to its original name. Other architectural monuments left behind by the Third Reich were quickly erased, the ruins of the Reich Chancellery were completely erased, and only a slightly raised mound remained where Hitler's fortress was located. The remains of the Reich State Building's dome were torn down for architectural safety reasons, and it has since stood alone in the uninhabited wilderness on the border between East and West Berlin. The Ministry of Defense on Banderer Strasse was zoned on the West Berlin side and became a memorial to the German Resistance, exhibited from the "White Rose" group to 720 conspiracy including "anti-Nazi deeds of the German people";The Gestapo headquarters became a "zone of terror" museum. The new guard room on Unter den Linden was a memorial to the German Unknown Soldier after World War I, but after World War II it was renamed the "Fascist Victims Memorial", and the joking Berliners called the East German guards marching in front of their doors "Red Prussians".
On March 6, 1953, the red flag over the Brandenburg Gate was lowered in mourning for Comrade Stalin, who died in Moscow the day before. One of the city's grandest settains, named "Stalinstrasse" after the Soviet ruler, was built to make East Berlin a "model of socialism" on a par with West Berlin, and his death has sent a series of shockwaves through the Soviet Union and its satellites. Unrest spread in the Soviet Union's Baltic republics, Western Ukraine, and Central Asia, and then spread to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria. Although the causes of the riots were varied (in the Czech Republic because of currency reform to the detriment of workers, in Ukraine there was a "nationalist outburst"), the participants were all working-class and the workers in East Berlin were undoubtedly encouraged by the news. As a result of the accumulation policy of prioritizing the development of heavy industry and the shortage of consumer goods, the standard of living of East German workers in the past eight years has not risen, but has fallen considerably compared to the pre-war period. On May 28, a high-ranking East German delegation secretly visited the Soviet Union and told them that "the people are dissatisfied and that the socialist regime is about to collapse." On June 16, workers in East Berlin took to the streets,** freezing wages and raising prices, and a group of young people climbed the Brandenburg Gate, ripped down the Soviet red flag on it and burned it, then raised the black, red and gold tricolor and marched to West Berlin singing the old German national anthem.
By 17 June, unrest had spread in Leipzig, Dresden and other cities, and Ulbricht, the leader of the Socialist Unity Party, called on the Soviets to send troops. The economic and social situation in East Germany was so bad at that time that Beria, one of the leaders of the Soviet Union, even suggested that the Ulbricht regime, which was purely temporary and excessive, should be kicked out, and that the goal of building socialism in East Germany should be abandoned, and that East Germany should be unified with West Germany, "preferring a neutral Germany to a socialist East Germany." But Khrushchev and Molotov opposed his claim and ordered the commander of the occupation forces in Berlin to quickly extinguish the riots and riots, and 260 people were killed in the ensuing clashes. The East German People's Police and the Soviet Red Army arrested about 20,000 workers who took part in the riots, of whom 3,000 were sentenced and 21 were shot.
Due to heavy shelling at the end of the war, the security of the Brandenburg Gate was in jeopardy, and the main entrance and the south porch were in danger of collapsing at any time. As part of the reconstruction and beautification of the capital of the German Democratic Republic, in September 1956, the city of East Berlin** proposed the restoration of the Brandenburg Gate and the restoration of the bronze statues of the Goddess of Victory and the carriage. At the time, the Left wing of the Socialist Unity Party had proposed to erect two huge sculptures of "Socialist Achievement" on the site of the bronze statues, but most East Berlin leaders were still conservative Berliners at heart and rejected the radical proposal. Friedrich Ebert Jr., the mayor of East Berlin and son of the Weimar Republic, sent a letter to the mayor of West Berlin, Franz Emmern, asking him for a plaster cast cast of the goddess of victory, which was personally produced by Schadoff himself and preserved in the Deutsche Rijksmuseum in Charlottenburg Palace in West Berlin as one of the few surviving post-war relics.
The West Berlin side was very pleased with the proposal, but was reluctant to hand over the historic plaster cast, so it was proposed to recast the statue in West Berlin at the expense of the West Berlin City Council. Nevertheless, on 14 December 1957, Waldemar Schmidt, the deputy mayor of East Berlin, criticized the West Berlin City Council at the groundbreaking ceremony for the restoration of the Brandenburg Gate ("If it had not been for the deliberate delay of these bourgeois politicians, the carriage would have been built by now. This is a conspiracy by the West to discredit the achievements of the people of the DPR in construction"). In July 1958, the carriage and the goddess of victory were cast at a cost of 250,000 West German marks. The entire set of statues was loaded onto a flatbed truck and transported from under the Brandenburg Gate to Pariser Platz to be displayed to two Berlin citizens. Even Mayor Albert and Deputy Mayor Waldemar Schmidt of East Berlin proudly posed for a photo with him, but suggested that the photo must be taken in a way that "symbols of Prussian militarism" were covered. On 1 August, the goddess of victory was placed on top of the Brandenburg Gate amid cheers.
Three days later, in the morning, the headlines of the West Berlin newspapers suddenly carried the shocking news in large letters: "The carriage has been stolen!".Disappeared in East Berlin last night!"Not daring to let the Prussian eagle and the Iron Cross, which were symbols of "Prussian and German militarism" and "revanchist West Germany", irritate the Soviets, the city of East Berlin** secretly removed the statue and transported it to the inner courtyard of the royal stables to hide it. Experts in East Berlin proposed a variety of modifications, including replacing the eagle with a dove, the Iron Cross with a sickle and axe, or simply replacing the garland of oak leaves with the coat of arms of the GDR, but the city of East Berlin** chose the most compromise solution: to remove the taboo symbols and leave only a bare wreath of oak leaves. On 28 September, a revised statue of Victory was installed on the Brandenburg Gate, while the Prussian Eagle and the Iron Cross were placed in the Historical Museum of East Berlin.
To be continued).