About the Author

Dr. Michael Brettin, born 1964, studied History, Politics and Slavistics and graduated with a PhD in History from Hamburg University. His dissertation examined the nationality question in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. He is also a graduate of the Hamburg School of Journalism (Henri-Nannen-Schule). Currently, he functions as a section editor for the daily newspaper, Berliner Kurier". His work on the history of The Berlin Wall was published in twelve issues and as a magazine. He lives with his wife, his daughter and his son in Berlin. Peter Kroh, born in 1950, has worked as a photo reporter for a number of East German newspapers, among them Junge Welt in Berlin, and Thüringer Allgemeine. In 1995, after the Berlin Wall had come down, he moved to the German capital to work for Berliner Kurier. Kroh became the photo editor of the paper. Today, he is retired. He lives in a small town near Berlin. Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries, mostly for the New York Times. He was chief of the Berlin bureau between 1990 and 1996. Today, he is a visiting fellow at Brown University. His most recent book is "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War."

Reviews

A testimony of the final battle, of death, destruction and hopelessness-but 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.