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Showing posts from January, 2018

Trespass on Devils Mountain

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8 th May 1945. The second Great War comes to an end. Germany had just surrendered to the Allies and it would be only a matter of months before Japan would follow suit. It was time for the world to piece itself back together again. Soldiers would return home, governments would reform and economies would start to rebuild themselves. This would be no small task, particularly for Berlin, a city with 70% of its buildings in need of repair and a third destroyed completely. Consequently midnight on the 8 th May 1945 (aka Stunde Null) saw the beginning of the biggest clean-up operation the city had ever seen. Stunde Null (‘Zero Hour’ in English) was seen by many as the moment that Germany began to put the atrocities of the war behind them, the start of a new non-Nazi Germany. Overnight Soviet forces began to dismantle industry and transport across the city, removing any trace of the previous government occupation. Two months later the city would be formally divided between the