Berlin, year zero : The Iron Curtain falls – Part 4: a divided city

The victorious powers gathered in Potsdam outside Berlin in July 1945 for the conference that would determine, among many other things, the final shape of the occupation of Germany. Only a few miles from where the Allied leaders and their staffs met, the country’s once-magnificent capital lay in ruins. Berlin had been bombed around the clock by the US Eighth Air Force by day and by the RAF at night for about 18 months. And the close-quarter fighting in the Battle for Berlin in April and May had left whole districts flattened. One third of all buildings in the city had been destroyed and thousands of acres had been reduced to rubble. No city in Europe, except for Warsaw, had suffered destru