Those Who Betray Their Homeland Must Die:Berlin 1945.

In the first days of 1945 a now long forgotten film was released called Berlin:Symphony of the World Capital in which the German city was shown to be a place where the sun always shines and life flourishes. There was no mention of World War II or concentration camps. But by the end of that year it had become impossible to airbrush these events out of history any more.

1945 was the year Berlin, and Nazi Germany, fell and Volker Heise's excellent three part documentary (available now on the BBC iPlayer) tells the story of how that happened through black and white archive footage and with historical narration provided by those that lived through it:- German civilians, Wehrmacht soldiers, combat commanders, auxiliary personnel of the Luftwaffe, SS officers, forced labourers, journalists, Jews in hiding, antifascist enemies of the Nazis, and even Hitler's dental nurse.

Voiced by others these testaments, and even those of Harry S. Truman and Joseph Goebbels, give us a feel of what it was like at the time which contrasts with the broader, retrospective, sweep of other acclaimed documentaries like Jeremy Isaacs' astonishing (everyone should watch it) The World at War. Last year BBC2's Rise of the Nazis showed us how Hitler and his gang were able to use hate speech, realpolitik, and blatant untruths to worm their way into power. Berlin 1945 shows us what always happens when such vile hate has been unleashed. It turns back in on its creators.

Berlin, the place where the sun always shines and life flourishes, would soon be in dust. A dust of its own making. December 1945 could hardly look more different to January 1945. Half of Europe had surrendered to the Reich and Berlin was basking in its success as the capital of this new fascist empire. Berliners wrote in their diaries of walks in the snow, stopping off for a beer, and taking a movie in. 

Casually mentioning that they'd paid their Nazi party subscription fees en route. The screams of tortured Ukrainian prisoners were blocked out by Berliners who simply closed their windows so they could no longer hear them. Soviet forced labourers speak of an unbearable homesickness and mourn a lost, or more accurately - stolen, youth.

On New Year's Day, Hitler gave a radio speech to his "fellow citizens" in which he talked about his people's "struggle" and their "destiny" in an attempt to raise spirits but by then, on the Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Carpathians, the Soviet offensive was pushing the Germans back. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, of course, reported otherwise.

So in Berlin they were oblivious, still, to their inevitable fate. People visited the circus, schnapps flowed freely, and the Fuhrer's speech was rapturously received. Lies in Berlin could not stop truth in Szczecin as the Soviets crossed the Oder, reports said that when 'Stalin's boys' reached Berlin they would not go easy on the Nazis, nor could they alter the fact that British bombs were landing in Germany each night. Mornings would see the dead retrieved from the rubble.

Sometimes legs would fall off these corpses, sometimes the corpses would puke. Sometimes they would lay in the rubble for longer than need be because French, Polish, and Soviet forced labourers were forbidden to touch 'pure' German bodies - even dead ones. The corpses would have to wait for a German to bury them.

The forced labourers lived in a camp surrounded by an electric fence, patrolled by dogs, and fed a diet of soup made of potato skins that they recall as 'pigswill'.  Those that survived would be freed from this soon and so would those who survived the even greater horror of the concentration camps. Reports are received in London telling of 30,000 deaths in Belsen, of decayed bodies strewn along the side of the road.

Nervous Nazis began to burn paperwork pertaining to plans for the final solution in case of the fall of Berlin but pits full of emaciated corpses and truckloads of cadavers couldn't be hidden away so easily. It's a story repeated all over the Nazi empire and its magnitude is often too great to take in. Small stories of individuals often speak loudest in conveying the sheer horror. In one hut, amid the groans of the dying, rescuers find a small girl, barely more than a skeleton, reaching out to them and asking "English? English? Medicine? Medicine?".

Berlin:Symphony of the World Capital wasn't the only film released about the German city that year. 1945 also saw the release of Yuli Raizman's The Fall of Berlin which made use of footage taken by Ukrainian and Belorussian combatants, and captured German footage, to tell the tale of the fall of the city. You'll not be shocked to hear that writer and director Volker Heise takes his cues more from the latter than the former film.

In Berlin, life was going on as normal but there was an awareness of an approaching catastrophe as two and half million Red Army soldiers had gathered outside of the city. Liberation was imminent but it was far from, at that point, certain and Berlin men who had the audacity to complain about the Nazis were still being hung from trees, left for dead with signs hanging round their necks reading, in German, THOSE WHO BETRAY THEIR HOMELAND MUST DIE.

But it was the Nazis who had betrayed their homeland and, soon, for many of them, they would die by the sword they chose to live by. Red Army soldiers were keen to avenge their own losses and were already doing so in cities outside Berlin. 20th April marked Hitler's 56th, and final, birthday and yet, in Berlin, no Nazi flags were flown for the first time in over a decade.

Some Berliners were afraid, others felt Hitler would somehow manage to turn it round and when he emerged from his bunker to inspect a delegation and Goebbels made a radio speech announcing Hitler would be made the "man of the century" (true, perhaps, but not in the way it was intended) there was a brief glimmer of hope for the Nazis.

A hope that was dashed the very next day when Soviet troops entered Berlin. Defenders of the city were called on to stop the "mongol hordes", it's suggested that Berliners shout fight to their death to defend the city, and draconian laws are passed in a final, vein, attempt to prop up the war effort. A Berliner who used, or wasted, electricity for cooking would face the death penalty.

There were genuine fears among the German civilians that they would be kidnapped and taken to Russia, the penny hadn't yet dropped that they were the bad guys, but the most real fear, one that was even accepted by Hitler, was that if Berlin was to fall the war would be over, the Nazis would have lost.

Against this backdrop of fear, retribution, and misinformation the city saw about one hundred suicides and filicides, Nazis fearful of life under anyone but the Nazis killed their own children, and invading forces sadly dehumanise their enemies as surely as their enemies had dehumanised them and some go on rape sprees against German women.

The Reichstag fire of 1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, was the pretext for the Nazi reign to get authoritarian and deadly. Twelve years later, the Reichstag was burning again - but this time it was the sign that the Nazi era was reaching its end. On 1st May, a national holiday of the German people, it was announced that Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer, had 'fallen'.

He'd been killed in action. Or at least that was the story told to the German people. In fact he'd killed himself and when two badly burned bodies are later discovered near his bunker, one a man aged between fifty and sixty with glass splinters in his mouth and the other a younger woman, they are taken to be identified by Hitler's former dental nurse. All that was left of Hitler that was recognisable was his teeth. 

For Goebbels, life no longer had "value" so he and his wife Magda murdered their six children before taking their own lives. Those left leading the Nazis, that had not taken their own lives, surrendered to the allies and soon no amount of liquor would be enough to fuel the celebrations that followed the defeat of the Nazis.

Singing, dancing, feasting, and toasting went on in to the small hours. One punch created even took the happy name of 'Hitler's death' but though Hitler was dead and the Nazis had been defeated the mess they had created across Berlin, across Germany, across Europe, and across the world would take decades to clean up. In truth the damage done to the world by the Nazis has not yet been undone. It never will be.

In Berlin, dead horses lying in the street are carved up to feed the hungry survivors, an observer claims "Berlin has practically ceased to exist", and scenes of shops being looted and destroyed are described by one Berliner as "unbelievable". Which is a bit rich considering they'd presumably been okay with the holocaust.

With the Reichstag covered in Russian graffiti, Berlin's clocks moved two hours forward to Russian time, an antifascist (Arthur Werner) appointed mayor of Berlin, and sermons returning to the synagogues, Berlin had become a place uncomfortable for a Nazi or a Nazi apologist.

But all was still not well. The sermons in the synagogues revealed just how many would never return, rapes continued throughout the city, and STDs like gonorrhea ran riot. As food rations were announced, many fled to France or to be with the Americans who had liberated the western parts of Germany.

Those who remained in Berlin first saw the destruction of Nazi symbols and statues and then saw a plan announced to divide their city into four sectors:- a French one, a British one, an American one, and a Russian one. With the city still smelling of rotting corpses Richard Dimbleby filed the first BBC report from liberated Berlin.

At Potsdam, thirty-five miles south west of Berlin, Churchill met with Stalin and Truman to decide the city's future. There, Churchill told Stalin that the Russians would not need to enter the still ongoing war with Japan as the US would soon bring that to an end with their nuclear missiles. He added, also, that if Stalin had any plans to expand Russia elsewhere those same nuclear bombs could be just as easily used to wipe out Moscow, Stalingrad, Kiev, and Sebastopol. Then they all had dinner together.

However many Russian cities it took for Stalin to get the message. The Cold War begun before the fires of Berlin had even been put out. Before, even, World War II had ended. On August 6th when the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (killing over 100,000 people), and then three days later on Nagasaki with a similar death toll, many at the time wondered just how much damage Hitler would have wrought if he had developed such lethal technology.

The final months of 1945 saw American soldiers in Berlin, despite orders not to fraternise with or even trust the German people, picking up local girls and having a high old time. German men would pick up cigarette butts lobbed to the ground by the Americans for something to smoke and with the economy in tatters, cigarettes became an alternative currency.

A tribunal was convened in Nuremberg for twenty-two of the men who had caused death and destruction on a scale the world had never seen before and has never seen since. Twelve of them, including Hermann Goring, Martin Bormann, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, were sentenced to death, others to life imprisonment but some were acquitted and many lower ranking SS functionaries were able to build successful careers and flourish in the post-war years.

If they carried their guilt and demons inside them for what they'd done or if they lived out the rest of their lives in denial it is not recorded. Their dreadful secrets have died with them but those who survived Auschwitz had to live with what had been done to them for the rest of their lives and the pain, as witnessed in an excellent recent documentary made by Robert Rinder of all people for BBC1, has been passed down through the generations.

Many who were sent to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Madjanek, Dachau, Kaiserwald and other Nazi extermination camps didn't even get to live. In total the Nazis were responsible for over sixty one million deaths. 

When Christmas arrived in Berlin in 1945 there were no trees and no presents. Elsewhere in Europe millions of households had no tree and no presents because the entire family had been wiped out by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The children who should have been opening their presents were all dead. Killed by a sick and twisted idea of racial purity and poisoned by the hate that Hitler let loose on the world. Never again.