Berlin 1945 and Today | Hacker News Reader

Berlin 1945 and Today

interaktiv.morgenpost.de

168 pointsguruz43 comments

Warsaw was devastated after the WWII. It is estimated that about 85% of the buildings were destroyed, and only about one thousand people lived in the ruins, compared to more than one million before the war. The communist government that was installed by the Soviet Union after the war initially decided to build a new capital city, because it was calculated that it would be cheaper to build a new one than reconstruct the old one. Later, people started to move back, and Warsaw was reconstructed instead.

There is a short movie based on a Russian airplane photo footage taken in 1945, the City of Ruins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ

The general feeling is also quite well represented in "The Pianist (2002)", which I highly recommend.

http://www.warsawrising.eu/

That website is simply extraordinary.

Wow, there goes morning productivity. Awesome site.

although nowadays the city seems to be populated, it has some scars of that time.

street view has good coverage in the area

https://goo.gl/maps/eDl59

Similarly, Nuremberg was something like 95% destroyed. It's strange to see it. The vast majority of the city looks obviously new, and it's all a very similar architectural style. The bricks are a little too clean, a little too straight, on these buildings designed to look 300-500 years old, that are only 30 to 60 years old--at the most!

I believe the source is Miasto Ruin or City of Ruins [1], which is a CG visualization based on computer modeling of what an airplane would have seen near the end of the war. See also IMDB [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Gk2b2N4vU [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4347938/

Last Fall I was in Minsk, Belarus. I was wondering why streets are so wide. It turned out that all (for all practical purposes) buildings were destroyed by Nazis about before their departure. On our way, the only building that survived (was older than 1944) was concentration camp building.

Minsk was rebuilt from ground up, really.

I don't know the real percentage of destroyed buildings in Minsk, but I guess it is about same or even bigger.

There is a 99 Percent Invisible episode about the "rebuilding" of the Old Town of Warsaw.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-72-new-old-tow...

Last year I was on a train that went from Germany to Poland, when we were in Poland a girl sitted in the same cabin I was, and asked me something. I said "bitte?" and she was like "we don't like that language, speak in english since you are obviously not german". I said "yeah I'm not german" and we started talking, I was shocked that she, so young, didn't like german language after all these years.

I just discovered this video, showing Berlin in 1945, a few days ago: https://vimeo.com/126267047 - it's high quality and in color. Very impressive if you are only used to the black and white shots of that time.

Saw this on reddit yesterday,Berlin footage in 1945 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5i9k7s9X_A

It's a little sad seeing how most of the old ornate buildings have been replaced with much more generic looking buildings. That's one thing that struck me about Berlin--it looks a lot more like a "typical" American city than a "typical" European city.

I don't know what you mean by a typical American city. There is nothing remotely distinguishing enoughly similar to an American city in those pictures of boring and bland versions of the already insignificant Bauhaus architectural style.

This criticism has been around even before WW2. Berlin was called "the Chicago of Europe" even back then; the "old ornate buildings" you mention were nothing compared to other European cities.

Helsinki times did a similiar thing some time ago: http://files.snstatic.fi/hs/2013/7/sakuvat/

Not that much destruction though.

The second to the last with A. Hitler/woman eating ice cream was probably my favorite of all of these.

The photos, btw, are from the Finnish Defence Forces photo archive which is available at http://sa-kuva.fi

It's not exactly a masterwork of UI design, but for those who like ww2 photos it might be interesting.

Interesting how much public transit (in the form of streetcars and rails in the road) can be seen in the older photos, which is almost gone from the newer ones.

It's mostly underground now.

Yeah, the tram lines were mostly torn out of West Berlin in the 1950s to make more space for cars. They're still all over the east, and there's been some very recent construction including a tram line that goes to the main railway station.

You've still got pretty good buses in those areas, though. Our main public transit problem lately is construction and/or strikes that shut down large parts of the S-Bahn.

The streetcar lines were removed in the west, but all of East-Berlin (about 1/4th of the city) still has them.

Would like to see Warsaw, or Stalingrad in similar manner.

Stalingrad 1942 vs 2013: http://fpvestnik.ru/foto/stalingrad-194243-volgograd-2013/

There is a movie about post-war Warsaw [1], based on Russian airplane photo shoots. The part of the city that looks almost perfectly flat is the former Jewish ghetto. Nowadays, this area has a completely different arrangement of streets, because in 1945 you could not tell very well a street from a building, so it was re-engineered.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ

Take a look at the second picture on this page:

http://culture.pl/pl/artykul/co-pamieta-warszawa

This is the ghetto area.

And these are before/after photos, all taken in the center of Warsaw: http://wczorajidzis.blogspot.com/2010/06/3-w-1-1945-1971-201...

I've always been hoping that we can learn from past mistakes, but recent inaction of western europe towards Putin's war with Ukraine has me deeply worried.

Google Earth (Desktop app) has some historical aerial imagery for Berlin, a lot of other German Cities/Warsaw/Gdansk/ from '44,'45,'53

For more coverage look for gray spots in this overview map http://imgur.com/bfvJpR3

Helps a lot to get an idea of the extent of destruction.

Warsaw has coverage for 1935 and 1945.

For Berlin it's helpful to also go to the 1953 imagery to see which structures where demolished.

http://www.google.com/earth/explore/showcase/historical.html

The fact that the perspective is slightly off bugs me more than it probably should.

It's such a sad shame that Germany has wiped any and all architectural detail or character from their buildings. It's really kind of sad looking at those boring, boorish buildings.

I'm sure if they'd known this was going to personally disappoint you, the broke and broken people of occupied postwar Germany would have put a little more thought into aesthetics.

Snark aside: have a look at Dresden, which was completely destroyed in the war and is still being reconstructed with beautiful results.

Devastating. See also Damascus a few years ago and present day.

Around 70 million people died in WWII, around 3% of the world population at that time. I find that absolutely horrifying, along with the terror inflicted on civilians on both sides. It's easy to forget just how destructive humans were less than 100 years ago...

It's a cool idea, but the site doesn't work properly with Chrome :/

Perfectly works with FF35 on WinXP

Works fine in Chrome 43.0.2357.45 OS X.

Bah wow, what's up with the picture on the women's gym at Auguststraße (Mitte)

There is a women-only gym there. And they probably put pics of women on the walls to make it clear to men. Awful.

Uh, what's wrong with it (besides some minor vandalism by someone who thought putting stickers on nipples was funny)?

The facade is kinda bland and ugly. The stickers is the best part of the wall.

I would find more interesting 1989 vs Today along and near the Berlin wall.

There are so many things to say about this context, but maybe the most interesting story is the one of Potsdamer Platz. How it was before, how it was during the wall, how it was (horribly and wrongly) rebuilt...

There is a similar project on this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/11/06...

Reichstag looked much better without the handicapped ramp. Couldn't they put it somewhere that wouldn't ruin the aesthetic of the building?

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