ABSTRACT
The photographs showing the sea of rubble that constituted Berlin in 1945 are legendary but the extent to which the country and its infrastructure were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt is not widely known. When Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945 the country was in ruins of a magnitude that is difficult to grasp. About 7 million Germans were dead (3,760,000 military personnel and 3,810,000 civilians), and as many as 20 million others became homeless refugees when they fled the advancing Russian army or were expelled from Eastern Europe.2
