ABSTRACT
The heavy bombing that Berlin had endured since 1943, together with the damage caused by the street fighting of the last weeks of the war, left a third of the city’s dwellings totally destroyed, and many of the remainder damaged or only partially habitable. The first post-war statistics in 1946 showed that, after allowance had been made for buildings requisitioned by the occupying powers, the reduced population of the city had 8 sq. m of residential space per head, as against 16.4 in 1939; put in another way, each habitable room had on average 2.0 occupants, as compared with 1.2 formerly.
