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SECOND WORLD WAR

What did your Berlin home look like after WWII?

A new interactive map allows users to travel back in time to 1953 and get a glimpse of the German capital still without a wall, and still devastated by the Second World War.

What did your Berlin home look like after WWII?
Soviet tanks in 1953 in East Berlin. Photo: DPA/UPI.

The Berliner Morgenpost on Tuesday released an interactive map online that shows a side-by-side comparison of Berlin in 1953 and 2016.

Users can search for their addresses in the top left hand corner and see what their neighbourhood looked like more than six decades ago – before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and while the city was still reeling from the Second World War.

“After the war, Berlin lay in ruins,” the Morgenpost writes.

“Particularly impacted was the centre: in the Mitte district, more than half of the buildings were destroyed or were extremely hard to recover.”

The newspaper also reports that the city cleared away 75 million cubic metres of rubble in the years after the war. And the city was struggling with hunger and a lack of firewood.

The city was already divided by 1953 as the communist East German GDR government had been established in 1949. And 1953 was the year of the June 17th uprising of East Berlin workers against the GDR government – for which the Straße des 17. Juni street, west of the Brandenburg Gate, is named.

See for yourself what Berlin and your home looked like in 1953. Click the link in the Facebook post below, and started dragging the the circle in the middle to the left or right to see more.

Der Tiergarten abgeholzt, die Stalinallee im Bau: Geht auf Zeitreise in das Jahr 1953. Wie sah eigentlich Euer Kiez damals aus? Vergleicht ganz Berlin aus der Luft mit den gleichen Orten heute.

Posted by Berliner Morgenpost on Monday, November 28, 2016

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