Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Lee
I wonder how there was anything left for an American to find after the Russkies were done with the place. IIRC, the US, UK and France occupied everything west of the Elbe, but later traded what became East Germany west of the Elbe for an allied sector of Berlin. But I don't think that happened for a few mos. after the fall of Berlin, which was around May 8th. Hitler's charred remains supposedly turned up in Magdeburg years after the war. And from what I've read Hitler was so far gone by the last days of the war, that he'd have had trouble signing his own name to anything.
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Very good friend of mine flies the medivac helo in Berlin, has for the last 20 years. We flew together years ago doing medivac there.
He is a big WW2 history buff and he has seen into parts of Hitlers bunker, and got down into the entrance at one time but was not allowed to enter. The guys who went down into the bunker, people who worked for the German govt doing stuff like this, brought back paperwork that was STILL down there, and this happened in the late 1990's. It was closed in by the East Germans trying to cover it up, but they did not do the job right, so when the Berlin Wall fell, the West Govt wanted to make sure that no one could get inside and sent a team to close it in. This was when my friend Gary was invited to take a look back into history.
One thing that everyone needs to know is that for the most part the Russian army who took Berlin were not really Russians. The Russians are not stupid and knew that the casualities were going to be heavy, so they put their Mongol conscripts in the front lines. These were the troops who took Berlin, pushed along by the normal Russian army.
My ex-wife's Mother was there and lived through the hell that followed. She said that these troops were absolute savages and that rings true with what I have read and been told. One example is that she laughed (which happened rarely when talking about these times) when she said that they did not even know how to use a toilet, that they used the toilet bowl to wash their potatos before cooking and that they crapped out in the open in slit trenches.
These troops were not rocket scientists, and took what looked valuable from what I have heard. Lots of things were left lying around that were found by the front line Russians who came behind and then the Americans, Brits and French when the Ruskies allowed them into the capital.