In April 1945, the mighty...
Illustration
In April 1945, the mighty Third Reich fell; the Thousand-Year Reich had fallen far short of its goal. Russian troops surrounded Berlin, relentlessly battering away. The German troops, weakened and few, put up a brave fight. But against such numbers there was no hope. Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel, a young German woman who lived in Berlin gives this description of the end of the war:
"Suddenly, the shooting and bombing stopped and the unreal silence meant that one ordeal was over for us and another was about to begin. Our nightmare had become a reality. The entire 300 square miles of what was left of Berlin were now completely under control of the Red Army. The last days of savage house-to-house fighting and street battles had been a human slaughter, with no prisoners being taken on either side. These final days were hell. Our last remaining and exhausted troops, primarily children and old men, stumbled into imprisonment. We were a city in ruins; almost no house remained intact." (from www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/berlin.htm)
One imagines that an eyewitness account of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 B.C. would be much the same.
"Suddenly, the shooting and bombing stopped and the unreal silence meant that one ordeal was over for us and another was about to begin. Our nightmare had become a reality. The entire 300 square miles of what was left of Berlin were now completely under control of the Red Army. The last days of savage house-to-house fighting and street battles had been a human slaughter, with no prisoners being taken on either side. These final days were hell. Our last remaining and exhausted troops, primarily children and old men, stumbled into imprisonment. We were a city in ruins; almost no house remained intact." (from www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/berlin.htm)
One imagines that an eyewitness account of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 B.C. would be much the same.
