This week in 1945 Germany lost the war: Hitler shot himself in the bunker and Berlin capitulated. The photograph above shows the Gendarmenmarkt, near Checkpoint Charlie, on a pretty evening last month. The photograph below shows the same plaza in May 1944. "The population decided -- out of sheer panic at first -- to carry on as if nothing had happened," writes W. G. Sebald in A Natural History of Destruction.
