09 BBC Thomas Cadett in Berlin

Berlin has practically ceased to exist. The RAF and the Americans by air and the Russians by land have wiped the place out. It is true that other cities, Germans and Allied, have also been wiped out.

But this is Berlin, a huge city of many millions, the capital of a nation which only recently claimed a population of 80 million. It's the scale of the thing that is so terribly, terribly in the true sense of the word, so terribly impressing and depressing.

For, as Erichis Marshall Teder himself so rightly said to me yesterday, it's impossible to groat over this sort of thing, but the job had to be done. Anyhow there it is, myel upon myel of unending ruin, devastation, and, as the cleared rubble were one day proof of death.

How many people perished in the bombing and fighting will probably never be known, but it must run into many, many thousands. And what about those who remain, you may ask? Well, the Russians estimate that there are still probably about two million people in the capital, most of them living in the cellars that have served them so well.

Many of the people I saw on the streets were trundling prams or other wheel contrivances crammed with their remaining portable positions. Others trudged along with bundles in their hands or on their shoulders. Not a shoe that I saw were sitting vacant clear amid the ruins too tired or too apathetic to look for shelter.

are old men and women or children, with her and their younger but obviously unfit men. The rest of the young men had been scooped up as cannon fodder, and now they lie in their graves or a bed in hospital or are behind barbed wire.