On April 30, 1945, as units of the 7th American army prepared to take Munich, the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" ["capital of the movement" of Naziism, and Hitler's favorite city], a ghostly land of ruins awaited them, in which almost all human life seemed to have died out. Already since the day before traffic had fallen silent in the rubble-filled streets of the outer areas, which in the center of Munich had been worn into narrow paths through mountains of looming building façades; a tense, paralyzing silence, interrupted only through the thunder of guns, told of the arrival of the victors....
The Munich population still bore the burden of the years of bombing, but the marching in of the enemy was still an occasion for joy: for the city, the Second World War was over.
--From Ruinen-Jahren: Bilder aus dem zerstörten München 1945-1949 [Pictures of Munich destroyed] (1983), by Richard Bauer.
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