On 12 April 1945 an audience sat attempting to enjoy an evening of opera. Amongst that audience were many high-ranking Nazis, of whom the most prominent was Albert Speer, Hitler’s trusted armaments minister. Despite the presence of such an important member of the Government the theatre was lit without electricity and the heating had failed. As the orchestra played it almost drowned out the rumble of distant guns; equally the emotionally charged music almost - but not quite - removed the fear of the air raids which had become commonplace since November 1943. Speer and others in the audience would have known that only two months before Roland Freisler, Hitler’s chief judge and a high-ranking Nazi, had been killed in this city as a result of an air-raid – joining an estimated 100 000 others from here in that same fate.

The music and the audience that night were German. The gunfire in the distance was Soviet, and the planes overhead were British. The city of this bizarre performance was Berlin: the war planned and unleashed from here almost six years before had come home.

In Berlin a mere forty-five thousand German troops prepared to defend their city against two million advancing Soviet troops; yet these numbers did not tell the whole story by any means. The Soviets were well equipped and battle hardened. Most had pursued the German army from the Soviet Union itself and were confident in their ability to defeat even the toughest German troops. But by 1945, after years of bitter fighting, most of the best German troops lay dead. A large proportion of the forty five thousand trying to resist the Soviets now were a pitiful sight. Some wore only armbands over their civilian clothes, others were dressed in captured French uniforms, and many were old men or boys. These were the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth units. Apart from the modern yet highly unstable Panzerfaust hand held anti- tank weapon which was almost as dangerous to the user as to its target their weapons were largely obsolete or makeshift yet they were expected to hold off large numbers of modern Soviet tanks.