The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-05-10
By JOSEPH w. GREGG. JR. United Press Staff Correspondent for Combined Press and Radio)


 By JOSEPH w. GREGG. JR.
 United Press Staff Correspondent
 for Combined Press and Radio)
 Berlin, May 10 - (U.P0 - In the language of the Air Forces, Berlin has had it. AS city it no longer exists.
 The Saturation raids of the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Forces did four-fifths of the job of obliterating the German capital. It needed ten days of suicidal street. so-Street and house-to-house fight Ing to complete it.
 Now the proud capital, where Hit Ter ordered Nazidom to make it's suicide last stand, has been wiped from the map of Europe - wholly and irrevocably
 It is Stalingrad and Coventry, Cologne and Aachen all heaped into one - hideous, nightmarish Laby- 'rinth of ruins beyond all hope of re- pair or rebuilding. Only on its out skirts does it even remotely resem- ble a city where human beings can live.
 I saw Berlin last on December IA, 194l, a week after Pearl Harbor. I left it under Gestapo arrest to be interned with other American cor respondents after covering the first 2 1-2 years of war there.
 I returned almost exactly three years and five months later as one of the first group of Allied cor respondents officially permitted by the Russians to enter the city since its fall on May 2. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I could identify the site of the former Uni ted Press office, 43-45 Unter Den Linden, where I had worked for more than three years.
 AS we stopped the car in the silent echoing waste that is all that's left today of Unter Den Linden, the Russian chauffeur kept repeating Berlin Stalingradl Berlin Kaput!"
 The extent of the catastrophe that has overtaken Berlin is diffi- cult to grasp, It's whole city prac- tically obliterated
 SLlI e4-C 4Gto4IlOlldD4G hul llIeIS- tendamm in the west to the AleXan- derplatz and Frankfurter Alice in the east a distance of maybe 1-2 miles - and the same distance from north to south, the city is an eerie. echoing waste of ruins and bomb-craters and burned out skele- tons of buildings.
 Often yhole areas are blocked by enormous bomb-craters in the streets or piles of debris which the bull -dozers have not yet had time to push aside. Some buildings are still blazing, but no one makes any attempt to put out the fires. It couldn't be done, anyhow, because there are no Water-mains working. The streets are thick with the dust of blitzed buildings and passing Russian army motor vehicles churn it into great, choking, swirling, dust clouds that blout out visibility like miniature Sahara sand-storms.
 It's hardly worth even begnning to list the famous buildings in Ber- lin destroyed. There is hardly one that does not stand in ruins: Un- ter Den Linden-the "triumphal route" of 150 years of German his tory is only recognizable by it's breadth and by the Brandenburg tor, bomb-scarred and mutilated but still standing, at its western end.
 The former Kaiser's palace, the opera house, the Prussian state li- brary, the hideous late Victorian Cathedral, the Adlon and Bristol Hotels, the American, French, Brit ish, and Russian Embassies all have been wiped out completely or are nothing but grim smoke -blackened husks of buildings.
 In the Alexanderplatz-on time hub of traffic in the eastern part of the business district, I was un- able to identify for sure which pile of rubble was the former dread Gestapo headquarters and prison where and 15 other American cor respondents spent 12 hours after being arrested by the Gestapo on Dec. 10, 1941, the day before Hitler declared war on the United States.
 Hitler's new Reichschancellery, completed in 1889 by which the Nazi leader thought to perpetuate himself for all time in concrete and yellow Stucco and marble, is some thing that should be seen by mil lions of Nazidom's former slaves throughout Europe. If any build ing in Berlin was to be completely bomb- proof Hitler intended it should be his chancellery. He had it built with roof of concrete nine feet thick, and under the whole building was an afraid shelter supposedly able to with stand the heaviest bomb any plane could drop.
 That was just another of Hitler's dreams. A blockbuster from an American flying fortress hit the chancellery fairly and squarely early this year, smashing a yawning hole through the nine feet of bomb-proof' concrete, tearing through the building itself and right down into the afraid cellar below, blasting open a crater 20 feet deep and large enough to hold bus. The whole interior of the chancellory was deep in dust and rubble through which the Russians had cleared a path along the fla nous gallery of mirrors through | which favored foreign dignitaries used to be escorted into Hitler's | presence. The chancellory today is | derelict-just another bombed-out | ruin in this city of ruins.
 The most fantastic area of devast- ation in Berlin is centered around | the very heart of the city-an area of maybe a square mile near the Unter Den Linden, Friedrichstrasse Wilhelmstrasse, Leipzigerstrasse and | anderplatz-which Hitler, Goeb- bels, and their s. s. fanatics chose as the "citadel' of their last ditch