These rare pictures from post-war Berlin have been taken by photographers of the Soviet Army and by Germans in their employ immediately after the surrender and in the months to follow. A city reduced to rubble, and now under martial law, is imposed by the victorious Communists. And now, broken tanks and makeshift barricades are littering the streets, tenements and churches are turned into bombed-out shells, tunnels are flooded and train tracks destroyed. German soldiers have been hauled off to POW-camps in Siberia, while old men are cutting up dead horses for food, women are trading clothing...

Leipzig is the city of books and music. Johann Sebastian Bach composed his cantatas in the St. Thomas Church; Martin Luther disputed the future of Christianity at Germany's second oldest university; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" got into a brawl at Auerbach's Keller, one of many historical trade-fair buildings. Leipzig, the site of one of the world's oldest and largest book fairs, is located at the meeting point of historic imperial roads between Paris and Moscow, and Rome and the Baltic Sea. It is the city where Richard Wagner was born, Clara met Franz Schumann, Edward Grieg...