It's hard to imagine what the city of Berlin might have looked like in the immediate aftermath of WW2, but Kronos Media, a historical-documentary-focused media production company in Hamburg, has released a HD color video that will get us as close as we can to actually being in Berlin in July of 1945. The video shows a city devastated by war, with chains of rubble-clearing teams, facades pock-marked with bullet-holes, and government buildings covered in Allied graffiti.
Believe it or not, the footage is not colorized – it was shot by U.S. Air Force military cameramen on Kodachrome color film. The footage by the First Motion Picture Unit was working on a project called Special Film Project 186, whose purpose was to document the post-war damage of Europe's greatest cities. The footage, provided by a separate German media company called Chronos Media, has an added ambient soundtrack as well.