Hoffmann. Hans-Albert Berlin. Sowjetische Garnisonsstadt 1945-1994. Geschichte, Standorte, Hintergründe

Embedded in the military-political development of the situation after the Second World War, this book gives an overview of the 49-year history of Soviet troops and services in Berlin. The structure and tasks in the individual periods as well as the working and living conditions of the officers and soldiers of the Soviet Army are vividly portrayed. Special attention is also paid to the activities of the Soviet secret police in Berlin 1945-1953.

As official Russian sources have only been accessible to a limited extent so far, the accounts of contemporary witnesses gain greater weight. Several generations of Soviet generals, officers and enlisted men fulfilled their military duty in the GSTD. After time-consuming research in the original Russian literature and in the social media of the Russian internet, the author has filtered out their statements and memories concerning Berlin and put them on paper here. Berlin was politically, ideologically and strategically at the centre of the global East-West conflict for over 40 years. The division of Germany and Berlin was, in a sense, the manifest expression of the bipolar world order. Here, American, British and French soldiers on the one side and Soviet soldiers on the other were literally face to face.
Soviet military personnel were stationed in Germany and thus also in Berlin for almost half a century. The tasks of the Group of Soviet Troops in Germany (GSTD) changed over time. Originally, it served to maintain occupation power in the Soviet zone. Due to the global confrontation with the USA and the NATO countries during the Cold War, the occupation army in Germany became the strategic vanguard of Soviet military power. No other city in the world was as scarred by the Cold War as Berlin. Here, a testing ground had developed for how far one could go vis-à-vis the other side. The scope of action included such military aspects as threat or deterrence, crisis management, intelligence gathering and psychological warfare. While there has been a comprehensive publication on the presence of the Western Allies in Berlin since 2002 ("Alliierte in Berlin 1945-1994"), only individual aspects of the "Eastern side" have been examined and published so far. The focus was on the activities of the Soviet Military Administration and the Soviet Control Commission in Germany in the immediate post-war period. The author would now like to close this gap with this publication.