Berlin, Monday, Aug 4, 1947

I am glad I have had the Berlin experience; I wanted to leave today, but the travel orders did not come through. Time is getting short; I only have 5 more weeks.

OMGUS is very different from Vienna. Not only much larger, but also “grandios”, very elegant, impressive, an am. Island in a desert of unbelievable extent & misery.

F. was bad enough, but here it is the extension of the damage that one simply cannot comprehend. Vienna is nothing in comparison. I drove 2x through the city & several times through outskirts to Wannsee etc where Walter Lichtenstein invited me to dinner & yesterday also Col P.P. Rodes, Dir. of Intelligence. The inner city is completely gone & cannot be rebuild. Yesterday saw the Reichskanzlei. What megalomania! As if one were among the ruins of Luxor. Now the russians are even carting the remaining marble away to make another atrocious monument. The Tiergarten is potatofields with odd ruins of the Siegesallee interspersed. Around the Schloss it is particularly ghastly. Inside the university just ruins but the Russians are trying to get it going again. What an odd collection of professors!