Page "Berlin" Paragraph 15

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power.

Nazi rule destroyed Berlin's Jewish community, which had numbered 170, 000 before 1933.

After Kristallnacht in 1938, thousands of the city's Jews were imprisoned in the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp or, in early 1943, were shipped to death camps, such as Auschwitz.

During World War II, large parts of Berlin were destroyed in the 1943 – 45 air raids and during the Battle of Berlin.

Among the hundreds of thousands who died during the Battle for Berlin, an estimated 125, 000 were civilians.

After the end of the war in Europe in 1945, Berlin received large numbers of refugees from the Eastern provinces.

The victorious powers divided the city into four sectors, analogous to the occupation zones into which Germany was divided.

The sectors of the Western Allies ( the United States, the United Kingdom and France ) formed West Berlin, while the Soviet sector formed East Berlin.