decided to have a walk round the airfield perimeter. Well wrapped up against the distinctly cold weather, we set off. On the far side of the airfield we realised that the perimeter fence, in effect, marked the East-West frontier, on the other side of which was a Russian training area. We heard a tank (a T33) draw up not far away and, being curious, stopped to look at it, watching as its turret swivelled round until its main armament was pointing directly at us. After a pause and some muttered comments between us, we continued our walk as nonchalantly as possible, yet always aware that for quite a distance we were still being tracked. Back in the Officers Mess, we were told "Oh, they usually do that, it keeps them amused!"
Our afternoon bus trip lasted a couple of hours and we had a very good German guide who explained a lot. She had been a nurse during the war and had seen and experienced the horrors of the Russian invasion of her city first hand. Her graphic descriptions of what it was like were reinforced as she pointed out significant landmarks and places of particular activity.
We travelled through the Brandenburg Gate into the Russian Zone, picking up a Russian Commissar on the way. He kept shouting communist slogans at us in broken English in an attempt to disrupt our guide's explanations. We were shown the site of the old Reichs Chancellery and that of Hitler's bunker, both in a wasteland of dereliction. Unter Den Linden had been renamed Stalin Allee and was lined with gaunt, severely four-square, blocks of flats. We could see down the side streets that behind the new buildings was dereliction and shells of buildings in the same state as on the day the city was occupied. Red flags and communist slogans adorned all buildings of significance, and many that were not. We passed what had been a railway station and could see inside its shattered shell the remains of a train that had been caught in an air raid and never touched since.
The supposed highlight of the afternoon was to visit a cemetery dedicated to the fallen of Mother Russia.
There was a long avenue of low, rectangular, engraved monuments. At its end stood representations of the Red Flag made out of (so we were told) red marble stripped from the Reichs Chancellery. At the other end of this avenue was a conical mound surmounted by a circular mausoleum on top of which was a statue of a Russian soldier, child in one arm, and a sword in the other, striking a broken Swastika at his feet. We climbed steps up the mound and into the mausoleum. The mound, it was said, contained a multitude of Russian dead. On entering the building we were shown a representation of the Order of Victory in the ceiling.
In the cemetery were several flights of steps which we climbed. In doing so I noticed some iron grills in the risers at one part and became curious. I whispered to Kim Lee what I had seen. On making our way down, at the significant part, I dropped a handkerchief which we both turned round to pick up and there, behind us, a grill had been slid back to reveal the business end of a sub-machine gun pointing at us. Pretending not to notice, we continued our walk back to the bus, passing several extremely scruffy and visibly dirty Russian solders on the way. We said nothing about what we had seen until we were safely in West Germany on our way back to Jever.
The Commissar alighted back at the Brandenburg Gate, but before he did so, I bought a set of post cards as a memento of the afternoon. Some of these photos have survived and are reproduced in Appendix 2.
Back at Gatow, Kim nearly went berserk when he spotted, from the bus, the camp GSO Superintendent. Kim recognised him as Chief Ferret from when he had been a prisoner of war in Stalagluft 3 at Sagan in Poland; we had a job to simmer Kim down. I have no idea what would have happened had the two met face to face. 67