Eden Hotel (1945)

Julius Stafford-Baker

The Battle of Berlin (1943) and the Nuremberg Raid (1944) involved heavy civilian and Bomber Command losses.

Attending the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Dame Laura Knight described the city’s ruins as worse than London’s, noting in her diary: ‘We went to the cathedral – I nearly wept … People were climbing over high masses of rubble to their little holes beneath the ruined homes’.

There she heard about Berlin’s devastation: ‘The centre of the city has entirely disappeared … and only one hotel left – partially destroyed’.

Julius Stafford-Baker’s watercolour, made months earlier, depicts the ruins of Berlin’s once majestic, successively bombed, Eden Hotel.