Bonus Episode: A Talk with Peter Graham from Berlin Battle Damage

Peter Graham was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and he is an independent historian and researcher specialising in the history of Berlin during WW2. Peter is based in Ireland and Berlin.

In 2018 Peter founded the popular Facebook page “Berlin Battle Damage” which currently has over 15,000 followers and focuses on the tangible remains of WW2 to be found in Berlin today.

In 2023 Peter launched a series of specialised walking tours which deal with different aspects of Berlin during WW2 and the Soviet assault on the city in April 1945.

Peter, like me, is fascinated with the battle of Berlin, and his Berlin Battle Damage page documents the bullet holes and shrapnel damage still visible across the city, all of which serve as a testament to the fighting which ravaged Berlin in April & May 1945.

Peter and I both believe that in order to understand modern day Berlin you have to appreciate what the city went through along the way. Therefore, preserving the physical signs of the battle of Berlin is an important step to teaching future generations about the struggles Berlin – and Berliners – went through in order to create the modern city we have today.

But as Peter and I discuss in the interview, some examples of battle damage in Berlin have been patched-up or covered-up in recent years, which is perhaps a sign that whilst Berlin is a city shaped by its history, it is also a city which is keen to reinvent itself as it looks to the future.

In any case, as what inevitably happens when two Second World War enthusiasts get chatting, we went off-topic at times, discussing everything from the politics of Soviet war photography to my surprise discovery of an air raid shelter ventilation shaft on a street corner near my house.

So it goes.

You can also follow Peter on Bluesky and Twitter.