I remember holding the small photo album in my hands. My father showed it to me when I was ten, shortly after the war. He had carefully glued in contact prints where the enlarged images were to be placed later on. It was the draft layout of a book.
My father, Hein Gorny, worked as an advertizing and wildlife photographer and hardly ever took photos of the city. But this was his planned book on Berlin, showing pictures of the city before and after the war. I found the aerial photos particularly striking.
Long black shadows from trees and jagged, shattered facades covered the black and white photographs. These were the first, if not only, photos of Berlin taken by a German photographer just a few months after the end of the war. At the time, in the winter of 1945/46, the airspace over the city was tightly controlled by the Allies, and German nationals were banned from flying over Berlin.
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