On June 5, 1945, Great Britain carved a piece out of its own occupation zone in Berlin and handed it to France. From that day forward, control over the western part of the ruined city belonged to three powers: the United States, Great Britain, and France. The eastern half had already fallen to another master. Berlin, the capital of the defeated Reich, now sat split down the middle, and the men who governed it could not agree on anything except that the war was over.

The division had been arranged long before the shooting stopped. An agreement dated September 12, 1944, between the Soviet Union and its Western Allies had drawn the lines: Berlin, though lying deep inside the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, would itself be cut into two approximately equal parts. The east stayed in Soviet hands; the west was garrisoned by a limited contingent of Allied forces. What no one fully grasped in 1944 was that this arrangement would harden into something permanent.

By 1949, there were two Berlins. East Berlin became the capital of a new German state, the German Democratic Republic. West Berlin remained under Allied control, a western island inside Soviet territory. When the war ended, the city itself was nearly dead.

Bombs and street fighting had leveled whole districts. Many houses were gone entirely; others stood damaged and unusable. The infrastructure that kept a modern city alive—electricity, water, gas, transport—lay in ruins. The threat of epidemics and outright famine hung over a population that was hungry, exhausted, and afraid to leave their homes.

That fear was not accidental. Years of Nazi propaganda had painted the Red Army soldiers as eastern barbarians, savage and merciless, and many Germans genuinely expected the worst. Marshall Georgy Zhukov, commanding the Soviet troops, made solving these problems a personal priority. He and his leadership organized brigades made up of Red Army units and local civilians to clear the streets and clean the city.

Field hospitals were set up to provide medical care to the German population. Field kitchens appeared in squares and along streets, cooking meals and handing out bread to starving citizens. The Soviets understood that order in Berlin depended on feeding it. But beyond the general provisions and the reconstruction of everyday life, there were the intimate needs that people carry with them everywhere.

The Reich, it should be noted, had not been shy about this. Legal prostitution had been organized and tolerated to satisfy the needs of the German Army and its associated services. When the Red Army arrived, the brothels were shut down and their workers sent home. That, however, did not end the sale of affection.

On January 19, 1945, even before the war in Europe was over, Headquarters Order Number 299 was issued. It strictly punished violence and prohibited Soviet soldiers and officers from having sexual relations with German women and with women from liberated countries. The reasoning was not purely moral, though the Red Army did pay considerable attention to the moral character of its men. The Soviet leadership was also genuinely worried about disease.

Infectious and venereal diseases were rampant in postwar Europe—tuberculosis, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and a full cluster of venereal infections including syphilis, gonorrhea, and others. An army that came home bringing those diseases would be an army that destroyed itself. No government, of course, has ever truly been able to stop sexual relations between soldiers and local women, and the Soviet efforts proved no exception. Propaganda was the first line of attack.

Political departments distributed leaflets among soldiers and officers shortly before the end of the war. One of these leaflets read: “Comrades soldiers, German women are seducing you. Among them are also those German women who were specially left by the enemies in order to spread venereal diseases and thereby incapacitate the soldiers. How will you appear to your loved ones if you bring them a contagious disease?

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Such agitation, combined with the threat of punishment, did influence soldiers. But it could not stop every soldier hungry for female affection, and it could not stop the German women themselves. Hunger was a powerful negotiator. Women in German towns and villages were willing to barter their bodies for food—meat, sugar, bread—anything that meant survival.

The writer Vladimir Gelfan later recalled the mother of a girl he was courting. The mother was pleased with the young man, and no wonder. Gelfan had brought sweets, butter, sausage, canned food, and other goods to the family—what he called “expensive German secrets. ” His generosity bought him more than goodwill.

Some Soviet servicemen became so close to German women during their time in Germany that they effectively lived together as husband and wife. Many of these women became pregnant. But there was a hard limit to how far these relationships could go. A Russian soldier could not take his German wife home.

Soviet law did not recognize such marriages. German women, even those who were pregnant, even those who had already given birth to Red Army soldiers’ children, were not permitted to enter the Soviet Union. The love that survived the war was often left behind with the country that had been the battlefield. The western sector of Berlin was a different army’s problem, but it was a remarkably similar story.

There, too, famine ruled, and there, too, the occupying soldiers—American, British, French—found themselves the objects of desperate attention. Military personnel paid girls with food and other goods. There was violence as well, and rapists were punished. The British publication the York Review reported on October 25, 1945: “Street young girls openly offer themselves for food and lodging.

It’s very simple. They only have one thing left for sale, and they sell it. ”

The Australian war correspondent Osmar White was in Berlin at the end of May 1945 and recorded a vivid portrait of the city’s strange, somber nightlife in his diary. “The smile of sewage and corpses was in the air,” he wrote.

The facade of the Femina night cabaret was covered with futuristic nude pictures and advertisements in four languages. Inside, the dance hall and restaurant were filled with Russian, British, and American officers, each accompanied by women. The prices were staggering: a bottle of wine cost twenty-five dollars, a plate of horse meat and chips—called a hamburger—cost ten dollars, and a pack of American cigarettes went for an almost unbelievable twenty dollars. Berlin women had rouged cheeks and painted lips, many in silk stockings.

The hostess of the evening opened the concert in German, English, French, and Russian. The Russian artillery captain sitting beside White was not impressed. He leaned toward the Australian and said, in perfectly decent English: “Such a quick transition from national to international. ”

The situation on the medical front worried the Allied command.

Dr. Stewart, a physician, submitted a medical report to General Eisenhower stating that over the course of six months, the level of sexually transmitted diseases had increased significantly. The Allied armies, like the Red Army, were facing a public health problem that no order could stop. A Berlin laundry woman, speaking to Osmar White, put the matter plainly.

She told him that the girls “will very soon drag your soldiers into bed and make them forget about any orders. You will see for yourself. ”

White, recalling her words in his memoirs, drew a conclusion that ran against the grain of a story that was already being told. All the talk about violence against German women committed by the Red Army, the Americans, the British, or the French was, he believed, clearly exaggerated and, in his time, was being actively spread apparently on purpose.

More accurately, he argued, it was the necessity of life that forced German women to behave the way they did. The two Berlins were, in their own ways, mirror images of each other. East and West, the occupying soldiers were fed, housed, and paid. The women were not.

In the capital of a defeated Reich, with the city in rubble and the economy in ashes, a woman’s body was often the only currency she had left. Some sold it for wine and cigarettes in a nightclub; others sold it for a loaf of bread in a starving household. Many did neither by choice, and many paid a price in disease, in shame, and in children who would grow up fatherless in a country that had lost everything. The occupying powers would eventually calm the city.

The rubble would be cleared, the streets repaired, the kitchens feeding the hungry would close. But the division of Berlin did not heal. It hardened into concrete and barbed wire, then into a wall that would stand for decades, a monument to the very split that had begun with those Allied plans of September 1944.

And the women who had survived those first terrible years carried the memory of what survival had cost them, long after the soldiers had gone home.