How historical and interesting that Heidi Hodges ("I hit it once for you," Nov. 7) became personal witness to the demise of the infamous Berlin Wall.

A friend, then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, was also there to help Germans celebrate the collapse of the old Communist regime, that ruled what many would recall as simply East Germany or the Soviet Zone of occupation, since the closing days of the Second World War.

However, that part of eastern Germany was not exactly "handed over to Russia," and though East Germany would become integral to the so-called Soviet bloc, or, more specifically, the Warsaw pact as counter to the NATO countries, East Germany was not integrated into the Soviet Union.

East Germany would prove very resourceful, having the highest standard of living than any other Communist country including the U.S.S.R. The division of what remained of Germany (Hitler's "Third Reich") after its defeat in World War II was that it would be "occupied" by the four major Allied powers.

The terms and conditions of the occupation were agreed to at the the Tehran and Yalta Conferences attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin.

Although, no one defends the tyranny of the Communist system, it was only natural that what remained of Germany after the war would fall to the victorious Allies, of which Soviet Russia was one.

Many know of the famous D-Day invasion, the Battle for Salerno, the Battle of the Bulge, where many Americans and British died fighting the Nazis. But the Soviet Union lost more people fighting the Nazi Wehrmacht than any other country.

While the aforementioned battles were going on in Western Europe and in Italy, the Red Army was driving into Hitler's Reich from the east.

Where the U.S. military and Naval forces really suffered its heaviest casualties was in the South Pacific against Imperial Japan, while there was much more lost of German, Russian, Polish and Jewish life in Europe than American or British.

What was unusual was that France, which did little of the fighting on the side of the Allies, received one-fourth of German post-war occupation, along with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union.

The city of Berlin was, as Hodges states, divided into four zones; East Berlin became the capital of the newly formed German Democratic Republic (DDR). West Berlin would soon become a self-independent city-state, after the Americans and British gave up their occupations, nominally associated with West Germany. Bonn became capital of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, after the division post-war Germany. Berlin of course is once again the capital of a reunited Germany.

Garry Peterson

Sturgeon Bay