Percy Knauth took off this week for Berlin.

It may be some time before he gets there, but as the Allied troops smash into the heart of Germany he is going in right behind them, to help reopen TIME's Berlin Office, closed since June 1941 when our last correspondent there locked its door and caught the train for Basel to telephone us the true story of Hitler's break with Stalin from the uncensored side of the Swiss frontier.

Percy Knauth is as American as baseball--he was born within sight of the towers of Manhattan--but this will be something like a homecoming for him. He knows almost every country in Europe firsthand (Finland, the Low Countries and Russia are just about the only places he has never been). He went to school on the Continent--first in Switzerland, then in Germany; and he lived and worked in Germany as a New York Times correspondent for years--all through the shame of Munich and the ravaging of Poland, the fall of France and the blitz of Britain. In fact, his mother and three sisters were caught in Leipzig when Hitler declared war on America--went through three of the heaviest bombings there ("The house was like rubber, bending back and forth, the floor rising up and down like waves").

Knauth remembers his Berlin correspondent days as one bout after another with the Nazis. He got his best chance to study Hitler's bigwigs closeup at the Berlin Auto Show, when he talked his way into a restricted area, found himself rubbing elbows with Hitler himself, Hess, Goebbels and Goering. Twice he was arrested by the Gestapo--once for photographing a riot, again for being in a cafe suspected as a gathering place for people who didn't like Nazis.

Knauth came to TIME soon after Pearl Harbor to write his personal knowledge of Central Europe into our Foreign News stories, but a year ago he flew to Turkey to take over the listening post we'd set up in Ankara to keep us posted on what was really going on in Hitler's Fortress.

As soon as he could, he got back inside the Fortress: in Bulgaria he watched a Russian division moving up to battle, a sight rarely witnessed by U.S. newsmen. In Rumania he lunched with young King Mihai and Queen Helen, got the King's own story of how he had trapped Antonescu. En route back to Turkey he joined the British troops clearing the Nazis out of their Aegean outposts.

Knauth will see and report plenty of fighting in his new assignment--but war cables to TIME'S Battlefronts editors are just part of his job. He speaks fluent German, of course, with so little accent most Germans take him for a Swede--tell him things they might hesitate to hint to an American. So Knauth's main work will be with the German people. He will talk with as many of them as he can, and pass on what he hears to TIME'S editors--so that TIME can bring its readers a better understanding of what crushing defeat has done and is doing to the once arrogant Germans.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.