The very first contact came a little to the south, near Strehla, where First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue crossed the Elbe in a boat with three men and found forward elements of a Soviet Guards rifle regiment of the First Ukrainian Front. But it was Torgau's shattered bridge that gave the day its photograph. Robertson, with Frank Huff, James McDonnell and Paul Staub, met a patrol under Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko; the famous image of the two officers gripping hands was arranged for cameras afterwards, which does nothing to diminish what it recorded. From that afternoon there was no continuous German front left between east and west. Germany had been cut in half, and the war in Europe had less than two weeks to run.

What the soldiers established at Torgau was a line of contact, not a frontier. Under the Yalta agreement the Americans handed the whole district back to Soviet forces, and Torgau spent the next forty-five years on the eastern side of a divided Germany. Moscow understood the symbolism early: in 1949 Mosfilm released *Encounter at the Elbe*, a feature built around the meeting. The town keeps a monument to it, a commemorative plaque at the spot, and a Russian military cemetery. For a place that had spent most of its history as a river crossing on the trade road between Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder, becoming the seam of a divided world was an unlikely late career.

Long before any of that, Torgau was a court town. A Slavonic settlement called Turguo stood here, then a stone castle under the Holy Roman Empire, then a market attested in 1119. When the Wettin dynasty took up residence in 1423, Hartenfels Castle rose above the river in stone laid by the architect Conrad Pflüger and, after him, Konrad Krebs - today the largest completely preserved early Renaissance castle in Germany. Brown bears are still kept in the moat, as they have been for centuries. Nikolaus Gromann built the castle chapel in 1543 and 1544, and Martin Luther consecrated it on 5 October 1544, long promoted as the first purpose-built Protestant church in the world, though the chapel at Neuburg Castle (1543) and the church at Joachimsthal (1540) are in fact older.

Wittenberg gets the credit, but a surprising amount of the Reformation was drafted here. In 1530 Luther, Melanchthon, Bugenhagen and Jonas wrote the Torgau Articles, the draft that fed into the Augsburg Confession; the Lutheran Formula of Concord was composed in Torgau in 1576. Katharina von Bora, Luther's widow, died in the town and lies buried in the Marienkirche. The court had a taste for novelty too - Heinrich Schütz's *Dafne*, the first German opera, was staged here in 1627. Even the shops carry the weight of it: Carl Loebner, first mentioned in Torgau's records in 1685, is claimed to be the oldest toy store in the world.

The most difficult chapter is the quietest one. Expanded in 1938 and 1939, Fort Zinna became the largest Wehrmacht prison in the German Reich, and in August 1943 the Reich War Court itself moved from Berlin to Torgau. That court handed down roughly 1,400 death sentences, about 1,200 of which were carried out; condemned men were shot in the fort's moat and a nearby gravel pit. Some 60,000 Wehrmacht prisoners passed through the town during the war - deserters and conscientious objectors, alongside members of the resistance from Luxembourg, France and Poland. Then, after the war, the Soviet NKVD opened Special Camps Nos. 8 and 10 in Fort Zinna and the Seydlitz barracks, and from 1950 to 1990 East Germany's People's Police ran Fort Zinna as a penitentiary that in the 1950s held mostly political prisoners. Founded in 1991 and now part of the Saxon Memorial Foundation, the Memorial Site Torgau presents that layered history under an unflinching title: "Courage and Helplessness."