2015-05-11

Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin

A tribute to 80,000 Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in 1945. Soviet Architect Yakov Belopolsky’s design was unveiled just four years after World War II ended, and its epic scale and brawny symbolism made it a vast war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin's Treptower Park, one of three Soviet memorials built in Berlin after the end of the war.

On entering, you are greeted by two kneeling soldiers, and the view unfolds across a geometrical expanse flanked by 16 stone sarcophagi, which mark the burial of 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the final Battle of Berlin in spring 1945. The focus of the ensemble is a monument by Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich: a 12-m-tall statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword holding a German child, standing over a broken swastika. According to Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Chuikov, the Vuchetich statue commemorates the deeds of Sergeant of Guards Nikolai Masalov, who, during the final storm on the centre of Berlin, risked his life under heavy German machine-gun fire to rescue a three-year-old German girl whose mother had apparently disappeared.

This was a great achievement of the Soviet people in the history of mankind. "The area is the final resting place for some 5000 soldiers of the Red Army. At the opposite end of the central area from the statue is a portal consisting of a pair of stylised Soviet flags made of red granite. These are flanked by two statues of kneeling soldiers. A further sculpture is located beyond the flag monuments; along the axis formed by the soldier monument, the main area, and the flags, stands another figure of the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons.

First Photo Credit: Leif Hinrichsen