The Most Striking War Memorials in Europe

11 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

   Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

   Germany · 1.8 km from Berlin52.514° N 13.379° E

   

   The design is by the New York architect Peter Eisenman. It grew out of a second competition in 1997, originally as a joint entry with the sculptor Richard Serra, who later withdrew. The Bundestag voted for it in June 1999 after a decade of public argument that began with a citizens' initiative led by the journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jäckel. Building ran from April 2003 to December 2004 and the memorial was inaugurated on 10 May 2005, sixty years after the war in Europe ended. Every block has the same footprint, 2.38 by 0.95 metres; only the heights differ, and many stand slightly out of true.

   Did you know? The heights of the blocks range from just 0.2 metres at the edges to about 4.7 metres in the middle of the field.

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2. 02 Menin Gate, Ypres

   Menenpoort

   Belgium · 25.9 km from Lille50.852° N 2.891° E

   

   The gate stands where the road left the walled town for Menin and the battlefields beyond, the route taken by hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching into the Ypres Salient during the First World War. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield as a monumental arch with a long barrel-vaulted hall, it was built by the Imperial War Graves Commission and unveiled by Field Marshal Herbert Plumer on 24 July 1927. A patient lion, standing both for Britain and for Flanders, lies on top. The main inscriptions above the arches were written by Rudyard Kipling and dedicate the memorial to the armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave.

   Did you know? Nearly 7,000 Canadians and more than 6,000 Australians are listed among the missing, alongside soldiers from South Africa, India and the West Indies.

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3. 03 Ilinden Memorial (Makedonium), Kruševo

   Споменик „Илинден“

   North Macedonia · 38.3 km from Bitola41.377° N 21.248° E

   

   It commemorates two moments of Macedonian history. The first is the Ilinden Uprising against Ottoman rule, launched on 2 August 1903, the feast of St Elijah, during which insurgents proclaimed the short-lived Kruševo Republic in this town; it lasted less than two weeks before being crushed. The second is the partisan struggle of the Second World War. The complex was designed by the husband-and-wife team Jordan and Iskra Grabul and opened on 2 August 1974, the anniversary of both the uprising and the 1944 founding assembly of the Macedonian state.

   Did you know? Five broken chains at the start of the route are meant to stand for the five centuries of Ottoman rule over Macedonia.

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4. 04 Douaumont Ossuary

   Ossuaire de Douaumont

   France49.208° N 5.424° E

   

   The idea came from Charles Ginisty, Bishop of Verdun, who wanted a resting place for the remains that were being found across the battlefield in the years after the war. The building was designed by the architects Léon Azéma, Max Edrei and Jacques Hardy and inaugurated on 7 August 1932 by President Albert Lebrun. Its central tower is 46 metres high and carries a rotating red and white "lantern of the dead"; inside hangs a great bronze bell, the Bourdon de la Victoire, which weighs more than two tonnes. From the top of the tower there is a panoramic view over the battlefield.

   Did you know? In 2014 the name of a German soldier, Peter Freundl, was engraved on the vault for the first time, beside the names of French dead.

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5. 05 Mother Ukraine Monument

   Ukraine · 3.6 km from Kyiv50.426° N 30.563° E

   

   The first design came from Yevgeny Vuchetich, the sculptor of The Motherland Calls in Volgograd and the Soviet soldier carrying a child in East Berlin. After his death in 1974 the project passed to Vasyl Borodai and was reworked so thoroughly that, it is said, only the eyes and eyebrows of the original face survived. The sword was made shorter than planned; a persistent story claims this was so its tip would not rise above the Lavra's cross, but the documented reason was aerodynamic, found in wind-tunnel tests. According to Borodai's grandson, the sculptor had wanted her to hold a palm branch of peace.

   Did you know? The 16-metre sword in the figure's right hand weighs about nine tonnes on its own.

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6. 06 Canadian National Vimy Memorial

   Mémorial national du Canada à Vimy

   France · 10.7 km from Arras50.379° N 2.774° E

   

   The Battle of Vimy Ridge began on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, the first time all four divisions of the Canadian Corps attacked together. The memorial was designed by the Toronto sculptor Walter Seymour Allward, took eleven years to build from 1925, and was unveiled by King Edward VIII on 26 July 1936 before a crowd of more than 50,000. It is made of close to 6,000 tonnes of pale limestone brought from a quarry near Seget in Croatia, used since Roman times. The twin pylons stand about 30 metres above the platform, one carrying the maple leaf and the other the fleur-de-lis.

   Did you know? In 1922 France granted Canada the use of the 100-hectare site on Vimy Ridge freely and for all time, on condition that Canada build and maintain a memorial there.

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7. 07 Soviet War Memorial

   Sowjetisches Ehrenmal

   Germany · 6.4 km from Berlin52.486° N 13.472° E

   

   The whole ten-hectare site is laid out along a single axis, and walking it is the experience the designers intended. You come in through a grey granite gateway to a statue of the grieving Motherland. From there an avenue of weeping birches climbs gently to two huge stylised banners of red granite, dipped towards the path, with a kneeling soldier at the foot of each, one older and one younger. Beyond them steps lead down to the long central field. Its lawns are marked by square stone slabs with laurel wreaths, and both sides are lined with sixteen stone sarcophagi, one for each Soviet republic of the time, carved with scenes from the war and quotations from Stalin in Russian and German.

   Did you know? Some 7,200 soldiers lie in 32 mass graves beneath the lawns of the central field, without individual markers.

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8. 08 Stone Flower

   Kameni cvijet

   Croatia · 37.9 km from Prijedor45.280° N 16.928° E

   

   For years after the war the site had no proper memorial. A local committee formed in 1952 began pressing for one, and in 1960 the veterans' association of Yugoslavia held a closed competition that Bogdanović won. While preparing the design he was offered the camp's archives – documents, photographs and survivors' testimonies – and chose not to study them, seeking instead a form that would purify the place rather than illustrate its horror. He spent almost four years on the monument and its landscape; construction began in 1964 under his supervision, and the reinforced-concrete flower was completed in 1966.

   Did you know? Its curved form needed such complex formwork that Bogdanović drew on the skills of traditional Dalmatian shipbuilders to build it.

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9. 09 Monument to the Revolution of the people of Moslavina

   Spomenik revolucije naroda Moslavine

   Croatia45.641° N 16.778° E

   

   The sculptor was Dušan Džamonja (1928–2009), born in Strumica and trained at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts under Antun Augustinčić. He received the commission in 1965; until then he had worked mainly on memorials to the victims of fascism, and a monument to a revolution was new ground for him. He conceived it as an architectural sculpture in which concrete volumes are balanced so as to express the movement of masses.

   Did you know? Džamonja later designed the Monument to the Revolution on Mrakovica in Kozara, Bosnia and Herzegovina, completed in 1972.

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10. 10 Thiepval Memorial

    Mémorial de Thiepval

    France · 26.8 km from Arras50.051° N 2.686° E

    

    The memorial was built between 1928 and 1932 and unveiled on 1 August 1932 by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, in the presence of the French president Albert Lebrun. It rises about 140 feet above its podium. The structure stands on sixteen brick piers faced with Portland stone, and on the stone faces of these piers the names are cut, regiment by regiment, in panel after panel. The original French brick weathered badly and in 1973 the tower was refaced with brick from Accrington in Lancashire, which gives it its deep, warm colour against the pale stone.

    Did you know? The Commonwealth War Graves Commission says over 90 per cent of the men named here died between 1 July and 18 November 1916.

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11. 11 Valley of Heroes, Tjentište (Sutjeska Memorial)

    Memorijalni kompleks Tjentište

    Bosnia and Herzegovina43.312° N 18.672° E

    

    The monument recalls one of the hardest episodes of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Between 15 May and 16 June 1943, in the Axis offensive known as Case Black, around 127,000 German, Italian and allied troops encircled some 22,000 Partisans in the mountains between Durmitor and Zelengora. The Partisans eventually broke out through the ravines of the Sutjeska, but more than 7,000 of them were killed, and Tito himself was wounded in the arm by a bomb on 9 June. The sculptor Miodrag Živković explained that the two blocks stand for the breaking of that encirclement, a breakthrough towards victory; the wings open towards the steep ravine the Partisans used to escape.

    Did you know? Miodrag Živković won the commission through a closed 1964 competition among four invited Yugoslav artists, and presented the design to Tito in person.

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