Soviet War Memorial

The memorial in Treptower Park is the largest of the Soviet war memorials in Berlin, and it is also a cemetery. About 7,000 Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in the spring of 1945 are buried here, out of the roughly 80,000 Soviet dead of that battle. The design came out of a competition held soon after the war and combined the ideas of the architect Yakov Belopolsky, the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, the painter Alexander Gorpenko and the engineer Sarra Walerius. More than a thousand labourers, some two hundred stonemasons and ninety sculptors worked on the site, on what had been a sports ground. The bronzes were cast at the Lauchhammer art foundry, and the ensemble opened on 8 May 1949.

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.

At the far end, on an artificial burial mound modelled on the kurgans of the steppe, stands Vuchetich's soldier: 12 m of bronze and 70 tonnes, a sword in one hand, a small child held in the other arm, a broken swastika under his boots. With mound and pedestal the figure rises about 30 m. Inside the pedestal is a small domed hall with a mosaic. The sculptor said the child was a symbol, but in East Germany the statue became tied to the story of Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, who carried a small German girl to safety during the final assault on the city centre. The memorial has never been politically neutral. It was the central war memorial of East Germany, it drew crowds of a quarter of a million in 1990 and it has attracted bitter local nicknames. It is still one of the most striking pieces of Soviet monumental design anywhere, and a burial ground first of all.

Getting there

The memorial is in Treptower Park, in Berlin's south-east, about 2.4 km from Baumschulenweg. Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) is 14 km away. Take the S-Bahn to Treptower Park station, then walk about 750 m south-east along Puschkinallee to the gateway.