The vast Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park commemorates 5,000 Red Army soldiers who fell in battle in the city in April and May 1945.
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With a monumental architectural style typical among Soviet memorials, the park is enclosed by imposing stone entrance portals ornamented with the hammer and sickle. These direct visitors along paths leading to a statue representing Mother Russia and then on to a pair of massive eaves made of red Carrara marble recovered from the ruins of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
There, a pair of giant statues depicting highly decorated Red Army soldiers on bended knee bow their heads reverently at the top of a set of stairs leading down to the main memorial promenade. On this level, an immaculately manicured garden is flanked by 16 granite sarcophagi representing the 16 Soviet Republics—each of which presents heavily idealized scenes from the Great Patriotic War in half relief.
At the end of this promenade, the memorial’s final feature is a 30-foot-tall mound on the top of which sits a pedestal and one final triumphal statue. Rising 36 feet, this statue depicts a Soviet soldier standing on a shattered swastika—a symbol of the complete destruction of National Socialist Germany. His right hand clutches a sword, and in his left he holds a child.
Dedicated on May 8, 1949, the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park is a perfect example of the kind of monumental state architecture the Soviet Union produced to memorialize its role in World War II. To the casual visitor, though, the statue of the triumphant Soviet soldier protecting an innocent child would leave the impression that the Red Army fought World War II as a benevolent force of compassion and justice. The truth behind that image is much more complicated and, in certain respects, much less attractive.