TREPTOWER PARK, BERLIN

​From April 16 to May 2, 1945, more than 70,000 people were killed in the liberation of Berlin from the Third Reich. That number includes some 22,000 Soviet soldiers, 20,000 German soldiers and 30,000 civilians. Five years later, on May 8, 1949, the largest and most well-known Soviet war memorial was dedicated, paying tribute to the liberation of Europe from National Socialism and the end of World War II.
 
For over three years, some 1200 workers, 200 stone masons, and 90 sculptors worked on the complex. With its completion, it became the third memorial built by the Soviet Union in Berlin, the other two being the Tiergarten Memorial built in 1945, and the Schonholzer Heide Memorial in 1947.
 
The Soviet War Memorial and military cemetery in Berlin’s Treptower Park is spread over 25 acres and includes a 36 foot-tall bronze statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword, holding a German child, standing over a broken swastika. In front of the statue is a central area lined on both sides with 16 sarcophagi, one for each of the then 16 Soviet Republics, with relief carvings of military scenes and quotations from Joseph Stalin, on one side in Russian, on the other side in German. Between the sarcophagi is a cemetery with some 7,000 soldiers of the Red Army. The Schonholzer Heide Memorial includes more than 13,000, while Tiergarten holds more than 2,000.
 
The end of the central area has a portal consisting of a pair of stylized Soviet flags built of red granite, flanked by two statues of kneeling soldiers. Beyond those, close to the main walkway of the park, is a stone figure of the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons.
 
The life of this memorial has not been comfortable. When Nikita Khruschev denounced the Stalinist rule in 1956, there were calls then and throughout the 1960s for Stalin’s words to be erased. It still took 30 years after Khruschev for Stalin’s reign of terror to be openly criticized, and with the fall of the wall and the unification of Germany, there were demands for the statue and the memorial to be torn down. There were massive protests and vandalism, but Germany has maintained its agreement to maintain and repair all war memorials in the country, including the memorial in Treptower Park.
 
It is a very impressive memorial and that statue is huge. 

---