Around 80,000 Red Army soldiers died taking Berlin in the last three weeks of the war in Europe. About 7,000 of them are buried here, under what became the largest Soviet war memorial in Germany, opened on 8 May 1949 — four years to the day after the surrender. This isn’t just a monument; it’s a military cemetery, which is why the scale is designed to make you fall silent: a 100,000-square-metre axis of weeping birches, granite banners and stone sarcophagi.
The 12-metre bronze at the far end shows a Soviet soldier with a sword lowered onto a shattered swastika, carrying a rescued German girl. The official inspiration: Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, who — the story goes — crossed open ground under fire during the battle to pull a crying German toddler from the crossfire near the Landwehr Canal. Sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich later built the even larger “Motherland Calls” in Volgograd; this one, people say, he considered the more human of the two.
The red granite cladding the banners is widely reported to have come from Hitler’s demolished New Reich Chancellery — the Soviets tore the building down and, so the account goes, recycled the Führer’s marble into his defeat. The sixteen stone sarcophagi along the axis stand for the sixteen Soviet republics, carved with battle reliefs and quotes from Stalin in Russian and German — one of the few places in Germany where Stalin’s words still stand in stone.