mass grave for 5000 Soviet troops in Treptower Park




Just over a month ago I was in Berlin to see the Frida Kahlo retrospective at the Martin Gropius Bau. It was my first visit to the city and I covered a fair amount of territory, some of which I thought was “very Hidden Glasgow”, so thought I’d start a thread on it.

My accommodation was deep inside what was once East Germany, just off of Karl Marx Allee, a vast, Moscow like boulevard. I’d read about a big Soviet war memorial only a couple of stops away on the U-bahn and paid it a visit on my last full day in Berlin not knowing what to expect. On my first evening there I’d been to the more accessible and better known Soviet war memorial in the former West Berlin as it’s next to the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate in the Tiergarten, but this site, a mass grave for some 5000 Soviet troops in Treptower Park is on a different scale altogether, and shows what a schizophrenic place this city remains.



Eastern approach


The cemetery commemorating the Soviet troops who died taking Berlin from the Nazi’s is a little piece of what will be, for years to come, part of that country that no longer exists, the USSR. Designed by Yakov Belopolsky, the Memorial consists of two huge processional walkways starting with a weeping, stone statue representing the Soviet Motherland looking toward two stylized Red flags.




At the foot of each flag a warrior kneels armed with a PPSh-41 machine pistol, one young, one a more “fatherly” figure with a Stalin moustache.







They overlook a sunken park where the troops lie buried under tombstones, each surmounted by bronze wreaths.



The park is lined with 16 marble slabs telling the history of WWII from a very Soviet viewpoint (it starts with the Nazi attack in 1941 on a peaceful, innocent peasant populace, and not the USSR’s contemptible invasion of Poland in 1939, of course), featuring iron willed soldiers and citizens suffering then turning the tide, ultimately rescuing the German people from Hitler's gangsters.













Each block is bookended with quotes from Stalin himself etched into the stones in both German and Cyrillic. It was a real shock to find these here, a set of decrees from the monster you’d be hard pressed to find an equivalent for in Moscow today. Like suddenly finding a set of Hitler’s speeches immortalised in marble.



Much of the building material for the memorial park had been provided by Adolf, incidentally, either torn from Albert Speer’s demolished Imperial Reich Chancellory or rock origionaly bought and shipped over from Sweden (calling to mind the red blocks of Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow) by Nazi architects.

The processional walk focuses on a giant 12 meter high statue (by Yevgeny Vuchetich) of a triumphant, sword wielding Soviet soldier cradling a rescued child in his arms, a smashed swastika at his feet.



I was there on a stunningly hot, sunny day and the strong contrasting light meant I couldn’t get a decent pic of it I’m afraid. The sculpture stands on top of a small “crypt”, or chapel really, the Orthodox saints replaced by mosaics of the peoples of the Soviet Republics (at least the ones Stalin still approved of).



Treptower Park was the site of the last major Nazi attempt at a counter attack with Panzers organised from within Berlin, and the whole site has a quite an incredible, tragic atmosphere (even on a bright, beautiful day) and is well worth a visit



There were very few people around while I was there, and at one point I seemed to have the whole Plaza to myself. The only language I heard from the few other visitors was Russian, many of them no doubt relatives of the approximately 80,000 Soviet troops who perished in the Battle for Berlin.