About this place
Rising from the edge of the Tiergarten on the Straße des 17. Juni, this was the first major monument raised in Berlin after the war, unveiled on 11 November 1945, only months after the city fell. Soviet architects and the sculptors Vladimir Tsigal and Lev Kerbel shaped it as a curved stoa carrying a bronze soldier who stretches his hand over the dead, and they faced the colonnade in dark and pale marble salvaged from Hitler's wrecked Reich Chancellery, so the regime's own building stone became a tomb for its conquerors. Two T-34 tanks and two heavy ML-20 howitzers stand guard at the entrance, weapons of the Battle of Berlin set down where they finished their advance. Behind the memorial lie the graves of more than 2,000 Red Army soldiers, a fraction of the roughly 80,000 Soviet troops killed in the final assault on the capital. After 1945 the site fell inside the British sector, and through the Cold War a Soviet honour guard stood here on Western soil, at times shielded by British soldiers, an unlikely island of Moscow in West Berlin.
Key facts
- 2000 graves — More than 2,000 Soviet soldiers are buried behind the colonnade
- 1945 year — Unveiled on 11 November 1945, the first such memorial in Berlin
- 2 T-34 tanks — Flank the entrance alongside two heavy ML-20 howitzers
📍 Zeltenallee, 10557, Berlin