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When we moved to Berlin back in 2012, we didn’t know anything about soviet memorials. Nothing at all. And I believe this lack of knowledge made us even more curious about everything and anything soviet.
The first time I was around the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park was less than six months after moving to Berlin. I remember that I was bored back home and I decided to walk from our house close to Rathaus Neukölln to the Spree River and that is how I managed to find the Treptower Park.
Once I was there, I remember seeing the weird lines of trees and that was it. It was a rainy evening and the place was empty and it made everything look even more epic. A few hours later, there I was back home talking to Marcela and showing her all the pictures of this new found place. After that first visit, I lost the count of how many times did I go there. But I know I enjoyed every time I was there. Mostly in the winter when it looks even more epic as you can see in this pictures here.
i took these pictures once we went to the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park back in december 2014, while Marcela’s mother was here. She wanted to see the snow falling and we wanted her to see something cool. We did both.
A little bit of history from the Soviet Memorial
The Berlin Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park is the largest of the three war memorials the USSR left in Berlin after the end of the Second World War. The others are the one on Tiergarten and the one at Schönholzer Heide, where we did our first Fotostrasse meeting of 2014. It was built to the design of the soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky as a memorial for 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin between April and May 1945. So, once you are there, think about the soldiers that are buried there and fought against Nazi Germany back then.
When you arrive at the Berlin Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, it hard to avoid looking at the huge, twelve meters high, statue that lies as the central point there. The statue represents a soviet soldier armed with a sword and crashing a swastika while he holds a child in his arms. It is supposed to look epic and it sure does. The first time I was there, I was even comparing it to Mr Bison in Street Fighter but I don’t believe this comparison makes sense to anybody else but me.
This sculpture was created by the same architect who designed the memorial Yakov Belopolsky and it shows the deeds of sargent Nikolai Masalov, who decided to risk his life during the Battle of Berlin to save the life of a child stranded into the battlefield. Besides that huge statue, the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park has 16 stone sarcophagi, one for each of the republics under the USSR at the time, telling the story of the Second World War with their point of view.
The Soviet Memorial was designed in a way that shields it from the outside. There’s a wall of trees surrounding the place during the warm months but, during the winter you cannot see it. It looks more desolate and it makes me think about everything that happened back then. The whiteness of the snow contrasting with all the dead trees around the place makes for a really epic scenery. You should visit there as soon as it snows in Berlin, you will love it.
The Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park is really easy to get to once you take the train to Treptower Park U-Bahn station. It lays a little outside the tourist path in Berlin but i am sure you are going to enjoy this place. You can search on Google Maps for Soviet War Memorial Treptow on Puschkinallee or just try the map below.
We posted about the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park before and you can see more pictures of this amazing place there. And you can read about the history of this large Soviet Memorial here.
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