On the morning of April 21, Red Army General Nikolai Berzarin led the 5th Shock Army across Berlin’s border. The first building that they passed as they entered Berlin, a small farmhouse, which today is decorated with a large mural: Haus der Befreiung. For many months they had been engaged in a fierce battle against Nazi troops. In January, they had advanced 400 kilometres as part of the Vistula-Oder offensive; in March, they captured the German fortress in Kostrzyn. Finally, Hitler’s capital was in sight.
Four days later, Berzarin was named city commander and assumed all governmental power, following a long Russian tradition dating back to Tsarist times of the first general to enter a city with that post. He set up his headquarters in an apartment building at Alt-Friedrichsfelde 1, which is still standing. His troops fought their way through Treptow and Kreuzberg, inching toward the city centre. They eventually reached the Gestapo headquarters at Prince Albrecht Palace – the ruins of which the Topography of Terror museum now sits atop. Bullet holes can still be found all over this part of the city, including on the facade of Gropius Bau nearby.
The battle for Berlin raged for 10 days, a period filled with senseless Nazi destruction. The SS bombed the Nord-Süd-Tunnel of the S-Bahn, where thousands of people were sheltering, flooding the underground network. They also blew up the once-glorious Karstadt department store at Hermannplatz – leaving behind the smaller section we have today.
Under machine gun fire from the opposite bank, Massalov crawled over Potsdamer Brücke and rescued the child
By May 2, General Helmuth Weidling, the Nazi regime’s Berlin commander, was ready to give up. He appeared at an apartment building near Tempelhof Airport, where Soviet General Vasily Chuikov had set up his command post. Weidling had orders not to surrender – but his superiors had all committed suicide, one after the other. With his nerves shot, he signed an order declaring that further fighting would be “senseless”. A German-Jewish communist on Chuikov’s staff typed up the German version of the order, which led to the surrender of the last 90,000 soldiers in the capital.
At this point, Soviet troops were fighting to take the Reichstag, a building still scarred from the fire of 1933, for three days. Several thousand German soldiers were barricaded in the basement. After they received the news of the surrender, the Red Army took a picture of the hammer-and-sickle flag raised on the Reichstag roof, creating one of the most iconic images of the war.
A Memorial as Grand as Its History
It’s estimated that 70,000-80,000 Red Army soldiers gave their lives to defeat Nazism in the Battle of Berlin. The bodies of around 7,000 of these soldiers were placed in mass graves in Treptower Park. Another 13,000 are buried at Schönholzer Heide in Pankow – Europe’s largest Soviet cemetery outside of Russia.
Treptow’s Soviet Memorial embodies the contradictions of Stalin’s Soviet Union – a regime caught between Tsarist nostalgia and the push for socialist modernity. Beneath the giant statue of a Red Army soldier, a mosaic proudly celebrates the USSR’s many nationalities – yet the depictions on the 16 sarcophagi show identical soldiers, their uniformity evoking an unsettling, almost fascistic aesthetic. Why, one wonders, is the soldier crushing a swastika beneath his boot also carrying a medieval broadsword only suited for a mounted knight? Stalinism seemingly couldn’t decide if it represented Lenin or Ivan the Terrible.
The central feature of the memorial is a statue of a soldier holding a young child. Who is the girl in the soldier’s arm? Depending on who you ask, it may or may not reference a real story. On April 30, the Red Army had taken up positions along the south side of the Landwehr Canal, and from here they began shelling the army command across the water. A Red Army sergeant, Nikolai Masalov, saw a three-year-old German girl desperately looking for her mother. Under machine gun fire from the opposite bank, Massalov crawled over Potsdamer Brücke and rescued the child.
Was there brutality from the Red Army? Undoubtedly. Soviet soldiers were responsible for widespread sexual violence in occupied Germany – an issue Stalin reportedly dismissed as a ‘trifle’ in comparison to the 27 million Soviet citizens killed at the hands of the Nazi regime. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped and the Red Army leadership did little to stop it. After Stalin’s purges, the Red Army had lost much of the internationalist and feminist ideals that had once defined it during the revolution.
Klaus Kordon, a socialist children’s book author, tried to capture this brutality with nuance in his novel Der erste Frühling (The First Spring) about Berlin in 1945. He presents a cultivated Red Army major speaking in German to a communist family in Wedding. The officer is horrified by some of the crimes his soldiers are committing, but cannot forget the context. His own mother starved during the siege of Leningrad, like 1.5 million others. “And now we should be nice to the Germans? Friendly?” he asks. The Wehrmacht had aimed to starve every last man, woman and child – while the Soviets were handing out food to civilians in Berlin.
A Surrender Set in Stone
The Nazis’ final surrender also took place in Berlin. German commanders on the Western front signed a preliminary document about their unconditional surrender in Reims, France on May 7. But this wasn’t enough for Stalin: a ceremony with the top officers of the German armed forces was needed to ensure that all soldiers would finally lay down their arms.
The battle for Berlin raged for 10 days, a period filled with senseless Nazi destruction
The following day, representatives of the Allies gathered at an old military academy in Berlin-Karlshorst, which had been seized by the Soviets. In the academy’s dining hall, leaders of the German army, navy and air force all formally surrendered. The document was not finalised until around 1am, sparking an enduring debate – one that continues even 80 years later – about whether World War II truly ended on.
Decades later, in 1967, the Soviet occupation forces in East Berlin opened up the Kapitulationsmuseum in the building, which was renamed Deutsch-Russisches Museum in 1995. Today, you can still see some of the original displays, including a spectacular diorama depicting the Soviet soldiers storming the Reichstag, filled with painted black smoke and red flags. There’s also a large stained glass window featuring the Treptower Park statue, with Berlin and Moscow in the background.
🧱 Battle of Berlin: 12 places you can still see damage from World War II
The free permanent exhibition re-opened in 2013 – in collaboration with war museums in Kyiv, Minsk and Moscow – showing unique artefacts from the Red Army. For museum director Jörg Morré, the most impressive item is a 3D topographic map of Berlin with tiny buildings, smokestacks and church towers; it was used to plan artillery attacks, with the Russian names of each neighbourhood marked on small flags.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Deutsch-Russisches Museum was forced to reflect on its name and purpose. They decided to rebrand as Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. Around 36,000 people visit each year, but as Morré points out, not enough are aware that “with just a BVG ticket, you can visit the place where the Second World War ended.”
