Footsteps of WWII · Berlin & eastern Germany
Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park
Cemetery · Apr–May 1945 (opened 8 May 1949)
The story
Opened on 8 May 1949, the fourth anniversary of the German surrender, Treptow is the largest Soviet war memorial outside the former USSR. It commemorates 7,000 of the roughly 80,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin; some 5,000 are buried in the central lawns. Architect Yakov Belopolsky laid out the park, and sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich made the 12-metre bronze of a Soviet soldier holding a German child and a sword, standing on a broken swastika. Sixteen stone sarcophagi, one for each Soviet republic, carry reliefs and quotations from Stalin in Russian and German.
What to look for
Enter through a granite gateway past the kneeling soldiers, walk down the long axis between the sixteen sarcophagi and the grave lawns, and climb the mound to the soldier statue. Inside its base is a mosaic hall.
Plan your visit
Open-air park memorial, free and open at all times, with no booking needed. Take the S-Bahn to Treptower Park station, then walk about ten minutes through the park.
Things change, so check opening times before you travel.
Nearby sites
- Museum Berlin-Karlshorst · 5 km
- Topography of Terror, Berlin · 6 km
- Site of the Führerbunker · 7 km
- Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe · 7 km
- Reichstag, Berlin · 7 km
- Soviet War Memorial, Tiergarten · 7 km
All 160 sites in Footsteps of WWII →
Footsteps of WWII: Europe 1939–1945
A free field guide for your phone: the route, the maps and the stories built in, even with no signal. The whole Second World War in Europe, from the first shots at Westerplatte on 1 September 1939 to the German surrender in May 1945: Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Normandy, Arnhem, Bastogne, Stalingrad, Berlin and the camps, in 15 areas from Britain to Russia.
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