Directly west of the Brandenburg Gate rises from the stone rubble of marble and granite of Hitler's chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse, the Soviet Memorial at the Tiergarten. It commemorates the 20000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle of Berlin in 1945.

The area around the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and Wilhelmstraße was a special war zone.

The memorial was built right at the end of the war, by order of the Red Army as a first Soviet memorial in the town centre. Over 2500 soldiers are buried behind the memorial. Design: the sculptors Lew E. Kerbel and Wladimir E. Zigal together with the architect Nikolai W. Sergijewski.

image author: Gisela Pape

The bronze-statue of a red army soldier carries the rifle on his shoulder as a sign that the war is over. The soldier's left hand is pointing to his dead fellow soldiers, who rest at the foot of the memorial.

On the columns of the colonnade, the names of the dead soldiers are honoured.

Two stone sarcophagi are inscribed with the names of dead officers.

The two Soviet T-34 tanks, which first reached the city at the advancing of Berlin, are positioned at the main entrance. Two pieces of artillery remind the gun salute, which announced the end of the 'battle of Berlin'.