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The Soviet War Memorial (sometimes translated as the Soviet Cenotaph), is a vast war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin’s Treptower Park. It was built to the design of the Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky to commemorate 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945. It opened four years after the war ended on May 8, 1949, and served as the central war memorial of East Germany.

The monument should not be confused with the Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten), built in 1945 in the Tiergarten district of what would later become West Berlin, or the Soviet War Memorial (Schönholzer Heide), in Berlin’s Pankow district.

The focus of the ensemble is a monument by Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich: a 12-m tall statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword holding a  German child, standing over a broken swastika. According to Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Chuikov, the Vuchetich statue commemorates  the deeds of Sergeant of Guards Nikolai Masalov, who during the final storm on the center of Berlin risked his life under heavy German machine-gun  fire to rescue a three year old German girl whose mother had apparently disappeared.[1]

Before the monument is a central area lined on both sides by 16 stone sarcophagi, one for each of the 16 Soviet Republics (in 1940-1956 then  up to the reorganization of the Karelo-Finnish SSR into the Karelian ASSR there were 16 “union republics”) with relief carvings of military  scenes and quotations from Joseph Stalin, on one side in Russian, on the other side the same text in German. The area is the final resting place  for some 5000 soldiers of the Red Army.