Marcel Krueger explores Soviet legacies in Karlshorst…
Berlin lay in ruins as the planes landed. From all over Europe, the vanquishers and the vanquished of World War Two came. Nine days after Adolf Hitler had shot himself and the Red Army defeated the last defenders of the Third Reich capital, the Axis and Allied powers converged here to accept the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy and the authorized British representative of the Western Headquarters; General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe; the Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky; and Field Marshal Keitel, the highest ranking officer left in the Wehrmacht—all landed at Tempelhof airfield.
From there they drove through Berlin in black cars along roads only recently cleared of rubble, directed by female Red Army traffic controllers with Kalashnikov sub-machine guns slung across their backs. They drove to a pioneer school of the Wehrmacht in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, where the main mess hall had been transformed into a surrender room draped with the flags of the four Allies. The cars stopped in front of the pillared entrance and men in leather boots, brown and grey uniforms walked up the stairs and into the building, the double door closing quietly behind them.
Upon first glance, there are seemingly not many remnants of these dramatic events today in Karlshorst. But I walk past the usual conglomeration of döner shops, bakeries, Rossmann stores and pharmacies around the S-Bahn station here before I make my way up quiet Rheinsteinstrasse to the place where you can learn more about the relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union, between Germany and Russia than anywhere else in Berlin: the aforementioned former pioneer school.
At the end of the street sits Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, an impressive grey building with four pillars framing the entrance, a Ukrainian flag flying in front and the words “Place of Capitulation May 1945” displayed out front. The building was the seat of the head of the Soviet military administration in Germany from 1945 to 1949, and was then used for a number of purposes by the Soviet military until 1967, when it became the “Museum of the Soviet Forces in Germany,” the usual array of Soviet World War Two tanks and ordinance one still finds in the park surrounding the museum a reminder of that time. In 1986 it became the “Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of the Forces of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945”, which existed until 1994, when all Red Army forces left a reunited Germany.…