The flag over the Reichstag

On the morning of 2 May 1945 the last German defenders emerged with their hands up from the cellars of the Reichstag building. Above the burnt-out building, on what remained of the dome, a red banner had been flying for two days, and that same day the photographer Yevgeny Khaldei climbed onto the roof with a few soldiers to photograph a flag over conquered Berlin. The picture became one of the best-known images of the Second World War, and the banner planted on the Reichstag the chief symbol of the Soviet victory.

The popular version, according to which Soviet troops “captured the Reichstag on 2 May and raised a flag over it”, simplifies the course of events. The assault on the building began on 30 April (its approaches had been fought for since 29 April), and the flags – including the one later recognised as the official Victory Banner – went up on the roof during the night of 30 April – 1 May. On 2 May the garrison holding out in the cellars surrendered, and Khaldei took his photograph, which was staged.

A symbol without military value

The Reichstag building, erected in 1884–1894 to a design by Paul Wallot, had stood largely empty since the fire of February 1933. Hitler’s parliament, deprived of any real power, met in the nearby Kroll Opera House; during the war the building itself served, among other things, as a store, a hospital and a shelter, and firing positions were bricked into its windows. To the Nazis it meant little – if anything, it was associated with the despised Weimar Republic.

The Soviet side saw it differently. In Red Army propaganda the Reichstag was “the heart of the fascist beast”, and the call to raise a red flag over it had accompanied the soldiers since the breakthrough on the Vistula and the Oder. The order of Georgy Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, assigned the capture of the building and the raising of the “Victory Banner” over it to the 3rd Shock Army of Colonel General Vasily Kuznetsov. The army’s military council prepared nine red flags, one for each of its divisions, so that whichever reached the Reichstag first could plant it. According to many accounts, pressure also came from Joseph Stalin, who wanted the building to fall before 1 May, the workers’ holiday.

The assault

After the encirclement of Berlin on 25 April and several days of street fighting during the storming of the city, units of Major General Semyon Perevertkin’s 79th Rifle Corps reached the Spree in the Moabit district on the night of 28–29 April. They crossed the damaged but still standing Moltke Bridge and on 29 April, after a full day of fighting, captured the building of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which the soldiers called “Himmler’s house”. Now only the Königsplatz separated them from the Reichstag – a few hundred metres of open ground, cut by an anti-tank ditch and a flooded excavation for a planned underground railway tunnel, and swept by fire from the building, from the neighbouring Kroll Opera House and from the flak tower at the zoo.

The main burden of the assault fell on Major General Vasily Shatilov’s 150th Rifle Division and Colonel Aleksei Negoda’s 171st Rifle Division. Three battalions went in the first wave: the 1st Battalion of the 756th Rifle Regiment under Captain Stepan Neustroev, the 1st Battalion of the 674th Regiment under Captain Vasily Davydov, and the 1st Battalion of the 380th Regiment under Senior Lieutenant Konstantin Samsonov. According to Soviet studies the Reichstag area was defended by about 5,000 men, about a thousand of them in the building itself. They were a scratch force drawn from various formations – according to accounts on both sides, soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, Kriegsmarine sailors brought into the capital in the last days, and members of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth.

On the morning of 30 April the first attempts to rush across the square broke down under the defenders’ fire. Before noon several dozen guns were set up in front of the Reichstag to fire over open sights – Soviet sources speak of 89 barrels – and at 1 p.m. the preparatory bombardment began. Under its cover the infantry leapt from crater to crater; in the afternoon the first groups reached the barricaded main entrance, and in the evening the battalions of Neustroev, Davydov and Samsonov broke into the interior. A struggle began for one hall, corridor and staircase after another, amid the smoke of burning furniture and documents. The defenders, driven from the upper floors, went down into the extensive cellars and launched counter-attacks from there.

That same afternoon, in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery a few hundred metres to the south, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The soldiers fighting in the Reichstag knew nothing of it.

Many flags on one roof

The story of the flag-raising itself is tangled – partly because of the chaos of battle, partly because of later propaganda, which picked one canonical episode out of many. As early as the afternoon of 30 April reports reached Zhukov’s headquarters that a flag was flying over the Reichstag; on the strength of them the marshal announced the capture of the building, although at that time the soldiers were not yet inside it, and the correspondents who came to check were pinned down by fire on the square. According to various accounts, red sheets were also dropped onto the roof from aircraft.

Later several groups laid claim to being first. According to one version, Private Grigory Bulatov and Lieutenant Rakhimzhan Koshkarbaev fixed a flag first in a window and then higher up, beside one of the sculptures on the façade. A group under Captain Vladimir Makov (including Sergeant Mikhail Minin) is said to have planted a banner on the figure of the goddess of victory on the western pediment of the building at around 10.30–10.40 p.m. Other flags appeared beside other sculptures. Most of them did not survive the shelling of the following hours.

The flag that went down in history was the assault banner of the 150th Rifle Division – one of the nine prepared by the army’s military council – bearing a handwritten inscription with the names of the division, corps, army and front. According to the official Soviet version, it was planted on the dome by the scouts Sergeant Mikhail Yegorov and Junior Sergeant Meliton Kantaria, led by the battalion’s deputy commander for political affairs, Lieutenant Oleksiy Berest. In the canonical narrative this happened late in the evening of 30 April; the division’s records and some historians place the moment in the early hours of 1 May (around 3 a.m.). The flag was fixed to the top of the burnt-out dome. Because it was the only one of the “official” flags to survive the fighting, it was this one that was recognised as the Victory Banner. Historians point out that the trio of a Russian, a Georgian and a Ukrainian also suited the propaganda image of a multinational army.

The garrison’s surrender on 2 May

The flag on the roof did not mean the end of the fighting. At around 10 a.m. on 1 May the Germans launched a co-ordinated counter-attack, from the cellars of the building and from outside, from the direction of the Brandenburg Gate, where several hundred soldiers with tanks struck the positions of the 674th Regiment. A fire broke out in the building and spread through much of the interior; soldiers on both sides fought in the smoke, and Soviet sub-units on the upper floors were cut off for a time. Only in the evening did Neustroev’s men manage to push the defenders back underground. On the other side of the square the fight for the Kroll Opera House went on until midnight; according to Soviet figures about 850 Germans were taken prisoner there.

Late in the evening of 1 May the garrison command in the cellars declared its readiness to talk, but – as Neustroev recalled – demanded that the Soviet side be represented by an officer of at least the rank of colonel. So the tall Lieutenant Berest was sent to the talks in a borrowed jacket, introduced as a colonel, with Neustroev playing his adjutant. The negotiations in the dark cellars dragged on, and so did the exchange of fire. Early on the morning of 2 May the Reichstag garrison laid down its arms.

This happened in parallel with the surrender of Berlin as a whole. After the failure of the talks that General Hans Krebs conducted on 1 May from dawn until the afternoon, and after the death of the Goebbels family, the commander of the city’s defence, General Helmuth Weidling, gave himself up on the morning of 2 May and at the headquarters of General Vasily Chuikov signed an order to cease fighting. During the day resistance in the city centre died away; the last groups around the Reichstag and the Tiergarten surrendered by the afternoon. According to a report by the chief of staff of the 150th Division, about 2,500 defenders were killed and 1,650 taken prisoner in the capture of the Reichstag – figures that cover the fighting in the whole area of the building and, like many reports from the last days of the war, should be treated with caution. Soviet losses for the Reichstag alone were not given separately; in the Berlin operation as a whole the three Soviet fronts lost, according to Grigori Krivosheev’s figures, more than 78,000 killed and missing.

Khaldei’s photograph

On 2 May Yevgeny Khaldei, a TASS photojournalist who had photographed the whole war – from Murmansk via Kerch to Belgrade and Vienna – reached the captured building. He had brought red flags from Moscow, sewn, by his own account, from tablecloths by a tailor he knew. The earlier flags on the roof had been destroyed or were unsuitable for a photograph, and no one had taken a picture of the night-time raising of the Victory Banner. So Khaldei asked some soldiers he happened to meet for help. On the edge of the roof the flag was fixed – according to the photographer himself – by 18-year-old Alexei Kovalyov, held steady by Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev from Minsk. A single roll of film produced a series of shots, one of which, with a panorama of the ruined city in the background, went round the world.

The photograph, published on 13 May 1945 in the weekly Ogonyok, had been retouched. The editors noticed that Ismailov was wearing a watch on each wrist, which suggested looting; Khaldei scratched one of them off the negative (later accounts say the second “watch” may have been a compass). He also added smoke over the city, montaged in from another negative, for greater drama. For decades the photograph was presented as a record of the flag-raising by Yegorov and Kantaria, while the names of the actual participants in the shoot remained in the shadows. Khaldei spoke more fully about the story behind the picture only in the 1990s. Like the photograph of the flag on Iwo Jima, taken two and a half months earlier – by Khaldei’s own account one of his inspirations – the Reichstag photograph was not a record of the “first” flag, but a later, carefully composed image of it.

A Polish flag on the Victory Column

Units of the 1st Warsaw Infantry Division “Tadeusz Kościuszko” also took part in the fighting in central Berlin; they had been sent on 30 April to support the Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Army and fought in the Charlottenburg district and around the Tiergarten. On the morning of 2 May – at about 6 a.m., according to Polish studies – during the advance through the Großer Tiergarten park, gunners of the 7th Battery of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Light Artillery Regiment planted the white-and-red Polish flag on the Victory Column (Siegessäule), erected to commemorate Prussia’s victories in the wars of 1864–1871. Polish accounts mention several flags hung on the column that day by soldiers of different batteries; Second Lieutenant Mikołaj Troicki, Sergeant Kazimierz Otap, Corporal Antoni Jabłoński and the gunners Aleksander Kasprowicz and Eugeniusz Mierzejewski are regarded as members of one of the groups. In memory of this event, 2 May has been celebrated since 2004 as Polish Flag Day.

Writing on the walls

After the surrender the Reichstag became a place of pilgrimage for Red Army soldiers. Thousands of them left inscriptions on the walls, columns and in the corridors, in charcoal or chalk or scratched with a bayonet: names, home towns, the road they had travelled (“from Moscow to Berlin”, “from Stalingrad”), dates, and curses aimed at Hitler and Germany. The building ended up in the British sector of Berlin, right on the border with the Soviet sector; after 1961 the Berlin Wall ran just behind it.

In the 1950s and 1960s the building was rebuilt in simplified form and the inscriptions were covered up. They were uncovered during the reconstruction to a design by Norman Foster in 1995–1999, before the Bundestag moved into the Reichstag. Some of them – after consultation with Russian diplomats – were removed as offensive, including racist and sexual ones; the rest were deliberately preserved as a testimony to the building’s history. Calls for their removal resurfaced later too, but the inscriptions have remained. They can still be seen today in many rooms of the parliament.

The fate of the banner and its heroes

The Victory Banner was taken down from the Reichstag in June 1945 and flown to Moscow on 20 June. It was to have been carried at the head of the Victory Parade on 24 June, but according to participants, because of poor results in rehearsals, it was decided not to bring it onto Red Square. It was first shown in public during the parade of 1965 and later became one of the most important exhibits of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow. In Russian Victory Day celebrations on 9 May, copies of it are carried today.

On 8 May 1946 Yegorov, Kantaria, Neustroev, Davydov and Samsonov were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. Berest, who had led the two scouts onto the roof and negotiated with the garrison, received only the Order of the Red Banner; the reasons for this omission were never explained, and for years his role was passed over in silence. He was killed in 1970 in Rostov-on-Don while saving a child from an oncoming train; in 2005 he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. Koshkarbaev received the highest decoration for his part in the assault only in independent Kazakhstan, in 1999. Yegorov was killed in a car accident in 1975; Kantaria died in Moscow in 1993.

Significance

Militarily the capture of the Reichstag changed little – Berlin’s fate had been sealed by the encirclement of the city, Hitler’s death and Weidling’s surrender – but it became the symbolic culmination of the battle. For Soviet propaganda the flag over the Reichstag was the clearest sign that the war which had begun with the German invasion in June 1941 and by the autumn had reached the approaches to Moscow had ended in the heart of Germany. Five and six days later, on 7 May at Reims and on 8 May at Karlshorst in Berlin, Germany signed its unconditional surrender.

Khaldei’s photograph, like the one from Iwo Jima, fixed an image of victory that in time overshadowed a more complex reality: many flags and many assault groups, a night-time flag-raising with no one present with a camera, a staging after the fighting, and retouching. For Berlin, the spring of 1945 also meant tens of thousands of inhabitants killed, a devastated city centre and violence by soldiers against the civilian population, above all the mass rape of women. The Reichstag building, for decades a ruin on the border of a divided city, became the seat of parliament again after German reunification – with the bullet marks and the inscriptions of the soldiers who had captured it preserved.