ON THE night of April 7 2022, the world-famous Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, the final resting place of some 7,000 Red Army soldiers who lost their lives in the fighting for Berlin in April and May 1945, was desecrated.

Graffiti — swastikas and slogans in English such as “Death to all Russians,” “Russia kills,” and “Russians = Rapists” — was found throughout the extensive grounds, from the Motherland Calls sculpture to the hill with the monumental statue of a soldier holding a child. At the time, an employee of a cleaning company tasked with removing the damage told Junge Welt that the graffiti was so extensive that it seemed as if “an entire school class” had been at work — apparently professionals at leaving no trace, as the perpetrators were never caught.

Although Ukrainian historian Yevheniia Moliar recently called for the “sacred status” of the memorials to be “broken,” an incident of this magnitude has not been repeated since. The impetus behind the desecration of the memorial — the attack on Soviet commemorative symbolism and its connection to the war in Ukraine — has become professionalised.

What seemed hasty in 2022 — such as the demand by Stefanie Bung, then the CDU parliamentary group spokesperson for urban development in the Berlin House of Representatives, to remove the two T-34 tanks in front of the memorial in the Tiergarten as “symbols of aggression” — is now being approached cautiously, step by step.

The three Soviet war memorials in Berlin — in Treptower Park, Schonholzer Heide and Tiergarten — have become battlegrounds in the debate surrounding the interpretation of the Russian attack on Ukraine.

A coalition of political, historical-political, and “civil society” actors is working to reinterpret, “contextualise,” and alter these sites, ultimately aiming to “de-Sovietise” them. The anti-Soviet iconoclasm that has swept through eastern Europe with renewed vigour since 2022 is thus also reaching Germany, where, after 1990, initially “only” the various layers of the anti-fascist and communist culture of remembrance left behind by the German Democratic Republic were attacked, erased and overwritten, while the memorial sites with a Soviet history remained untouched.

The central argument against the memorials in their current form is inherently contradictory: on the one hand, Russia is accused of instrumentalising the memorials; on the other hand, it is claimed that the memorials, with their Soviet character, are as such an authentic expression of an “imperial” policy that continues in the war in Ukraine.

Since 2022, this contradiction has been translated into political action with the annual ban on displaying Soviet flags and other symbols at the memorials on May 8 and 9. The fact that it can be normalised to prohibit the display of the liberators’ flag at their graves on the day of liberation from fascism in the former capital of Nazi Germany has whetted the appetite for more.

Since 2025, there has been an increase in attempts to alter the appearance of war memorials. Eastern European actors play a significant role in this, indirectly introducing a line of inquiry into the mainstream of the German debate on the politics of remembrance, derived from the programmatic declaration of the so-called Platform of European Memory and Conscience, which equates Nazism and Communism.

Organisations and individuals of the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora, such as the Vitsche association and the Berlin-based Ukrainian Institute (arguing along the lines of a “decolonisation” of the memorials, based on the claim that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine in the USSR was a colonial one), the anti-Soviet Memorial association, the Pilecki Institute, which has been operating in Berlin as an outpost of Polish anti-communist historical policy since 2019, institutions of belligerent ideology production such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation-sponsored “Cafe Kyiv,” Ukrainian and German historians (who, since 2022, have largely acted as maximalist amplifiers of the state’s position, much like the discredited “eastern studies” of the past), and increasingly also parts of Berlin state politics are active in the debate about the memorials.

The main argument here is for a more or less invasive “contextualisation” of individual elements of the memorials. This method has a certain tradition — one need only think of the handling of the memorial erected in 1981 in Berlin’s Lustgarten for the resistance group around the communist Herbert Baum.

Since simply removing the memorial seemed too risky, but it was also inconceivable that a communist monument bearing the inscription “Forever bound in friendship with the Soviet Union” could remain in the heart of Berlin, the idea arose to cover the memorial stone with glass plates on which the monument would be commented on according to the dictates of German historical policy.

Similar preparations are now under way for the war memorials. Since 2025, two Social Democrat (SPD) members of parliament, Andreas Geisel and Alexander Freier-Winterwerb, have been particularly active. Both have recognised (or been told) that a redesign of the memorials can best be presented as a measure against “Stalinist bombast.” In October 2025, they called, among other things, for commentary on the Stalin quotes and a stronger emphasis on the memorial’s character as cemeteries. The BZ newspaper thundered: “Away with the Stalin propaganda at the Treptow War Memorial!”

This opens a path to ultimately deeming the entire memorial “Stalinist” (or, depending on the context, “imperial”) and calling it into question. This was evident from the programme of a conference held on March 26 at the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum — a joint event organised by the museum, the Ukrainian Institute, and the Federal Foundation for the Study of the “SED [Socialist Unity Party] Dictatorship” (in East Germany).

Under the telling title “Foreign Remembrance — Our Own Responsibility?” discussion focused on “Soviet Memorials and German Culture of Remembrance,” with the opening panel tellingly addressing “Coming to Terms with Communism in Germany.”

Only afterwards was the discussion turned to “Dealing with Memorials and Cemeteries.” At the site where Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender was signed on May 8 1945, the structurally and primarily anti-communist “German culture of remembrance” comes into its own. It could not be demonstrated more clearly that the intended new approach to the war memorials is understood as a kind of conclusion to the political debate surrounding “Communism in Germany.”

The conference caused quite a stir after an RT report referred to it as a “secret conference,” especially since Jorg Morre, the museum’s director, subsequently told the Berliner Zeitung: “We were not interested in public reporting on March 26. That was the selection criterion for our guests.”

Just before the anniversary of the liberation at the weekend, Berlin’s state politicians took action. A motion from the Green Party, which the Left Party supported at the committee level, proposes entering into dialogue not with Russia, but with the 14 other successor states of the USSR — several of which, as is well known, pursue a policy of rigorously removing Soviet monuments — about what the future of the memorials could look like. SPD representative Freier-Winterwerb reiterates in his motion the demand to “contextualise” the Stalin quotes. The coalition partner CDU will now form an opinion on the matter.

Undoubtedly, the (foreign) policy costs associated with intervening in the design of the war memorials are also being considered. In the agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation on the “care of war graves” of December 1992, the Federal Republic committed itself to maintaining and caring for the Soviet war cemeteries in Germany, guaranteeing access and dignified conditions for commemorative events, and informing the Russian side about restoration and maintenance work. However, the 1992 agreement only guarantees the existence of the war cemeteries, not the architectural design and political symbolism. A greater obstacle appears to be the historic preservation regulations, which make it difficult to simply remove or overwrite individual design elements.

One factor, however, cannot be factored into the equation: political opposition. In the Berlin House of Representatives, only BSW representative Alexander King has so far spoken out against the redesign of the war memorials.

He told Junge Welt on Thursday that the plan to reinterpret the Treptow War Memorial is “clearly in line with the logic of anti-Russian propaganda.” In his view, “neither German politicians nor Memorial EV [the German wing of the anti-Soviet Memorial organisation], which is collaborating with Berlin SPD representatives on this matter,” are authorised to “develop or even implement changes to the memorial” without the consent of the Russian embassy.

This article is republished from Junge Welt (www.jungewelt.de).