Revamped museum makes ‘Barbarossa’ more palpable

By Esteban Engel

"Glory to the Great War” is inscribed in golden letters in Russian over the lobby of the German-Russian Museum in the Karlshorst quarter of Berlin.

The building, where Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II was signed, houses a permanent — and now revamped — exhibition on Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

The horrors wrought by the invasion, which was code-named Operation Barbarossa and took place nearly two years after Germany’s attack on Poland — the start of World War II — are made palpable for visitors by the exhibits.

Several tanks and a rocket launcher stand in the yard in front of the building, formerly the officers’ mess of the German Armed Forces’ number one engineering school.

In the Battle of Berlin at the end of April 1945, the 5th Soviet Shock Army set up its headquarters there.

After the main German surrender was signed on May 7 in Rheims at the headquarters of US General Dwight D Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, it was ratified in Karlshorst shortly after midnight on May 9.

These signatures ended the war in Europe.

At the head of the wood-panelled surrender room stands a long table overhung by flags of the victorious Allied Powers. The top German officers under Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel sat at a side table.

After they had signed the surrender document, they left the room. The Americans, Britons, Russians and French celebrated the Allied victory over copious drinks until the next morning.

An adjacent room, once the office of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, still has a Soviet feel. His country’s most acclaimed military commander in World War II, Zhukov led the final Soviet assault on Germany in 1945, capturing Berlin in April.

He then took command of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, which was headquartered in the building in Karlshorst. After establishment of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, the “Berlin Kremlin”, as the building was known, housed the command of Moscow’s military mission in the GDR, or East Germany.

Between 1967 and 1994, a museum of the Soviet armed forces (Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945) was located there.

The current museum was opened in May 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Its director, Joerg Morré, said it was an experiment in German-Russian co-operation.

Historians from both countries, as well as from the former Soviet republics Belarus and Ukraine, are on the board of trustees. Constantly rehashing Soviet-German history, they are not always of one mind, but reach an agreement in the end, Morré said.

The revamped exhibition traces Operation Barbarossa and its consequences in 10 stations.

Whereas the documents and objects previously on display chronicled the invasion rather drily, the new version by Morré and his colleagues does not spare visitors the horrors of the war.

They have made the suffering of millions personal, whether it be through POW jackets, children’s shoes from the Majdanek concentration camp, letters, or a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The wartime fates of 15 Soviet and German citizens are followed.

Numbers also shed light on horror. The Soviet Union lost 27mn of its people in the war. As much as 60% of the 5.7mn Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans died as POWs.

A total of 1.1mn of the 3.15mn German POWs did not survive Soviet captivity.

During a tour of the exhibition, visitors soon come across a black cube containing the “criminal orders” for the German attack on the Soviet Union. “You can’t miss this room,” Morré noted.

In another room is a wartime map of Berlin with hundreds of white dots marking forced labour camps. “No one can say that the Germans couldn’t have known about the prisoners,” Morré remarked.

In the museum’s basement, the exhibition turns to the invasion’s aftermath: the Cold War division of Europe.

Morré said he would like to expand the museum and pointed to the neighbouring buildings. Former Wehrmacht barracks, they held administrative offices of the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union, until the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany in 1994.

The area is to be converted into a residential park. Adverts for the property by the real estate developers blithely say: “The buildings, with full-size basements, were built circa 1935 in masonry construction.” — DPA