Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag
Victory comes at a price, and few knew this better than the men and women of the Red Army in WWII, having withstood the German surprise onslaught on the Soviet Union in 1941 only by dint of superhuman sacrifices and tenacity. By the end of 1941, the Red Army had lost about 5 million personnel, and civilian losses amounted to millions more.
Forced to retreat until the enemy came within literal sight of the Kremlin in the winter of 1941, they managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth, before beating the Germans back from the gates of Moscow. They endured another onslaught the following year that brought the Germans all the way to the Volga river, before the tide was turned with a Soviet comeback victory at Stalingrad.
They then clawed their way back, fighting gargantuan battles and campaigns to beat back the Germans until they reached Berlin. By war’s end, four fifths of Germans killed had met their fate on the Eastern Front, while all the other Allies combined – American, British, French, etc – accounted for only one fifth. It did not come cheap: estimates for total Soviet deaths range from 25 million killed at the conservative end, to a high of 40 million dead or more.
It was against that background that photographer Yevgeney Khaldei arrived in Berlin in 1945, lugging a Leica camera and a massive Soviet flag that his uncle, a tailor, had sewn out of red tablecloths. On May 2nd, 1945, he snapped the most iconic Soviet photo of the war, Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag. It captured two Red Army soldiers, Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov, raising the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag – viewed as a symbol of Nazism – with the wreckage of Berlin beneath them. As Khaldei described the event: “this is what I had been waiting for for 1400 days“.