The famous photograph of Soviet soldiers raising the red flag over the ruined Reichstag is one of the most iconic images of the Second World War. It has come to symbolize the Soviet Union’s victory in the Battle of Berlin and the destruction of Nazi Germany. There is only one problem with it. The photograph is a fake.
It was not taken at the moment the flag was first raised, and it is not even a genuine image of that event. It is a recreation, staged after the battle, and then deliberately altered by a Soviet war photographer to please his masters. Before condemning the Soviets too quickly, it is worth remembering that they were not the only ones tampering with history. The Americans did the same thing.
The photograph of US Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima, taken months before the flag went up in Berlin, is also misleading. It was not the first flag raising but the second. That staged image served as the inspiration for the Soviet photograph. If George Orwell had been looking for a real-world example of the Ministry of Truth, this picture could have served nicely.
In 1984, the Ministry rewrites history, falsifies records, and manufactures lies to protect Big Brother’s image. Swap Big Brother for Joseph Stalin, and you have this photograph. The problem for the Soviets was a sacred date: May Day, the first of May, 1945, International Workers’ Day. Orders had come from the very top that the Reichstag, the unused German parliament building, had to be captured by that day, and that included getting a Soviet flag on its roof.
The building had no real function under the Nazis, but it had become a symbol of Berlin to the Soviets, and it had to be taken at any cost. The SS defended the Reichstag fiercely. The doors and windows had been bricked up and turned into firing positions. The building was surrounded by defended structures, trenches, and tanks.
The open square in front of it had been turned into a deadly killing ground, swept by heavy flak guns firing in a ground role from the nearby zoo flak tower, a massive fortress in its own right. For the Soviets, the Reichstag blocked the advance of divisions from the Third Shock Army across the Moltke Bridge, past the Brandenburg Gate, and up to the Reich Chancellery and Hitler’s bunker in the defense sector known as the Citadel. The Germans defended the Citadel with everything they had. Soviet troops had crossed the Moltke Bridge on the twenty-ninth of April, fighting their way through German defenses in the Ministry of the Interior, which the soldiers called Himmler’s House, and through the diplomatic quarter.
Assaults against the Reichstag itself by the 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions had failed with heavy losses. On the thirtieth of April, the day Hitler would die, fresh assaults were launched against the Reichstag. One of the men who had helped capture Himmler’s House was a young lieutenant from what is now Kazakhstan named Rakhimzhan Koshkarbayev. He commanded the reconnaissance platoon of the 674th Infantry Regiment, part of the 150th Rifle Division.
On the thirtieth, his regimental commander handed him a large Soviet flag and ordered him to get it on top of the Reichstag by May Day. Koshkarbayev was born in 1924. His father had been purged in 1937 and labeled an enemy of the people. The young man had joined the Red Army in August 1942 and received his commission as a junior lieutenant in October 1944.
He had seen heavy combat in the Soviet advance across Poland and into Germany. Now promoted to full lieutenant, he threw himself into the terrible assault to reach the Reichstag on the thirtieth of April. In that attack, he and one of his men, Grigory Bulatov, managed to get inside the massive building and planted a flag at about 2:25 in the afternoon, at the top of a staircase in front of the Reichstag’s main entrance. That was not enough.
It had to fly from the roof where all Soviet troops could see it. Koshkarbayev and Bulatov pushed on under fire, found their way up to the roof, and were immediately pinned down by heavy German defensive fire and artillery. For hours the two soldiers lay trapped. While they waited, both men wrote their names on the flag.
It was only when darkness fell that they could move again. They could see almost nothing until an explosion lit up the night. In the flash, they saw a large bronze sculpture of a horse with a woman on top wearing a crown. The statue stood directly above the Reichstag’s entrance.
It was called Germania. Koshkarbayev climbed onto the sculpture to raise the banner while Bulatov helped steady him. Once the flag was fixed into place, Koshkarbayev checked his watch. It was 10:40 p.
m. on the thirtieth of April. They had made it, an hour and twenty minutes before May Day. There was one enormous problem.
It was pitch dark, with only the flashes of artillery and small arms fire to light the scene. No one could see the flag through the smoke and dust, let alone photograph it. Although the men’s feat was reported up the chain of command, and although the higher command had promised the title of Hero of the Soviet Union to any man who could place a flag on the Reichstag roof by May Day, neither Koshkarbayev nor Bulatov received that honor. They each received a lesser award, the Order of the Red Banner.
Koshkarbayev’s flag did not last long. As soon as dawn broke, German snipers shot it down. This left a propaganda problem. The Kremlin needed an image of a red flag on the Reichstag to show the Soviet people and the world that the fascists had been beaten.
In the meantime, other small groups of Soviet soldiers made their own attempts to get a flag onto the building. One of those attempts involved Mikhail Minin of the 136th Artillery Brigade, accompanied by three sergeants. These men claimed that they entered the Reichstag in the early morning hours of May Day during the fighting, broke down a locked door, climbed to the attic, and then reached the roof through a smashed window. They guarded their flag until five in the morning, when they were relieved.
These men were also nominated for Hero of the Soviet Union, but again they received only the Order of the Red Banner. Fast forward to the second of May, 1945, when Berlin surrendered. The Reichstag garrison finally came out with their hands raised after a truly brutal battle. One man was well prepared to make sure the propaganda photograph would get taken.
Soviet war photographer Evgeny Khaldei from the TASS news agency in Moscow arrived by plane in Berlin on the second of May. He carried a large Soviet flag made for him by his tailor uncle out of three red tablecloths. By the time Khaldei arrived at the Reichstag, the building was already covered in red banners placed by victorious Soviet troops. He asked around to find out who had planted the first flag.
An eighteen-year-old named Aleksei Kovalev was pushed forward by the other soldiers. Kovalev had indeed planted one of the flags on May Day, but it was not the first. Khaldei asked Kovalev and his friends to escort him up to the roof and help plant the flag he had brought from Moscow. The eighteen-year-old Kovalev appears in the photograph reaching up to fix the flag into position.
The soldier reaching up to steady him was Abdulkhakim Ismailov, a Kalmyk from Dagestan and a veteran of Stalingrad. Some may wonder exactly where this flag was raised on the Reichstag. The flag was not raised at the front of the building, as one might expect, but at the rear, on a bronze decoration. The statues in the background of the photograph still exist today.
Comparison photos show that Khaldei was standing on a tower looking across and down toward the flag. In the background can be seen the Brandenburg Gate, with the Tiergarten park to its right. The photograph had problems beyond the staging. It was censored.
Ismailov was wearing two watches, a sign that he had been looting, and such behavior was considered damaging to the reputation of the Red Army internationally. Khaldei erased the second watch from the negative. He also doctored the image by superimposing thick black smoke from another photograph. He darkened the whole scene to make the battlefield look more apocalyptic and heroic.
So which soldiers received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union? The decision was carefully made by the political authorities. It was not simply a question of who had done the deed first, but who was acceptable to the political mentality of the leadership. The men chosen were two junior sergeants, Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov, both of the 150th Rifle Division.
They had performed the feat of raising a flag earlier on May Day in the company of Lieutenant Alexei Berest, a Ukrainian political commissar. Under fire, these three men made their way onto the roof and planted their makeshift flag. No photographs were taken at the time. The following day, the men returned under orders from the political department to raise a much larger flag atop the now surrendered Reichstag.
So why were Lieutenant Koshkarbayev and Private Bulatov denied the title of Hero of the Soviet Union? They were the first to plant a flag on the Reichstag roof on the thirtieth of April. The likely reason is that Koshkarbayev looked Asian, coming from what is now Kazakhstan. More important, his father had been purged and declared an enemy of the people.
Junior Sergeants Kantaria and Yegorov, by contrast, had performed their feat under the guidance of a political commissar, which mattered a great deal. Kantaria was a Georgian, as was Stalin. Yegorov was a Russian. Together the two men represented the great leader of the Soviet Union and the majority Russian population, all under the wise political guidance of Commissar Berest.
The state decided the history of this famous event and who would be called a hero. It made sure the correct image, as they saw it, was presented to the Soviet people and the world. The photograph that emerged from the wreckage of Berlin was not the truth.
It was the story the leadership wanted told.