Germany / Berlin

Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

World War II in Europe was brought to an end on the night of May 8/9, 1945, when leading officers of the German Wehrmacht signed the capitulation of the German Reich in a former officers' mess in Berlin-Karlshorst. Today, located in that very building is the German-Russian Museum which commemorates World War II, the events of the last days of war and the many victims, whose lives were claimed at that time.

History

Between 1936 and 1938, the German Wehrmacht had an officers' mess constructed for its engineer school in the Berlin district of Karlshorst. Since the building was not damaged in the war, the Red Army installed its headquarters here in April 1945, led by general Nikolai Berzarin. The Soviet Army organised the taking of Berlin's city centre - at that time still occupied by the Wehrmacht, the Volkssturm and the Hitlerjugend - from its base in Karlshorst. After all resistance had been suppressed and Berlin was militarily conquered by Soviet and Polish soldiers, Germany's unconditional surrender was signed in the night of May 8/9, 1945 by General Field Marshal Keitel, General Admiral von Friedeburg and Colonel General Stumpf in the large dining hall at Karlshorst. Their signatures were accepted by Marshal Zhukov as the Soviet Commander in Chief and the British Marshal and representative of Eisenhower, Sir Arthur Tedder. In addition, the American General Spaatz and the French General de Lattre de Tassigny attended as witnesses. Although a declaration of surrender had already been signed two days earlier by a representative of the German high command in the French town of Reims, only with the formal ratification in Berlin-Karlshorst was the war in Europe definitely ended. From 1945 until 1949, the building housed the headquarters of the Chief of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. Here, in 1949, the Soviet Military Administration handed over state authority to the newly founded German Democratic Republic.

Berlin, May 8, 1945, The former officers' mess of Pionierschule I, Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

Victims

It is estimated that well over fifty million people perished during World War II. Over twenty million soldiers and civilians died on the Soviet side. How many died in the battle for Berlin remains unclear - according to estimates about 100,000 fell on the German side and about 80,000 on the Soviet side. Tens of thousands of civilians in and around Berlin died.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

From 1967 until 1994 the »Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945« was located in the building. Influenced by Soviet authorities, the museum presented information about the Red Army's battle against the Wehrmacht and about the conquest of Berlin in April/May 1945. Since 1994, the museum has been maintained by an association which is jointly supported by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation. The museum was newly conceptualised and reopened under its current name on May 10, 1995. The national world war museums of Belarus and Ukraine joined the board in 1997/98. The museum's mission is to inform about the German-Soviet war 1941-1945 and especially about the final days of war in 1945, but also to present the changeful history of German-Soviet relations between 1917 and 1990. Aside from the historic rooms and the permanent exhibition, the museum regularly displays temporary exhibitions.
In 2013, a new permanent exhibition was opened in the museum. Aside the presentation of the military history of the war, it informs about the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, the suffering of the civilian population and the mass murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
Before 2022, the museum was commonly called »German-Russian Museum at Berlin-Karlshorst«. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, however, the museum has decided to only use the official name »Museum Berlin-Karlshorst« instead, without the adjectives »German-Russian«.

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, film series, music events, readings, academic seminars, temporary exhibitions, German-Russian exhibition catalogues, guided tours in several languages

Open

Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.

Contact

http://www.museum-karlshorst.de

kontakt@museum-karlshorst.de

+49 (0)30 501 508 10

Zwieseler Straße 4
10318 Berlin

Berlin, May 8, 1945, General Field Marshal Keitel before signing Germany's surrender, Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

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