The photograph is one of the most famous images of the twentieth century. Soviet soldiers raise the red flag above the ruined Reichstag, the symbol of the USSR’s triumph over Nazi Germany in the Battle of Berlin. There is only one problem. The photograph is a fake.
It is not a genuine image of the actual flag raising. It is a recreation, staged after the event, and then doctored into a composite by a Soviet war photographer who wanted to please his masters. Before condemning the Soviets too quickly, it is worth remembering that nearly every power in that war tampered with history. The famous photograph of US Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima, taken months before the flag went up in Berlin, is also not what it appears to be.
It does not show the first flag raising but the second. And it served as the direct inspiration for the Soviet version. George Orwell would have recognized the process. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and manufactures lies to support Big Brother.
Substitute Joseph Stalin for Big Brother, and you have this photograph. The trouble began with a date. The Soviets had orders from the very top that the Reichstag, the unused German Parliament building in Berlin, must be captured by May Day, the first of May 1945, International Workers’ Day. The building had to fall, and the red flag had to fly from its roof by then.
The Reichstag was not in use by the Nazi regime, but it had become a symbol of Berlin to the Soviets. It had to be taken at all costs. The SS defended it fiercely. The doors and windows were bricked up and loopholed.
The surrounding buildings, trenches, and tanks formed a ring of protection. The great square in front had been turned into a killing ground, swept by fire from the zoo flak tower, an impregnable citadel housing large anti-aircraft guns firing in the ground role. The Reichstag blocked the advance of Soviet divisions from the Third Shock Army. They had to get across the Moltke Bridge, past the Brandenburg Gate, and on toward the Reich Chancellery and Hitler’s bunker in the defense sector known as the Citadel.
The Germans defended the Citadel with everything they had. The Soviets crossed the Moltke Bridge on the twenty-ninth of April, battling through the Ministry of the Interior, which they called Himmler’s House, and through the diplomatic quarter. Assaults against the Reichstag by the 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions failed with heavy losses. On the thirtieth of April, the day Hitler would die, renewed attacks were launched against the building.
Among the men who had captured Himmler’s House was a young lieutenant from what is now Kazakhstan, Rakhimzhan Koshkarbayev. He commanded the reconnaissance platoon of the 674th Infantry Regiment, 150th Rifle Division. On the thirtieth, his regimental commander handed him a large Soviet flag with orders to get it on top of the Reichstag by May Day. Koshkarbayev had been born in 1924.
His father had been purged in 1937 and labeled an enemy of the people. The son had joined the Red Army in August 1942 and been commissioned as a junior lieutenant in October 1944. He had seen heavy combat in the advance across Poland and into Germany. Now promoted to full lieutenant, he faced the horrendous attack to close up to the Reichstag on the thirtieth.
He and one of his men, Grigory Bulatov, managed to get inside the huge building and planted the flag at about 2:25 in the afternoon, at the top of a staircase in front of the main entrance. But the flag had to fly from the roof so all Soviet troops could see it. Under fire, the two men found their way up to the roof, where they were immediately pinned down by heavy German defensive fire and artillery. They were trapped for hours.
While they waited, both men wrote their names on the flag. It was only when darkness fell that they could come out of hiding. They could not see much until an explosion lit up the night. In the flash, they saw a large bronze sculpture directly above the Reichstag’s entrance.
It depicted a woman wearing a crown, riding a bronze horse. It was called Germania. Koshkarbayev climbed onto the sculpture to raise the banner while Bulatov helped steady him. Once it was fixed into place, he checked his watch.
It was 10:40 p. m. on the thirtieth of April. They had made it.
The flag was atop the Reichstag, one hour and twenty minutes before May Day. There was one enormous problem. It was pitch dark. Only artillery and small arms flashes broke the night.
In the smoky, dusty air, no one could see the flag, and no one could photograph it. The feat of these two men was reported up the chain of command. The higher command had promised the title Hero of the Soviet Union to any man who could place a flag atop the Reichstag by May Day. Neither Koshkarbayev nor Bulatov received that award.
Both received the lower Order of the Red Banner. Koshkarbayev’s flag did not last long. As soon as dawn broke, German snipers shot it down. That left a propaganda problem.
An image of a red flag atop the Reichstag was needed to show the Soviet people and the world the great victory over the fascists. Several other small groups of Soviet soldiers tried to get a flag onto the building. One story involved Mikhail Minin of the 136th Artillery Brigade, accompanied by three sergeants. These men claimed to have entered the Reichstag in the early morning hours of May Day during the fighting, broken down a locked door, climbed into the attic, and reached the roof through a smashed window.
They guarded their flag until 5:00 a. m. , when they were relieved. They too were nominated for Hero of the Soviet Union.
They too only received the Order of the Red Banner. On the second of May 1945, Berlin surrendered. The Reichstag garrison finally came out with their hands raised after a truly horrendous battle. Fortunately, one man was well prepared to ensure the propaganda photograph would be taken.
Soviet war photographer Evgeny Khaldei of the TASS news agency in Moscow arrived by plane in Berlin on the second of May. He carried with him a large Soviet flag made for him by his tailor uncle from three red tablecloths. By the time Khaldei arrived at the Reichstag, the building was already covered in red banners placed there by victorious Soviet troops. He asked around as to who had planted the first flag.
An eighteen-year-old named Aleksei Kovalev was pushed forward by other soldiers. Kovalev had indeed planted one of the flags on May Day, but it was not the first. Khaldei asked Kovalev and his comrades to escort him up to the roof and help him plant the flag he had brought from Moscow. In the photograph, the eighteen-year-old Kovalev reaches up to affix the flag into position.
The soldier reaching up to steady Kovalev was Abdulkhakim Ismailov, a Kalmyk from Dagestan and a veteran of Stalingrad. The flag was not raised at the front of the Reichstag, as one would suppose, but at the rear, on a bronze decoration. The statues in the background still exist today. Khaldei stood on a tower looking across and down toward the flag.
In the background, the Brandenburg Gate is visible, with the Tiergarten Park to its right. But there were problems with the photograph. The image was censored. Ismailov is wearing two watches, a sign that he had been looting.
Such behavior, if shown, was considered damaging to the reputation of the Red Army internationally. Therefore, the second watch was erased from the negative by Khaldei. The photo was further doctored by superimposing thick black smoke taken from another photograph. It was also heavily darkened to make the battlefield scene look more apocalyptic and heroic.
So which soldiers received the title Hero of the Soviet Union? That decision was carefully considered by the Soviet political authorities. It was not simply a case of who was first. It was a case of who was acceptable to the political mentality of the leadership at that time.
The honor went to two junior sergeants, Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov, both of the 150th Rifle Division. They had raised a flag earlier on May Day in company with Lieutenant Alexei Berest, a Ukrainian political commissar. Under fire, the three men had made their way onto the roof and planted their makeshift flag. No photographs had been taken at the time.
The following day, under orders from the political department, the men had returned to raise a much larger flag atop the now surrendered Reichstag. Why had Lieutenant Koshkarbayev and Private Bulatov been snubbed when it came to the title Hero of the Soviet Union? They were the first to plant a flag atop the Reichstag on the thirtieth of April 1945. The reason was probably that Koshkarbayev looked Asian, coming from what is now Kazakhstan.
And perhaps even more important, his father had been purged and declared an enemy of the people. Junior Sergeants Kantaria and Yegorov had performed their feat with the help of a political commissar, which was important. Kantaria was a Georgian, as was Stalin. Yegorov was Russian.
The two men together represented the great leader of the Soviet Union and the majority Russian population, under the wise political guidance of Commissar Berest. The state decided the history of the event. The state decided who was a hero. The state ensured that the correct image, according to their thinking, was presented to the Soviet people and to the world.
The men in the famous photograph were actors in a staged scene, the smoke was borrowed, the watches were airbrushed away, and the true first heroes were written out of the record. The photograph remains one of the most iconic images of the Second World War. But it is a lie, carefully constructed, carefully censored, and carefully delivered to the world. The real story of the flag above the Reichstag belongs to men who were in the right place at the right time but had the wrong faces and the wrong fathers.
History was rewritten to fit the image, and the image was worth more than the truth.
