The German-Russian Museum
This museum looks at the Second World War from the point of view of the Russians and Germans who fought each other on the eastern front. If you’re more familiar with what British and US troops did, the museum’s displays add a new dimension.
Why go there?
Why trek out to the suburbs when there’s already so much on offer in the centre of Berlin? Germany signed the unconditional surrender at this otherwise ordinary villa in Karlshorst, putting an end to the Second World War. The museum’s first and biggest ‘exhibit’ is the grand room where the ceremony of surrender took place.
You probably need to set aside a day for visiting the museum as it’s an S-Bahn ride from the city centre (take the S3 towards Erkner), followed by a bus ride or walk, and once you get there the exhibition is quite extensive. It’s spread over two floors, with captions translated into English.
The museum focuses on the ideas that started and sustained the war in the East and on the experiences of those who lived through it. Apart from a Russian tank in the garden, which forms part of a memorial to Russian soldiers, weaponry plays only a minor role in the displays, so if you’re interested in military hardware then you might prefer the Military History Museum at the Gatow Airfield on the other side of Berlin.
Children can play in the garden and it would be easy enough to distract toddlers with some of the objects, such as a scale model of the city of Kharkov, while you read. Given its content, it’s not a museum with child-friendly exhibits or activities but it is also contains very few immediately shocking images so there’s no reason to avoid taking children.
What’s Inside?
The main permanent exhibition covers the build-up to war, the make-up of the two armies, and war propaganda on both sides. A significant amount of space is given over to the crimes against humanity committed by (or with the support of) the German army in pursuit of Nazi war aims: mistreatment of the occupied civilian population; mistreatment of Soviet POWs; and the Holocaust.
The museum makes effective use of facts and figures to make the visitor stop and think: a simple map of Berlin with a dot for every forced-labour camp gives a sense of the sheer scale and public visibility of this practice. Mostly, stick in the mind. The museum has . A folding panorama of the Leningrad waterfront, sold as a souvenir to the German army, shows the extreme imbalance of power in a siege. The besiegers act like they are sightseeing while the besieged starve and defend their lives.
Although the museum isn’t about the war in the West, you will find a few objects which show British and US support (material and political) for their Soviet allies. These include a pork luncheon meat tin from the US, representative of the food aid sent to the Soviet Union, and a British public information leaflet titled ‘USSR: The Strength of Our Ally’.
When the Allied occupation ended, the Soviets kept a lease on this building and used it for training soldiers stationed in East Germany. One educational tool was a ‘Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945’. Some of the original displays from the Surrender Museum have been kept, creating a ‘museum within a museum’ that reminds the visitor how subjective history-telling can be.
The museum also specialises in war photography and shows temporary exhibitions on Soviet and German war photographers.
German History Museums 