Unknown soldier

The huge Soviet 'Tomb of the Unknown Soldier' in Berlin's Tiergarten was known for many

years after the war as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist, due to the savage behaviour of the

Russian troops in their long march, after Stalingrad, to the capital of the Nazi empire in 1945.

Given the atrocities committed by the German SS and even the Wehrmacht - the regular

army - during their short stay in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, the Red Army's rampage,

which went on for some months after Berlin fell, has been excused by some historians as

understandable.

But this is not that memorial, this is Germany's own Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Sited in

the 19th century Prussian guardhouse known as the Neue Wache, on Unter den Linden in

central Berlin, it now incorporates a memorial to the Unknown Victims of the concentration

camps. The statue is by Käthe Kollwitz, replacing an earlier plinth that had commemorated

the fallen of WW1 and which had become tainted by association with Nazism. Amid the

hurly-burly, a quiet place to reflect on the horrors of the last century.

The huge Soviet 'Tomb of the Unknown Soldier' in Berlin's Tiergarten was known for many years

after the war as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist, due to the savage behaviour of the Russian

troops in their long march, after Stalingrad, to the capital of the Nazi empire in 1945. Given the

atrocities committed by the German SS and even the Wehrmacht - the regular army - during

their short stay in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, the Red Army's rampage, which went on for

some months after Berlin fell, has been excused by some historians as understandable.

But this is not that memorial, this is Germany's own Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Sited in the

19th century Prussian guardhouse known as the Neue Wache, on Unter den Linden in central

Berlin, it now incorporates a memorial to the Unknown Victims of the concentration camps. The

statue is by Käthe Kollwitz, replacing an earlier plinth that had commemorated the fallen of WW1

and which had become tainted by association with Nazism. Amid the hurly-burly, a quiet place

to reflect on the horrors of the last century.