We've all seen the picture of the victorious Soviet soldier raising the flag on the roof of the Reichstag after the Battle of Berlin.
It was obviously intended to be a propaganda photo. Despite this I was unaware of the real story behind the flag raising. The official Soviet history was that the photo was taken after the Reichstag was overrun on April 30th. In actuality it was taken on May 2nd. The man who raised the flag was a Georgian sergeant named Meliton Kantaria who was later awarded the award "Hero of the Soviet Union".
In reality the Reichstag was taken during a night attack led by Mikhail Minin. Here is his story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_MininJoseph Stalin had urged his troops to mount the flag on the Reichstag building no later than May 1, 1945. Minin's superiors had told the soldiers that any piece of red cloth fixed to the building would symbolize that the battle was won.
Minin recalled in a recent interview in a German documentary, the "War of the Century", that by the time the building needed to be stormed, morale among the victorious Soviet soldiers was low. They knew the building could only be taken on foot and it was still heavily defended. So his commanders decided to launch a night attack and Minin was put in charge of the platoon.
“Nobody really wanted to die that night because the war was already won,” he declared. “Even a promise by our officers that those who captured the building would get the highest decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union called forth few volunteers. Except for my little company.” As they made their way towards the Reichstag they were met by heavy fire. Ducking and weaving their way up to the portals of the building, they found they were bricked up. Minin reported that one of his men remembered seeing a felled tree in the neighborhood so they went back to get it and used it as a battering ram. As they entered there was sporadic fire from German soldiers. They responded with their machine guns and managed to go up the stairs and reach the roof. “But we had no flag with us. Instead we found a pole and a red rag and fixed it into a damaged statue symbolizing Victoria on the top of the building. I was euphoric. I had done my duty as a simple soldier.”
The members of his platoon was passed up for Hero of the Soviet Union medals for the sake of propaganda; although Kantaria being a Georgian like Stalin may have had something to do with it. President Yeltsin officially recognized his victory in 1995. He died on January 10, 2008. According to Wikipedia he was not the only Russian who claimed to have been put a banner on the Reichstag on April 30th, but I'm inclined to believe him.
A note on innacurate representations of the Soviet campaign; works of fiction like Call of Duty 5 would have the consumers believe that the push toward Berlin and the battle therein was a glorious series of battles against helmeted SS troops. In reality many of the defenders were 12 year old Hitler youth and very old militiamen. The reason there were so few German men left after the war was because they had all been killed off (the Nazis did not allow women to seriously participate in the war effort until 1943, and never in combat or combat related jobs, which was very foolish.) The Russians frequently executed all prisoners and raped almost all of the German women, girls, and concentration camp survivors they found along the way. They were in no way heros.
