The surrender hall
Preserved with its furniture and flags.
Thm72 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Neptuul — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Andreas Teutsch (adtmuc) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Thomas Bruns — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because the first signing took place at Reims in France on 7 May before the Western Allies, and Stalin objected that the Soviet Union had borne the greater part of the war and the surrender should be signed in Berlin before its command. So it was repeated here the following night — which is why Russia marks Victory Day on 9 May while the West marks the 8th, owing to the time difference at the moment of signing.
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This building is where the Second World War ended in Europe. On the night of 8 May 1945, German army commanders signed the instrument of unconditional surrender in the dining hall of a former military engineering school in Karlshorst, east Berlin, before representatives of the Soviet Union, Britain, America and France. The hall is preserved today as it was that night: the tables arranged the same way, the flags in place. Standing in it produces an odd sense of ordinariness — a plain room in a plain building where a war that killed tens of millions came to an end. What distinguishes the museum is that it is jointly German-Russian: founded in cooperation between the two countries and presenting the war from both perspectives, which is genuinely rare. The exhibition covers the Eastern Front specifically — the front where most of the human losses occurred and which remains the least present in Western accounts. Entry is free, and it sits east of the city on the rail network.
Preserved with its furniture and flags.
The war from German and Russian perspectives.
Zwieseler Strasse 4, 10318 Berlin