Marcel Krueger on a project that documents the Red Army’s time in East Germany…
In 2014, Italian photographers Stefano Corso and Dario-Jacopo Laganá travelled more than 8,000 kilometres by car, took 10,000 photos and visited more than 200 former military locations, all with one goal: to document the physical traces of the Red Army in Germany.
“Myself and Stefano have always liked history and how society changes in relation to historical events,” explains Dario, who is also the founder of the historically-minded Elephant in Berlin blog. “When I first came to live in Berlin, I quickly discovered the huge Soviet memorial in Treptower Park. I realised that, although it was well known, it was not quite famous and certainly not overcrowded. This got me thinking about the topic of the Russians here in Germany and in a way was the starting point for the project.”
The project’s appeal indeed stems from the way it documents a part of German history that, up until now, hasn’t had much mainstream attention. The Red Army effectively occupied East Germany from May 8th, 1945, when the dust was still settling over a destroyed Berlin and German forces had unconditionally surrendered, creating the so-called Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone or SBZ in German).
Assigned official responsibility for the eastern part of Germany through the Potsdam Treaty, the zone was divided, in 1947, into the newly-created German federal states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt und Thuringia. On the 7 October 1949, the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Soviet involvement in the administrative responsibilities and politics of this new state theoretically ended. The Red Army, however, stayed.
Since the GDR marked the official frontline of the Cold War and the fledgling Republic did not have a standing army until 1956, the Russian military were assigned the task of enforcing the regulations of the Potsdam Treaty; for example, Allied military personnel passing from West Berlin along the corridors through the GDR and into West Germany could only be inspected by Red Army troops.
In 1957 a treaty between the governments of the Soviet Union and the GDR about the arrangements of Soviet armed forces on the territory of the GDR was signed, specifying that the Soviet armed forces were not to interfere into the internal affairs of the GDR (as they had done during the Uprising of 1953 in E…