Yevgeny Khaldei’s photograph on the roof of the Reichstag, 2 May 1945, in Adam Cuerden’s restoration of the Commons scan. Khaldei retouched the picture before it was first printed.Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945, restored by Adam Cuerden (public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
The Reichstag · 30 April – 13 May 1945
Red Army soldiers fixed the first flags to the Reichstag on the last day of April, in the middle of the battle and with no photographer there. Yevgeny Khaldei climbed to the roof on 2 May 1945 with a flag he had brought himself, set the scene up, and then retouched the picture with his own hands.
01The Reichstag
For Soviet propaganda the Reichstag was the target, the symbol of Hitler’s Germany. The assault on it began on 30 April 1945. For a time German troops held the lower rooms and Soviet troops the upper ones. The building was not finally taken until 2 May 1945, the day Berlin surrendered.
Soviet units carried red flags to mark what they had captured, and several groups set out for the Reichstag with one, so that at least one would get there. The roof was the prize.
Erst am 30. April 1945 gelang es Einheiten der Roten Armee, auf dem Dach die sowjetische Fahne zu hissen.“Only on 30 April did Red Army units succeed in hoisting the Soviet flag on the roof.” — Deutscher Bundestag
02The event and the image
Upper line: what happened on the roof. Lower line: the photograph. Which soldiers were first, and at what time, is disputed: the sources give different hours, and this story shows them side by side.
The roof and the picture, 30 April – 13 May
30 Apr 1945
Soviet infantry fight their way into the building on 30 April 1945. Inside, the two sides hold different floors.
30 April, afternoon
The division’s war log records a flag planted at 14:25 by Lieutenant Rakhimzhan Koshkarbaev and the scout Grigory Bulatov. The two men themselves later put it at 18:30. There was no camera.
Night of 30 April – 1 May
Alexei Berest, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria of the 150th Rifle Division fix its red assault flag high on the building. Accounts give 22:40 Berlin time; others about 3 a.m. Russian law dates it 1 May 1945. It was dark, and no photographer was there.
2 May 1945
On 2 May 1945 the building is finally taken, and General Weidling and his staff surrender Berlin.
2 May 1945, after the surrender
The TASS photographer goes up with three soldiers and a flag of his own. The fighting is over. He has them raise it again, and shoots.
13 May 1945
It first appears in the magazine Ogonyok, issue 19, 11 days after it was taken. By then Khaldei has darkened the sky with smoke and retouched a soldier’s wrist.
1946 and 1996
Yegorov and Kantaria, the men of the banner, become Heroes of the Soviet Union in 1946. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, one of the men in the photograph, is recognised only half a century later: a Hero of Russia in 1996.
03The photograph
The Bundestag’s own account of the building says the picture was “staged by Khaldei only days later and retouched by him several times”. None of this makes the moment false: the soldiers were real and so was the ruined city. But the picture the world knows was made, and then made again in the darkroom.
The photograph, as it became known
Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945, restored by Adam Cuerden (public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
2 May 1945
“Ich nahm die Fahne, die ich bei mir hatte.” — “I took the flag I had with me.” It was a handmade flag sewn by a tailor, not the banner of the night before.
In the darkroom
Before publication Khaldei dramatised the sky with two rising clouds of smoke, montaged into the background.
In the darkroom
The soldier steadying the flag-bearer wore something on each wrist. For fear the soldier would be branded a thief, Khaldei retouched one of them away before publication. The second “watch” was possibly a wrist compass.
The men in the picture
The soldiers in the photograph are not the ones credited with the flag. Khaldei named the flag-bearer as Aleksei Kovalyov; the man steadying him was identified in the 1990s as Abdulkhakim Ismailov. The third is named differently in different accounts.
2 May 1945
Another frame from the same roll: the same men, the flag hanging differently. Khaldei set the scene up and took it several times.
04Who was honoured
Moscow chose its flag-raisers from the banner of the 150th Division, not from the picture. The two men of the afternoon flag got no star at all.
Years from the flag to the honour
Bars run from the flags of 1945 to the award. Koshkarbaev and Bulatov were put forward for Hero of the Soviet Union and given the Order of the Red Banner instead, for reasons never explained.
30 April, afternoon
The division’s war log records their flag on the front of the building at 14:25. He was never made a Hero of the Soviet Union; Kazakhstan put him on a stamp for his centenary.
Rakhimzhan Koshkarbaev on a Kazakh stamp of 2024, issued for the centenary of his birth. T. Baskhozhayev / QazPost, 2024. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Night of 30 April – 1 May
Their assault flag became the official Victory Banner. It was flown to Moscow on 20 June for the Victory Parade, and Russia later gave it a law of its own.
Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria with other soldiers at the banner of the 150th Rifle Division, Berlin, 20 May 1945 (photograph by Khaldei; the archive does not say who is who). Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
2 May 1945
The men Khaldei photographed. Ismailov, from Dagestan, was recognised only half a century later and died in 2010, aged 93.
Another of Khaldei’s frames from the roof, 2 May 1945: the same soldiers and the same flag, which hangs differently. The scene was set up and shot more than once. Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
05Inside the building
In the days after the battle, Soviet soldiers streamed to the Reichstag. They wrote their names and home towns on its walls in coloured chalk or charcoal, as high as they could reach, standing on each other’s shoulders. Most wrote “Hier war …”: “… was here”, then a name, a date, a unit or the road they had come by.
When Norman Foster began stripping the interior in 1995, he found them behind the plasterboard Paul Baumgarten had put up in the 1960s. They were cleaned and conserved under the Berlin monuments office, with the Bundestag and the Russian embassy, and Foster framed them in the new plaster like paintings. Among those the Bundestag records:
“For Leningrad they have paid in full”; “Glory to the pontoon builders who conquered the Spree and its canals”. Veterans have come back more than half a century later and found their own handwriting. The building has been the seat of the Bundestag, under Foster’s glass dome, since 1999.
06The photographer
Yevgeny Khaldei was born in 1917 in Yuzovka, today Donetsk, into a Jewish family. His mother was killed in a pogrom when he was about a year old. He became a photographer for the news agency TASS in 1936 and followed the Red Army with his camera through the war.
In 1941/42 the Germans murdered his father and three of his siblings. When he climbed onto the roof of the Reichstag, he was photographing the defeat of the people who had killed them. He died in Moscow in 1997.
The corner of the building is still there, statues and all; only the city behind it has changed. The soldiers were real, the ruins were real, and the picture was made: all three are true.
The flags that went up first left no picture. The one the world remembers was set up afterwards with a flag the photographer brought.
The history is in the walls, in the soldiers’ own hand.
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Berlinfographics (2026). “The flags on the Reichstag, 1945”. Berlin Experiences. https://berlinfographics.com/reichstag-flag-raising/
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