Raising a Flag over the Reichstag

• 1. Introduction

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  Raising a Flag over the Reichstag was taken on the 2nd of May 1945, and it shows two Soviet soldiers planting a flag on the roof of the most recognizable building in Nazi Germany. The photograph was reprinted in thousands of publications and came to be seen around the world as one of the most significant images of the entire war. But almost nothing about it was straightforward. The identities of the men in the frame were disputed for decades. The image itself had been altered before it ever ran in print. And the flag that appears so triumphantly raised had actually gone up hours after several other flags had already been placed on the same roof. How did a single photograph, taken in the chaos of a still-burning city, come to carry the full weight of Soviet victory? And who, exactly, is in it?

• 2. A Symbol Worth Dying For

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  The Reichstag was erected in 1894 as the seat of the German national legislature, and its architecture was considered magnificent for its time. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin in April 1945, the building had been closed for twelve years. The Reichstag fire of 1933 had gutted the interior, and all subsequent meetings of the legislature had moved to the nearby Kroll Opera House instead. As Nazi decision-making became centralized with Hitler and his cabinet, those sessions grew increasingly infrequent. To the Nazis themselves, the building was a symbol of democratic weakness, not strength. Yet the Soviet Union saw it differently. For the Red Army, the Reichstag was the ultimate emblem of their fascist enemy in Berlin. It was arguably the most symbolic target in the entire city. That symbolic weight would drive soldiers into some of the bloodiest close-quarters fighting of a battle that had already claimed enormous casualties since it opened on the 16th of April 1945, when the Red Army breached the German front and advanced westward at up to 30-40 kilometres a day.

• 3. The Night of Many Flags

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  Before Khaldei ever climbed to the roof, a tangle of competing claims had already formed around who first raised a flag on the Reichstag. Two planes dropped large red banners that appeared to catch on the bombed-out dome. A report reached Marshal G. K. Zhukov that M. M. Bondar of the 380th Rifle Regiment and Captain V. N. Makov of the 756th may have hoisted flags during the day of the 30th of April. Zhukov announced that his troops had captured the building and raised a banner. When correspondents arrived, they found the building still held by German defenders, with Soviet soldiers pinned down outside. Rakhimzhan Qoshqarbaev and a companion reportedly mounted a flag at 14:25. That flag was deemed too low, placed in a second-floor window, so the pair moved it higher. A separate group of four men, M. Minin, G. Zagitov, A. Lisimenko, and A. Bobrov, reached the rooftop and attached a flag to a sculpture called the Goddess of Victory on the western pediment at around 22:30. Two more groups followed, planting flags at the Goddess of Victory and at a second sculpture called Germania. The flag that would eventually appear in Khaldei's photograph went up at around 3 in the morning. It was the only one of those flags to survive the continued shelling of the building.

• 4. The Man with the Tablecloth Flag

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  Yevgeny Khaldei climbed the now-pacified Reichstag on the 2nd of May 1945 carrying a flag his uncle had sewn from three tablecloths for that specific purpose. He shot the photograph with a Leica III rangefinder camera fitted with a 35mm f3.5 lens. The official Soviet account would later present the event as a deliberate ceremony: two hand-picked soldiers, the Georgian Meliton Kantaria and the Russian Mikhail Yegorov, had been selected to raise the Victory Banner as the first official flag over the Reichstag. That photograph, the story held, was the record of that moment. Khaldei told it differently. According to his own account, he arrived at the building and simply asked passing soldiers to help him stage the shot. The man attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Aleksei Kovalev, from Burlin in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The two others in the frame were Abdulkhakim Ismailov, from the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and Leonid Gorychev, from Minsk. Some authors have concluded that for political reasons the official identities were substituted, and that Kovalev was in fact the actual flag-raiser. The secrecy of Soviet media kept these questions alive for decades.

• 5. The Darkroom Controversy

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  After returning to Moscow, Khaldei altered the image before it was published in the 13th of May 1945 issue of Ogonyok magazine. The editor-in-chief had noticed that Senior Sergeant Abdulkhakim Ismailov, who is supporting the flag-bearer in the shot, appeared to be wearing two watches. A second watch on a soldier's wrist could suggest looting. Using a needle, Khaldei removed the watch from Ismailov's right wrist. A later claim held that the removed item was actually an Adrianov compass and not a stolen watch, but Khaldei altered it regardless to avoid any controversy. He also increased the contrast of the overall print and added smoke in the background, montaging it from a second negative taken from the same roll of film. That additional sky made the final image more square in format and the scene more dramatic. While many other photographers had taken pictures of flags on the Reichstag roof before Khaldei reached the top, his altered and composed image became the one that endured. The photograph's copyright, because Khaldei shot it in his capacity as an employee of the TASS news agency, belongs to TASS rather than to Khaldei himself.

• 6. Copyright and Legacy

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  Russian copyright law grants works created by legal entities a term of 70 years after publication, or after creation if the work was not published before the 3rd of August 1993. Because Raising a Flag over the Reichstag was published in 1945, its Russian copyright expired on the 1st of January 2016. The question of who owned the image was formally tested in court. In 2015, Khaldei's daughter Anna Khaldei brought a case against the publishing house Veche over the photograph's use in a book titled Za Porogom Pobedy, or Behind the Threshold of the Victory, written by Arsen Benikovich Martirosyan. ITAR-TASS was named a third party in those proceedings without a separate interest. The ruling confirmed where the rights resided: with the agency, not the photographer's family. Kovalev, the 18-year-old private from Burlin who attached the flag in the photograph, lived on as one of the named subjects of an image that millions would see without ever knowing his name.