On April 30, 1945, senior sergeant Nikolai Masalov, risking his life, brought out a German girl from under fire, which became the plot of the monument to the Liberator Soldier in Berlin
The monument in Berlin's Treptower Park is widely known not only in our country and not only in Germany. But not everyone knows that the idea of the monument was prompted by a real story that took place at the very end of the war in the Tiergarten, one of the central districts of the German capital.
It happened during the battles for the capture of Berlin. Soldiers of the 79th Guards Rifle Division as part of the 8th Guards Army of Colonel General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov went to the canal, behind which there were fortified enemy positions that defended Hitler's headquarters and the main communications center of the Nazi troops. In his post-war memoirs, V. I. Chuikov wrote about this place that "the bridges and approaches to them are densely mined and densely covered with machine gun fire."
Silence reigned shortly before the decisive attack. And suddenly in this silence there was a cry of a child who called his mother. The regiment's standard-bearer, senior sergeant Nikolai Masalov, heard the children's cry. To get to the child, it was necessary to cross an area filled with mines and completely shot from cannons and machine guns. But the mortal danger did not stop Masalov. He turned to the commander with a request to allow him to save the baby. And so the guard sergeant crawled, hiding from shrapnel and bullets, and finally got to the child. Nikolai Ivanovich Masalov later recalled: “Under the bridge I saw a three-year-old girl sitting next to her murdered mother. The baby had blonde hair that was slightly curled at the forehead. She kept pulling at her mother's belt and calling: "Mutter, mutter!" There is no time to think about it. I am a girl in an armful - and back. And how she will shout! I am on the move, and so, and so I persuade: shut up, they say, otherwise you will open me. Here, indeed, the Nazis began to shoot. " Then Masalov said loudly: “Attention! I'm with a child. Cover me with fire. Machine gun on the right, on the balcony of a house with columns. Plug his throat!.. ". And the Soviet soldiers responded with heavy fire, and then artillery preparation began. Under the cover of this fire, Sergeant Masalov made it to his own people unharmed and handed the rescued child to the regiment headquarters.
In August 1946, after the Potsdam Conference of the anti-Hitler coalition countries, Marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov had the idea to create a memorial in Berlin's Treptower Park, where about 7,000 Soviet soldiers were buried. Voroshilov told about his proposal to a wonderful sculptor, former front-line soldier Yevgeny Viktorovich Vuchetich. I must say that they were well acquainted: in 1937, the sculptor received a gold medal at the World Art and Industrial Exhibition in Paris for the sculptural group "Kliment Voroshilov on horseback."
As a result of the conversation with Voroshilov, Vuchetich got several versions of the monument. One of them represented the figure of Stalin holding the earth's hemisphere or the image of Europe in his hands. But then Evgeny Viktorovich remembered the cases when our soldiers saved German children from death, and V. I. Chuikov. These stories inspired Vuchetich to create another version, with a soldier holding a baby on his chest. At first it was a soldier with a PPSh submachine gun. Both options were seen by Stalin, and he chose the figure of a soldier. He only insisted that the machine gun be replaced with a more symbolic weapon - a sword that cuts through the fascist swastika.
The monument to the Liberator Soldier was made in 1949 in Leningrad at the Monumental Architecture plant. Since the 12-meter-high sculpture weighed more than 70 tons, it was taken to the installation site disassembled into six parts by waterway. And in Berlin, 60 German sculptors and two hundred stonecutters worked on the production of individual elements of the monument. In total, 1200 workers were involved in the creation of the monument. The monument to the Liberator Soldier was inaugurated on May 8, 1949 by the Soviet commandant of Berlin, Major General Alexander Georgievich Kotikov.
In 1964, journalists in East Germany tried to find the very girl who was rescued by senior sergeant Masalov. Materials about this story and messages about the search were published by central and many local newspapers of the GDR. As a result, it turned out that the feat of N. I. Masalova was not the only one - it became known about many cases of the rescue of German children by Russian soldiers.
The monument in Berlin's Treptower Park reminds of the true character, humanism and strength of spirit of the Russian soldier-liberator: he did not come to take revenge, but to protect the children, whose fathers brought so much destruction and grief to his native country. The poem of the poet Georgy Rublev "Monument", dedicated to the liberator-soldier, speaks about this with poetic force:
“… But then, in Berlin, under fire
A fighter was crawling, and his body was shielding
Baby girl in a short white dress
Gently carried it out of the fire.
… How many children have their childhood returned, Gave joy and spring
Privates of the Soviet Army
People who won the war!"
