range from the tiny Stolpersteine that can be seen in more than 500 towns and cities across Europe – simple brass cobbles set in the street outside houses where Jews once lived ; to the gigantic monuments and museums in Berlin , and vast memorial sites like Auschwitz and Dachau , which attract millions of visitors every year .
Unlike monuments to the heroes of the war , monuments to its martyrs have rarely been attacked by protesters or by governments . When they are – for example , when the famous wrought-iron gate of Auschwitz concentration camp were stolen by a far-right collector in 2010 – the attacks are greeted with universal , international outrage .
If you wish to create a monument that will stand the test of time , it is clearly much safer now to build a statue devoted to a martyr than one devoted to a hero . While real-life heroes can never live up to the ideal values we ascribe to them , martyrs do not need to : it is their suffering that is being commemorated , not their moral virtue .
Monument builders appear to have taken note . Even in the nations that traditionally consider themselves the heroes of the war , the idea of victimhood has become a much more central motif . In Britain , for example , the change has been dramatic . In 1992 the British were still commemorating heroes like Sir Arthur Harris , the wartime head of Bomber Command who had been responsible for the bombing of hundreds of cities across Europe . Perhaps unsurprisingly , demonstrators turned out in force during the inauguration of the statue . Twenty years later , however , a separate Bomber Command Memorial was erected in central London . This monument was dedicated to the 55,000 men of Bomber Command who lost their lives ( almost no mention was made of the 600,000 who had also died beneath Allied bombs ). Furthermore , it was inaugurated after a campaign by several British newspapers claiming that the veterans of Bomber Command had been treated unfairly for decades . The message was clear – this was a memorial to victims , not heroes .
The Russians have also learned their lesson . The brand new Memorial to the Soviet Soldier , unveiled by Vladimir Putin in 2020 at Rzhev , looks a little like an old school Soviet monument . The main statue . which stands 25 metres tall , is a squarejawed hero whose face looks like an image from a 1950s Soviet poster . But his body is made up of a flock of flying cranes – symbols of the souls of those who died in battle . The rest of the site is dominated by broken walls inscribed with the names of the dead . This is Russia reimagining its past : if it can no longer be the greatest hero of the Second World War , it must stake a claim to being the war ’ s greatest victim .
Herein lies the reason why monuments like those at Treptower Park should be protected now more than ever . Not only are they reminders of the greatest European war in history ; they are also a reminder of a time when we still allowed ourselves to believe in heroes . That time , like the wartime generation itself , is slowly slipping away . overview
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