“This is a sight you will never forget”

Yevgeny Khaldei

Yevgeny Khaldei (1917–1997) documented through his photographs the devastating scale of the Second World War as well as the processes of reflection and reconstruction in the postwar period.

Following the violent occupation of nearly all of Europe, on 22 June 1941 the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. From the very beginning, Nazi Germany waged a racially motivated war of conquest and extermination in the East. By the end of the war, approximately 27 million people had perished in the Soviet Union alone.

As a photographer of the Red Army, Khaldei documented various stages of the war in the Soviet Union — in Murmansk, Rostov-on-Don, and Sevastopol. He also recorded the advance of the Red Army and the liberation of cities such as Budapest and Vienna. In these photographs, Khaldei preserved the joy of people freed from fascist oppression.

The exhibition presents a unique photograph of the Soviet poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky holding a sculpted head of Hitler. This image, taken in Berlin near the Reichstag, conveys both the weight of the past and a powerful symbol of the defeat of Nazism.

Khaldei’s iconic photograph — the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 — brought him worldwide recognition.

After the end of the Second World War, he was commissioned to travel to Nuremberg to photograph the city as well as the “trial of the major war criminals.”

On the occasion of the 81st anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the City of Dresden commemorates this historical moment and presents photographs by Yevgeny Khaldei in an exhibition at Galerie Orangerie. The exhibition spans a wide range — from battlefields in the occupied Soviet Union to the trials of Nazi crimes in Nuremberg.

For many years, Khaldei’s photographic archive was held in the United States. Following a court decision in New York, it was returned to his daughter, Anna Efimovna Khaldei, who spent 18 years fighting to restore historical justice. After the archive was returned to the Khaldei family, exhibitions of his work resumed with renewed intensity, including in 2021 at the Memorium Nuremberg Trials Museum under the curatorship of Steffen Liebscher. In December 2025, he visited Galerie Orangerie in Dresden with a lecture dedicated to the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials.

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the German-Russian Institute of Culture and Galerie Orangerie under the curatorship of Denis and Grigory Puchkov.

Special thanks are extended to Anna E. Khaldei for her trust and support, as well as to Dr. Denis Puchkov, attorney-at-law, for providing the exhibited works.

The exhibition includes photographs from the private collections of Anna E. Khaldei and Denis V. Puchkov.

* Quote by Yevgeny Khaldei