Hotels near Treptower Park

Treptower Park runs along the Spree in the southeast and holds the Soviet War Memorial, a monument on a scale that has to be seen to register: a 12-metre bronze soldier holding a child and a lowered sword standing over the graves of around 7,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin. The approach runs between two vast stone flags of red granite, reputedly taken from Hitler's Reich Chancellery.

The park around it is the other half of the visit: mature riverside woodland that turns through October, boat hire on the Spree in the warmer weeks, and the Archenhold Observatory, which holds the longest refracting telescope in the world and is where Einstein gave his first Berlin lecture on relativity in 1915. The park and the memorial are both free and open at all hours.

Pro Tip: Approach the memorial on foot from Treptower Park station through the trees rather than from the riverside. The design is built around a long axial approach and coming at it the intended way, with the scale opening up gradually, is the whole point of the thing.