Maria Limanskaya joined the Soviet Union’s Red Army as a reservist in spring of 1942, when she was just 18. She was put to work sewing clothes for soldiers before training as a military traffic controller, but the next three years proved eventful to say the least. She helped to direct Soviet troops across the River Don under heavy German fire; she witnessed the Battle of Stalingrad and the Soviet liberation of Poland and Belarus; she contracted malaria and narrowly escaped death on two occasions — once when a lorry nearly ran her over and again when she left a building seconds before it was hit by a bomb.
Then came her moment of fame. In May 1945 the Red Army rolled into Berlin at the end of a two-week battle against the remnants of Hitler’s forces for control of the German capital. Limanskaya heard about the victory from a passing lorry driver and soon found herself controlling traffic in the centre of the ruined city.
That was where the celebrated Tass war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei spotted her. Using flags, she was directing vehicles from a podium in front of the Brandenburg Gate, a landmark pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel and bedecked with a banner proclaiming: “Glory to the Soviet Troops”.
Khaldei took two iconic photos with his Leica camera in those giddy days immediately after the fall of Berlin. The first was posed, and showed a Soviet soldier raising the hammer-and-sickle flag over the wreckage of the Reichstag; the other was one of Limanskaya, which was also published around the world and quickly became a symbol of the war’s end and the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Limanskaya was variously dubbed the “Victory Traffic Controller”, the “Brandenburg Madonna” and the “Queen of the Brandenburg Gate”. The only problem was that she was wrongly named. “I saw [the photograph] for the first time in the Rabotnitsa magazine in the 1960s,” she recalled. “But the caption said it wasn’t me but some other girl. I wrote a letter to the magazine and a reply came from Yevgeny Khaldei himself. He apologised for his mistake.” She had been confused, perhaps, with Lydia Spivak, another traffic controller who was famously filmed while dancing with Soviet soldiers on top of their tanks in the centre of Berlin.
Advertisement
Limanskaya also recalled a second event from the days that followed the fall of Berlin. The Potsdam conference opened in July, bringing Winston Churchill, President Truman and Joseph Stalin together to plan the postwar peace. Limanskaya was by that time directing traffic in Potsdam, and surprised at how British, American and French troops were lying around on the grass with their guns hung from trees.
One day a motorcade passed. She saluted and the main car stopped right by her. Out stepped Churchill, puffing on a cigar and looking “exactly the way I imagined him”, she said. Through an interpreter, he asked her if the British soldiers were behaving. “If they don’t, our soldiers will defend us,” she replied. Churchill smiled and left. The Red Army’s soldiers were in fact raping German women and girls on an industrial scale.
Little is known of Maria Filippovna Limanskaya’s early life beyond the fact that she was born in the Volgograd region of western Russia in 1924 and became one of about 800,000 women to serve in the Red Army during the Second World War. She was awarded various medals, including the Order of the Patriotic War, and returned to civilian life in Volgograd after the war, working first as a nurse and later as a school librarian.
She and her first husband divorced, leaving her to bring up two daughters by herself but she later met a war veteran named Viktor to whom she was married for 23 years until his death. Thereafter she lived with one of her daughters in a village called Zvonarevka in the Saratov region of western Russia.
The woman who had captured the world’s imagination back in 1945 was not entirely forgotten. In 1982 Khaldei sent her a copy of his famous photograph of her with a personal dedication, as well as photographs of Churchill, Truman and Stalin that he had taken in Potsdam. Two years after that the pair met again, and Khaldei took photographs of Limanskaya wearing her wartime medals. He died in 1997 and his famous Leica was later sold for £143,000.
Advertisement
In 2020 the authorities erected a bronze statue of the “Brandenburg Madonna” in the city of Marx near her village in the Saratov region. By then one of her grandchildren had married a German and settled in Germany with three of Limanskaya’s five great-grandchildren.
Maria Limanskaya, subject of an iconic Second World War photograph, was born in Volgograd, Russia, on April 12, 1924. She died in the Saratov region of Russia on November 26, 2024, aged 100
