Dear friends and comrades,
Happy Great and Holy Victory Day to you all!

Please see below the translation of a research on throwing the Nazi banners at the feet of the Mausoleum during the Victory Parade on 24 June 1945.

It is difficult to say who exactly came up with the idea of throwing the fascist banner at the foot of the Mausoleum. In one version, the Soviet historian Tarle reminded Stalin of the Roman tradition of throwing the banner of a defeated enemy at the feet of Caesar or the victorious commander.

General Shtemenko also claimed that the idea was declared by Stalin, who said: “We must bring Hitler’s banners to the parade throw them down to shame at the feet of the victors. Think about how to do this.” This was not new for Russian military tradition. The great Suvorov practiced the “execution” of captured banners as an act of “neglect not of the enemy, but of his defeated military distinctions.”

In March, about 900 enemy banners and standards collected by the trophy teams of the SMERSH military counterintelligence in the area of operations of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts were delivered and stored in the gym of the Lefortovo barracks. A special commission selected 200 trophies for the parade, including a number of Kaiser banners that were well preserved.

The enemy banners at the parade were to be thrown to the Mausoleum by 200 soldiers of the Special Joint Battalion, consisting mainly of soldiers of the 1st Special Purpose Motorized Rifle Division named after F.E. Dzerzhinsky. The first to be thrown to the foot of the Mausoleum was the standard of the 1st SS Panzer Division "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler" (often confused with Hitler's personal standard due to the inscriptions), then the rest of the enemy banners flew there.

After the throwing of the enemy standards, there are several unclear historical moments - where they were thrown (on the paving stones or on a special platform, "so as not to desecrate the square") and whether the gloves used by soldiers who carried them were burned afterwards.

According to a later research by historians, the banners were thrown on the steps to Mausoleum entrance. Prior to that, the Reich banners were "sweeping" the paving stones while being carried. Also, according to a legend, after the Parade the gloves (which carried Nazi symbolics) were supposed to be collected and consigned to fire. Historians have not found confirmation that such an order existed, but the soldiers said that they themselves "collected the gloves that touched the abomination and burned them"

The video on the original channel shows that very moment of triumph.