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The memorial on the Soviet honorary cemetery against the backdrop of the tower of St. Nicholas Church
Photo: Soeren Stache / picture alliance
Unknown persons have smeared the monument on the Soviet Cemetery of Honor in Potsdam with red paint.
The monument commemorates the Red Army soldiers who died in World War II.
The crime is said to have happened between Monday evening and Tuesday afternoon, according to the police in Brandenburg an der Havel.
Traces were secured and a report of damaging property was recorded.
The Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) had previously reported on it.
Accordingly, the perpetrators are said to have thrown a ketchup bottle filled with red paint at the monument.
Almost 400 graves in the complex and the memorial in the Brandenburg state capital commemorate the Soviet soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin.
According to the report, local politicians expressed their incomprehension.
"Here are soldiers who lost their lives in the liberation of Potsdam," said the chairman of the city council, Peter Heuer (SPD), the rbb.
There is no comprehensible connection with Russia's current war of aggression against Ukraine.
Already daubed several monuments
The smearing of the memorial with red paint is not the first incident of this kind at Soviet memorial sites.
The Soviet memorial in Berlin had already been smeared with paint twice.
Earlier in the week, the words "Murderer" and "Orcs" and the letter "Z" had been affixed to pillars painted white.
Orcs are willing executors of evil in the fantasy world of writer JRR Tolkien and his novel The Lord of the Rings.
At the beginning of April, slogans against the war in Ukraine and against Russian President Vladimir Putin were sprayed in red on the memorial.
As the "Tagesspiegel" reports, the Berlin police have identified more than a dozen color attacks on monuments and memorials since the beginning of the war.
ani/dpa
