One of the largest monument complexes in Berlin, realised in the GDR era by an international team, whose creation was intended as an official expression of friendship and cooperation between the two 'people's' states. It was created by combining two prize-winning designs from a closed competition, whose German-Polish jury included Professor Jan Zachwatowicz. The monument was unveiled by the First Secretary of the SED, Erich Honnecker.

The Friedrichshain public park was created in 1846 according to a concept by the famous garden designer Peter Joseph Lenné. It contains many sculptures, monuments from the 19th century, and during the GDR period a monument to the Spanish Revolution was erected there, among others. The park was regarded as particularly important for propaganda because of the cemetery of the victims of the Berlin March Revolution of 1848, which was also located there. At the edge of the park, a structure with terraces and steps was created, into which a multi-part memorial to the Second World War and the participation of the People's Polish Army, the Soviet army and the German anti-fascists was integrated. The propaganda significance of the concept is marked above all by the national coats of arms of the People's Republic of Poland and the GDR, placed on twin concrete pylons-obelisks, which are linked at the top by a winged bronze form resembling a banner unfurled in the wind. This is by far the most successful artistic metaphor of the entire complex, close to many solutions of Polish monuments of the 1960s, and is the work of Tadeusz Łodziany (cf. e.g. his monument to the victims of the Radogoszcz camp in Łódź and the monument to the brotherhood of arms in Gołdap, created in cooperation with Zofia Wolska). Below, on a squat concrete wall, there is a stone relief depicting three soldiers - Polish, German and Soviet - and next to it a large inscription "For our freedom and yours" (repeated in German). These objects are interestingly inscribed into the slope of the park hill descending towards them. The 220 tonnes of granite used for the reliefs were brought from quarries in Poland.

During the GDR period, the site was also referred to as a monument to the German-Polish brotherhood of arms (Waffenbrüderschaft).