Berlin - The photograph of a Red Army solder hoisting the hammer and sickle atop the still smouldering Reichstag building as clouds of black smoke swirled in the background, made Russian photographer Yevgeni Khaldei famous.

One of a series of dramatic shots taken in Berlin days before the end of World War II, it signalled not only the capitulation of Hitler's Nazi regime, but also the denouement of six years of bitter hostilities.

Khaldei's Reichstag photos, taken on May 2, 1945, along with numerous other spectacular wartime shots, some of them never published, are currently to be viewed at a major retrospective of the Russian's work in the Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

Curator Ernst Vollend says that, of the 200 photographs featured in the exhibition, the Reichstag image is the most famous.

"A lot of people know his pictures of the flag," says Vollend. "It's one of the most reproduced photos in the world of the 20th century.

"It's been in every schoolbook, more than his photos from the Potsdam Conference and the Nuremburg trials. But nobody knew his name."

Born in 1917 in the Donezk area of the Ukraine, Khaldei became a Soviet news agency TASS photographer in 1936. Later, he was one of 200 TASS soldier photo-reporters dispatched to the front to cover the War from June 1941 onwards - after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

It was a hazardous exercise. Conditions at the front were often appalling, with eating and sleeping arrangements primitive, compared to the facilities their US and British counterparts enjoyed in Western Europe.

More than half the Soviet photo-reporters would die in action.

As the Berlin exhibition reveals, Khaldei's life was itself a reflection of the 20th century upheavals in the Soviet Union and Europe.

Born to a Ukrainian-Jewish family in 1917, his mother was murdered in a pogrom a year after his birth.

Then, in 1941, his father and three sisters were killed after falling into the hands of the invading Germans.

Despite his reputation as a war photographer, Khaldei was destined to drift into obscurity in the years that followed, with his work largely ignored by the state-controlled Soviet media.

Unjustly so, as the Berlin retrospective amply demonstrates.

"Khaldei always remained a photographic eye-witness in the best sense," Berlin critic Klaus Grimberg says, writing in the city's monthly "Hauptstadt Brief" (Berlin Letter).

"This is clearly illustrated by the hundreds of photos he took during the advance of the Red Army westwards during the war.

"Whether in Murmansk, Budapest, Vienna or finally in Berlin, Khaldei's work repeatedly reflects the horror he experienced, shooting scenes of death, destruction and despair," Grimberg says.

In wartime Vienna his camera captured the tragedy of a family killed in a park by their own Nazi father who afterwards shot himself.

In Berlin in early 1945 he photographed two old men, one of them blind, in a street in the centre of the devastated city.

"They knew neither where they were nor where they were going. They had reached the end of the world," Khaldei was to say later.

Thirty years after the conflict, Khaldei sought out ex-Red Army men and women veterans he had photographed during the war, and captured them again on camera - creating a startling comparison of people at very different moments in their lives.

During his 50-year-career Khaldei often fell foul of Soviet officials.

At the time of the communist collapse in 1990 Khaldei, whose work was likened to that of Robert Capa or Cartier-Bresson, was living in a one-room apartment in Moscow, where he slept, developed his pictures, and maintained his archive until his death in 1997.

It was there that Vollend first encountered and befriended Khaldei in 1991. Today he and close associate Heinz Krimmer own a vast collection of the Russian's wartime photographs.

Yevgeni Khaldei - The Decisive Moment - A Retrospective, runs until July 28. (dpa)