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PersianThe role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany in the Second World War is regarded as one of the most glorious moments in Soviet history. But there is another story connected with it: the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers in the final days of the war.

The sun is setting slowly over Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin as I look at an enormous statue framed by the blue sky. The twelve-metre monument shows a Soviet soldier with a sword in one hand and a small German girl in the other, his boot planted on a broken swastika.
It is the final resting place of 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin between 16 April and 2 May 1945.
The colossal scale of the monument reflects the scale of the sacrifice. After climbing the long steps, you reach the pedestal, lit from all sides like a shrine. An inscription states that the Soviet people saved European civilisation from fascism. Yet some people call this memorial the "Tomb of the Unknown Rapist."
As Stalin's troops moved toward the German capital they assaulted vast numbers of women. The subject was rarely mentioned in either West or East Germany after the war, and even in Russia today it remains taboo.
Russian media regularly dismiss reports of rape, yet one of the sources describing what happened is the diary of a young Soviet officer.

Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jewish lieutenant from Ukraine, wrote his diary with remarkable frankness from 1941 until the end of the war despite a Soviet military ban on keeping such records on security grounds.
The manuscript, still not published in full at the time of the article, depicts disorder in army battalions: very poor food, lice, antisemitism and theft, with soldiers even stealing their comrades' boots.
In February 1945 Gelfand's unit was stationed on the Oder in preparation for the final assault on Berlin. He wrote about his comrades surrounding and defeating a battalion of women soldiers.
"Things are getting worse"
One of the most revealing entries in Gelfand's diary is dated 25 April, after he had reached Berlin. While riding a bicycle beside the Spree, he passed a group of German women carrying suitcases and bundles.

In broken German he asked where they were going and why they had left their homes. He wrote: "With horror on their faces, they told me what had happened on the first night the Red Army arrived."
"A beautiful German girl lifted her skirt and said: 'They raped me all night. Some were old, some had pimples. They all took turns on me - no fewer than twenty men.' Tears were running down her face."
"Her poor mother added: 'They raped my daughter in front of me, and they can still come back and rape her again.' The thought terrified everyone."
The girl suddenly threw herself toward him and said: "Stay here. Sleep with me. You can do anything you want to me, but only you."
Before that, German soldiers had spent almost four years in the Soviet Union committing sexual violence and many other atrocities.
Vitaly, Gelfand's son, says: "He passed through many villages where the Nazis had killed everyone, even small children. He had seen evidence of rape." Vitaly discovered his father's diary after his death.

The Nazi German army was supposed to be a disciplined Aryan force whose men would never engage in forbidden sexual relations. But Oleg Budnitsky, a historian at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, says the prohibition was ignored. Nazi commanders were so concerned about venereal disease that they established a network of military brothels throughout the occupied territories.
Direct evidence of how German soldiers treated Russian women is difficult to find because many victims did not survive. Jorg Morre, director of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, showed a photograph from a German soldier's private wartime album, taken in Crimea. It shows a woman's body lying on the ground.
"It looks as though she was killed while being raped. Her skirt is raised and her hands cover her face," he says.
"It is a shocking photograph. We argued a lot about whether such pictures should be shown. But this is war, this is the sexual violence that formed part of German policy in the Soviet Union. We show the war. We do not merely talk about it; we show it."
As the Red Army approached what the Soviet press called "the lair of the fascist beast," posters encouraged troops to express their anger: "Soldier! You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has come!"

The political department of the Soviet 19th Army, advancing toward Germany along the Baltic coast, proclaimed that a true Soviet soldier should hate Germans so intensely that he would be disgusted by the idea of sex with German women. Once again, however, soldiers proved the ideologues wrong.
While researching his 2002 book on the Battle of Berlin, historian Antony Beevor found documents about sexual violence in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. They had been drawn up by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and sent in late 1944 to its chief, Lavrentiy Beria.
Beevor says: "These documents were presented to Stalin. You can see markings showing whether they were read. They contain reports of mass rape in East Prussia and of German women trying to kill their children and themselves to avoid such a fate."
A wartime diary preserved by the fiancee of an unnamed German soldier shows how some women adapted to horrifying circumstances in order to survive.
The diary begins on 20 April 1945, ten days before Hitler's suicide, and its anonymous author, like Vladimir Gelfand, writes with striking frankness.
Describing herself as "a pale blonde woman," she paints vivid pictures of neighbours sheltering beneath her Berlin apartment block: among them a person in grey trousers and horn-rimmed glasses who appears to be a young man from a distance but proves to be a young woman, and three elderly sisters, all seamstresses, huddled together "like one great black pudding."

While waiting for the Red Army, the people in the shelter develop black humour. They joke that having Russians "on top of you" is better than having the Americans "over your head" - in other words, rape seems preferable to death by bombing.
But when Soviet soldiers break into the basement and try to drag women out, the other residents beg the diarist, who speaks Russian, to complain to the Soviet command.
She risks the rubble-strewn streets and finds a senior officer. Despite Stalin's order against violence toward civilians, he merely shrugs and replies: "It happens anyway."
She takes the indifferent officer back to the basement, where he rebukes the soldiers. One soldier angrily protests: "What do you mean? What did the Germans do to our Soviet women! They took my sister and..." The officer calms him and removes the soldiers.
But when the diarist returns to the corridor to make sure they have gone, men who were waiting seize her. She is brutally raped and almost strangled. The frightened neighbours - whom she calls the "cave dwellers" - have locked the basement door behind her.
She writes: "At last the two iron leaves of the door opened. Everyone stared at me. My stockings were down over my shoes, and I was still holding what remained of my garter belt. I began shouting: 'You cowardly pigs! I was raped twice and you left me lying there like rubbish!'"
The diarist eventually realises that she needs to find one "wolf" to protect her from gang rape by the "male beasts." The relationship between perpetrator and victim becomes less violent, more transactional and, at the same time, more ambiguous. She takes a senior officer from Leningrad as a bed partner and discusses literature and the meaning of life with him.
She writes: "It cannot really be said that the Major rapes me. Am I doing this for bacon, butter, sugar, candles and canned meat? I cannot deny that, at least in part. And I also like the Major more as a human being the less often he wants me as a man."
Many of her neighbours made similar arrangements with the conquerors ruling the ruins of Berlin.
When the diary appeared in Germany in 1959 under the title A Woman in Berlin, its frank account of the choices made for survival was attacked for "staining the name" of German women. The author then refused to allow the book to be republished during her lifetime.

Seventy years after the end of the war, research into sexual violence by Allied forces - American, British and French as well as Soviet - was still developing. For years, however, the subject received little attention.
Alongside the social stigma, East Germany treated criticism of the Soviet heroes who had defeated fascism as sacrilege, while in West Germany guilt over Nazi crimes also discouraged discussion of some issues.
In 2008 the Berlin woman's diary was adapted as the film Anonyma, starring the well-known German actress Nina Hoss. The film had a strong impact in Germany and encouraged many women to talk about their experiences, including Ingeborg Bullert.

Ingeborg, now ninety, lives in Hamburg in an apartment filled with photographs of cats and books about the theatre. In 1945 she was twenty, a Berlin woman who dreamed of becoming an actress and lived with her mother on an elegant street in Charlottenburg.
When the Soviet attack on the city began, she, like the anonymous diarist, took refuge in the basement of her building. "Suddenly there were Soviet tanks in our street and the bodies of Russian and German soldiers everywhere. I will never forget the terrible sound of the Russian rockets. We called them Stalin's organs."
During a break in the bombardment Ingeborg left the basement to find material for a lamp wick. "Suddenly two Russians pointed pistols at me. One forced me to lie on the floor and raped me, then they changed places and the second raped me. I thought I was dying and that they would kill me."

For decades Ingeborg did not speak about what had happened. It was too difficult. "My mother liked to boast that nobody had touched her daughter," she says.
Rape affected families throughout Berlin. Ingeborg remembers that women between fifteen and fifty-five were ordered to undergo examinations for venereal disease. "You needed a medical certificate to receive food, and I remember the doctors' waiting rooms being packed with women."
How large was the scale of the rape? The figures most often quoted are about 100,000 women in Berlin and two million across Germany. Those highly disputed estimates are based on the small number of surviving medical records.
In a former munitions factory now used as a state archive, Martin Luchterhand showed the reporter an armful of blue cardboard files. They contain abortion records from July to October 1945 in Neukolln, one of Berlin's 24 districts. It is remarkable that they survived.
Abortion was illegal in Germany, but Luchterhand says there was a narrow exception for women in the extraordinary circumstances created by mass rape in 1945.

Between June 1945 and 1946, 995 abortion applications were approved in this one Berlin district alone. The files contain more than a thousand scraps of paper in different colours and sizes. One girl, writing in a childlike hand, testifies that she was raped in her family living room in front of her parents.

We will probably never know the true scale of the sexual violence. Soviet military tribunal records and other sources remain classified. The Russian parliament recently passed a law under which anyone who tarnishes Russia's record in the Second World War can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years.
Vera Dubina, a young historian at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, says she knew nothing about the rapes until a scholarship brought her to Berlin. She later wrote an article about the subject but found it difficult to publish.
"The reaction of the Russian media was very aggressive. People only want to hear about our glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War, and it becomes harder to do proper research," she says.

History is often rewritten to serve the needs of the present. That is why first-hand sources are so valuable - whether the testimony of elderly people who speak now about the past or the writing of young people who took the risk of recording events at the time.
Vitaly Gelfand, son of the Red Army soldier who kept the diary, does not deny that many Soviet soldiers showed great courage and sacrifice in the Second World War. But, he says, that is not the whole story.
After a recent interview on Russian radio and television, Vitaly was subjected to antisemitic abuse on social media. Some people claimed that the diary was a forgery and that he should disappear to Israel; in fact, he had already been living in Berlin for twenty years.
He nevertheless hoped that his father's diary would be published in Russia that year. Parts had already appeared in German and Swedish.
"If people do not want to know the truth, they are only deceiving themselves. Everyone knows - Russia knows, and even the people behind the new laws about insulting the past know. We will not move forward until we look back."
The Battle for Berlin (April-May 1945)

After the Red Army captured Vienna, Joseph Stalin ordered his forces toward Berlin. He was determined to take the city before the United States.
Two and a half million Red Army troops, 6,000 tanks and more than 40,000 artillery pieces were committed to the operation, supported by thousands of aircraft.
After intense fighting and heavy losses, Red Army soldiers entered the outskirts of Berlin on 21 April.
At a meeting with his advisers Adolf Hitler came close to admitting defeat, but instead decided to continue the fight and command his forces from his underground headquarters.
As Soviet forces occupied the city, it is estimated that about 100,000 women were raped by Red Army soldiers.
Hitler killed himself on 30 April, and the Reichstag fell on 2 May.