70 年前苏军强奸了十万柏林妇女？

Chinese

16–17 March 2016

Did Soviet Troops Rape 100,000 Berlin Women Seventy Years Ago?

On 2 May 1945 the Soviet Red Army captured Berlin. German historians have estimated that about 100,000 women in Berlin were raped by Soviet troops, with 40 percent of them raped more than once. The article notes that discussion of the subject is still often regarded in Russia as offensive or as an attempt to denigrate the Soviet victory.

Seventy years ago, after the Second World War ended amid ruins, the collective and individual crimes committed by the Axis powers were gradually investigated and punished. Yet large-scale harm inflicted on civilians by the Allies, deliberately or otherwise, was long obscured. The article cites the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and sexual violence committed by Allied troops, especially the Red Army, after entering Germany.

On 2 May 1945 the Nazi forces defending Berlin surrendered and the Red Army occupied the city. The war had ended, but for Berlin’s civilian population — especially its women — a new nightmare began. Research cited in the article says that as many as one in three Berlin women were raped. German researchers Helke Sander and Barbara Johr gave a more cautious estimate of roughly 100,000 victims, 40 percent of whom were assaulted repeatedly.

The BBC later devoted a documentary to the “rape of Berlin,” drawing wider attention to a humanitarian catastrophe that had long been treated ambiguously or kept silent.

The Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park

In Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin stands a Soviet war memorial designed by a Soviet architect. Five thousand of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin are buried there. Completed in 1949, it is one of three major Soviet war memorials in Berlin.

The monument depicts a Soviet soldier standing on a pedestal, holding a German girl in one arm and a sword in the other while trampling a broken swastika. The statue is about twelve meters high. According to the story associated with the sculpture, a Soviet soldier rescued a three-year-old German girl under enemy fire. The inscription says that the Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.

The article argues that behind this heroic image lies a darker side of the story. Some critics have called the memorial the “grave of the unknown rapist.” As Soviet forces fought their way into the Third Reich, many civilians — above all women — also became victims.

It cites estimates that between 24 April 1945, when Red Army forces entered Berlin, and 5 May, when resistance ceased, one third of the city’s women suffered sexual violence. It also cites American historian William Hitchcock as reporting cases in which women were raped dozens of times, while hospital reports and the sharp rise in abortions after the fighting were used to estimate deaths associated with rape.

The article adds that these discussions still provoke a painful reaction in Russia and are often interpreted as attempts to blacken the Red Army’s achievement. At the same time, it notes that sexual violence was not committed exclusively by Soviet troops and that the events in Berlin cannot be separated from the context of the war of annihilation waged by Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union.

A Jewish Lieutenant’s Diary

Against this background, the diary of the young Jewish lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand is presented as an especially valuable source. His notes offer an unvarnished view of what German women experienced during the last days of the war.

Although relatively few written sources on mass rape by Soviet soldiers in Germany survive, the article highlights two diaries from the spring of 1945. The first was written by Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish lieutenant from Ukraine. After his death, his son Vitaly found the diary among his father’s papers.

As the Red Army entered what Soviet propaganda called the “lair of the fascist beast,” propaganda slogans urged soldiers to take revenge: “Soldier! You are now on German soil. The hour of retribution has come!”

Gelfand recorded a frightening scene involving German women fleeing a Berlin suburb. “Their faces were full of fear,” he wrote. They told him what had happened on the first night after the Red Army arrived. One woman lifted her skirt and said that about twenty men had raped her in turn. Crying, she then pleaded with Gelfand to sleep with her himself — but to be the only one. The article interprets this as a desperate attempt to avoid another gang rape.

A Woman in Berlin

The second source is A Woman in Berlin, the diary of a German journalist who was about thirty at the time. Her identity remained unknown for many years. She began writing on 20 April 1945, ten days before Hitler’s suicide, while sheltering from shelling in a basement.

She and her neighbors joked that it was “better to have a Russian on top of you than an American overhead,” meaning that rape by Soviet soldiers seemed preferable to being killed by American bombs. When Soviet soldiers entered the shelter, however, her attempts to reason with them in broken Russian failed and she was raped.

She later concluded that she needed a “protector” in order to avoid repeated gang rape. She entered a relationship with an older Soviet officer from Leningrad, with whom she could discuss literature and the meaning of life. “One should not say that the major raped me,” she wrote. “I agreed for bacon, butter, sugar, candles and canned meat. Yes, to some extent. Besides, the less he wanted from me, the more I liked him as a person.”

When the diary was first published in 1959, its author was accused of betrayal and of dishonoring German women. Society, the article says, was not yet ready to accept the painful truth about survival amid total collapse.

Accounts of violence by Allied troops, particularly the Red Army, remained taboo for decades. The 2008 film A Woman in Berlin, based on the diary, became an important cultural event in Germany and gave a voice to women who had long remained silent.

Ingeborg Bullert

The article also recounts the testimony of Ingeborg Bullert, then ninety and living in Hamburg. In 1945 she had sheltered in a Berlin basement. When she went upstairs to fetch a lamp wick, she encountered two Soviet soldiers who threatened her with a pistol and raped her.

Bullert recalled that women from about fifteen to fifty-five were victims of sexual violence and that women were required to undergo examinations for venereal disease. “A certificate that you had been tested was necessary to receive food ration cards,” she said. “I remember the waiting room for the examination was packed with women.”

The full scale of the catastrophe may never be known. The article says that Soviet military-tribunal documents and other sources remain classified, and it refers to Russian legislation punishing actions interpreted as discrediting the Soviet people’s wartime achievement.

Vladimir Gelfand’s son Vitaly stresses that he does not deny the heroism of Soviet soldiers who showed courage and self-sacrifice during the war. He nevertheless hopes his father’s diaries will be published in full so that a more complete picture of events can be reconstructed. “If people do not want to know the truth, they are only deceiving themselves,” he says. “Remembering the past is the road to the future.”

© Beijing Beiwang New Vision Media / China News, 2016