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“After the Soviet Army Captured Berlin, Women Suffered Violence: Why Was Wartime Rape So Frequent?”

5 September 2016

Seventy years ago, when the Second World War ended amid ruins, the collective and individual crimes committed by the Axis powers gradually came under legal scrutiny: perpetrators were punished, justice was at least partly served and an effort was made to ease the victims’ suffering. Yet during the war the Allies, deliberately or otherwise, also inflicted large-scale harm on civilians, and this was long concealed or left unspoken. Examples cited include the bombing of Dresden, the destruction of Tokyo and widespread sexual violence committed by Allied forces, particularly the Red Army, after entering Germany.

On 2 May 1945 the Nazi forces defending Berlin surrendered and the Red Army took the city. The war had ended, but for Berlin’s civilian population—especially its women—the nightmare was only beginning. A study by Göttingen University was cited as saying that one third of Berlin’s women were raped. German historians referred to in the article gave a more cautious estimate of about 100,000 women raped by Soviet soldiers in Berlin, with 40 percent of the victims assaulted more than once. The article states that in Russia references to these events are still often regarded as slander or an insult to the Soviet wartime achievement.

On 2 May the BBC broadcast a special documentary about the rape of Berlin, attempting to shed light on a humanitarian catastrophe that had long remained a taboo subject.

Although comparatively little documentary evidence of sexual violence by Soviet soldiers has survived, some written testimony makes it possible to reconstruct fragments of what happened. Two diaries written in and after the spring of 1945 are presented as sources that may help us understand the period.

The first diary belonged to Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish Red Army lieutenant from Ukraine. After his death, his son Vitaly discovered the diary while sorting through the family papers.

As the Red Army entered what Soviet propaganda called the “lair of the fascist beast,” propaganda officers displayed slogans intended to raise morale: “Soldier! You are now on German soil—the hour of revenge has come!”

Lieutenant Gelfand’s diary contains a disturbing entry describing a group of German women trying to leave the battle zone on the outskirts of Berlin.

“With horror on their faces they told me what had happened on the first night after the Red Army arrived. ‘They poked me here,’ a beautiful German woman explained, lifting her skirt, ‘all night, and there were so many of them. I was a girl,’ she sighed and began to cry. ‘They ruined my youth. There were old ones, pockmarked ones, and they all climbed on me, all of them. There were at least twenty, yes, yes,’ and she burst into tears. ‘They raped my daughter in front of me,’ the poor mother added. ‘They may come back and rape my girl again.’ Once again everyone was overcome with horror, and bitter sobbing passed from one corner of the cellar to another.”

Ingeborg, now ninety and living in Hamburg, recalled that when violence began in Berlin she, like the author of A Woman in Berlin, hid in a cellar. When she went upstairs to look for a cord to use as a lamp wick, two Soviet soldiers threatened her with a gun and raped her.

Ingeborg said that countless women in Berlin, between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five, were raped. Women were ordered to undergo examinations for sexually transmitted infections. “You needed a certificate in order to receive food ration cards. I remember the examination waiting room being packed with women,” she recalled.

The true scale of the violence may never be fully known. Records of Soviet military tribunals and other sources about these events remain inaccessible or classified. The article also refers to a recently adopted Russian law under which, it says, a person who discredits Russia’s record in the Second World War can face a fine or up to five years in prison.

Vitaly Gelfand, the lieutenant’s son, said he did not deny the courage and self-sacrifice shown by many Soviet soldiers during the war, but hoped that publication of his father’s diary would help restore a fuller picture of the past.

“If people do not want to know the truth, they are simply deceiving themselves,” he said. “The whole world understands this. Russia will respect those who seek to understand. The past must be remembered for the sake of the future.”

Why does mass rape so often occur in war?

The article argues that armies in many eras—including German forces in France, Japanese forces in East Asia, American forces in France and Japan, Soviet forces in Germany and Italian forces in Greece—have committed large-scale sexual violence against women.

American troops, it says, were also implicated in such crimes, though on a smaller scale. The article attributes this not only to the image of the victor and liberator, but also to differences between occupation settings: in Japan tensions among the defeated population could be suppressed, while in allied countries such as France soldiers could behave more freely.

Across different periods, armies have repeatedly left a trail of sexual violence. The article invokes legends about Genghis Khan and notes that centuries later, during US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, rape and field prostitution again appeared. It also points to violence committed by Muslim fighters among allied forces in conflicts such as Libya.

Its conclusion is that armies, war and mass sexual violence have repeatedly gone hand in hand throughout history.

Why does this happen? The article offers several explanations:

Maintaining troop morale. Rape has been treated as a way to release stress, relax soldiers, reduce tension after combat and strengthen cohesion within units.

Consolidating occupation. The underlying idea is described in brutal terms: humiliating women in front of the defeated men is intended to crush the local population psychologically and weaken its will to resist.

Reproductive violence. Sexual violence can be used as a means of seizing the reproductive resources of an occupied territory. Forced mixing of populations, aimed at weakening the ethnic identity of the defeated and increasing the occupier’s influence, is presented as a long-term strategy of domination.