Europe in the Second World War: What Happened to Women in the Defeated Countries?
Sohu History — May 14, 2017
On May 2, 1945, the Soviet Red Army captured Berlin. German historians have estimated that Soviet soldiers raped approximately 100,000 women in Berlin. On May 2, the BBC broadcast the documentary The Rape of Berlin,
drawing attention to a humanitarian catastrophe that for decades had
been treated ambiguously or kept out of public discussion.
After the Red Army took Berlin, German prisoners of war were marched
through the streets. For the women of Berlin, however, the Soviet
capture of the city became a nightmare.
Seventy years after the Second World War ended amid ruins, the
collective and individual crimes committed by the Axis powers were
investigated and punished, justice was sought, and victims’
suffering was acknowledged. Yet large-scale harm inflicted on civilians
by the Allies, deliberately or otherwise, was for a long time obscured
or minimized. Among the examples discussed are the bombing of Dresden,
the bombing of Tokyo, and the mass sexual violence committed by Allied
troops—especially the Soviet Red Army—after entering
Germany.
On May 2, 1945, the Nazi forces defending Berlin surrendered and the
Red Army occupied the city. The war was ending, but for Berlin’s
civilians, especially its women, the nightmare was only beginning. A
historical research group at the University of Göttingen wrote
that as many as one third of Berlin’s women were raped. German
researchers Sander and Johr, after examining multiple sources, offered a
more cautious estimate: approximately 100,000 women were raped in
Berlin, around 40 percent of them repeatedly. In Russia,
discussion of wartime rape is often received as an accusation or insult.
One Third of Berlin’s Women Raped During the Soviet Capture of the City
In Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin stands the Soviet War
Memorial, designed by Soviet architects. It is the burial place of
5,000 of the roughly 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of
Berlin. Completed in 1949, it is one of the three major Soviet war
memorials in the city.
The central monument depicts a solemn Soviet soldier holding a
German girl in his left arm and a sword in his right hand, standing on
a shattered swastika. The sculpture is about twelve metres high.
According to the story behind the monument, a Soviet soldier risked his
life under German fire to rescue a three-year-old German girl. The
inscription declares that the Soviet people saved European civilization
from fascism.
Yet some people have remarked bitterly that an unknown rapist may
also lie buried beneath the memorial. During the final Soviet advance
into the Third Reich, countless women became victims of the
troops’ advance.
Chinese scholar Zhu Weiyi, in a book about German soldiers of the
Second World War, cites research by the University of Göttingen.
According to eyewitness accounts, from April 24, when Red Army troops
entered central Berlin, until May 5, when German resistance ceased, as
many as one third of the women in Berlin were raped. Sander and Johr, after comparing several investigations, estimated
that about 100,000 Berlin women were raped and that 40 percent of them
were assaulted more than once.
American historian William Hitchcock has written that some women
were raped sixty or seventy times. The steep increase in abortions
after the events and contemporary hospital reports have also been used
to estimate that close to 10,000 women died as a result of rape and its
consequences.
Many Russians, however, regard any mention of rape committed during
the Second World War as an insult. Sexual violence by Soviet troops is
frequently dismissed in Russian media as a Western myth. Soviet
soldiers were not the only perpetrators of sexual violence, and the
events in Berlin cannot be viewed in isolation. Before the Red Army
entered Germany, Nazi forces had invaded the Soviet Union in what
Hitler himself described as a war of annihilation, causing enormous
devastation.
A Jewish Lieutenant’s Diary and the Suffering of German Women
One surviving private source is the diary of Vladimir Gelfand, a
Jewish lieutenant from Ukraine. After Gelfand’s death, his son
Vitaly found the diary while sorting through his father’s papers.
As the Red Army entered what Soviet propaganda called “the
lair of the fascist beast,” a propaganda banner urged the troops:
“Soldiers! You are now on German soil. The time for revenge has
come!”
Gelfand recorded a disturbing encounter with a group of German women
fleeing from the outskirts of Berlin. “Their faces were full of
fear,” he wrote. They told him what had happened on the first
night after the Red Army arrived. One German girl lifted her skirt and
said, “They did it to me here—no fewer than twenty
men.” She burst into tears. Then she suddenly pleaded with
Gelfand: “Stay here. Sleep with me. You can do anything you want
to me, but only you!”
Gelfand described a deeply traumatized girl desperately trying to avoid being subjected to another gang rape.
A Woman in Berlin
Similar experiences appear in another diary, written by an anonymous
German journalist who was about thirty years old at the time. Her
diary, later published as A Woman in Berlin, became a
bestseller, although for decades the author’s identity was
unknown. She began writing on April 20, 1945, ten days before
Hitler’s suicide, while sheltering in a cellar during artillery
fire.
She recalled that people in the basement 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 Allied bombing. When Soviet soldiers entered the cellar
and tried to drag women away, she attempted to speak to them in Russian
and dissuade them, but within minutes she was attacked and brutally
raped.
Eventually she concluded that the only way to protect herself from
repeated gang rape was to find a single “protector.” She
entered into a relationship with a senior officer from Leningrad and
talked with him about literature and the meaning of life.
“I cannot say that this sergeant major is raping me,”
she wrote. “Am I doing this for bacon, butter, sugar, candles or
canned meat? To some extent, yes. And yet I like him; the less he wants
from me as a man, the more I like his personality.”
When the diary was first published in Germany in 1959, the author
was attacked by some German women for what they saw as a shameful
description of survival through accommodation with an occupier.
More recent private studies have continued to investigate mass rape
by Allied forces—American, British and French troops as well as,
most extensively, Soviet troops. Nevertheless, the subject remained a
taboo for a long time. In East Germany, criticism of the Soviet
“heroes” who had defeated fascism was treated as sacrilege.
In West Germany, guilt over Nazi crimes made public criticism of Allied
abuses difficult.
The Film A Woman in Berlin Encourages Survivors to Speak
In 2008, the film Anonyma – A Woman in Berlin, based
on the diary, was released and had a major impact in Germany. It
encouraged a number of women who had survived rape in 1945 to speak
publicly. One of them was Ingeborg Bullert.
Bullert, then ninety years old and living in Hamburg, described how
she had hidden in a cellar in Berlin during the violence. When she went
upstairs to look for rope to make a lamp wick, two Soviet soldiers
threatened her with their weapons and raped her.
She recalled that countless women in Berlin were assaulted. Women
from the age of fifteen to fifty-five were ordered to undergo
examinations for sexually transmitted diseases. “You needed a
medical certificate in order to receive food ration cards,” she
said. “I remember that the waiting room was packed with
women.”
The true scale of the sexual violence may never be known. Records of
Soviet military tribunals and other sources have remained inaccessible.
Russian law also allows fines or imprisonment for people accused of
“discrediting” Russia’s record in the Second World
War.
Vitaly Gelfand, Vladimir Gelfand’s son, has said that he does
not deny the courage and sacrifice shown by many Soviet soldiers during
the war. He hopes, however, that publication of his father’s
diary will help the public see a fuller picture of what happened.
“If people do not want to know the truth, they are only
deceiving themselves,” he said. “The whole world
understands this, Russia understands it, and so do those who pass such
laws. We have to look back at the past in order to look forward to the
future.”
