Diary Casts Doubt on the German-Revanchist “Rape Myth”

January 14, 2007

Vladimir Gelfand’s memoir German Diary 1945–46 is in many ways a special book.

It is an unusual eyewitness account of the Red Army’s liberation of Poland and the eastern parts of Germany. Keeping diaries was strictly prohibited in the Red Army for security reasons. For that reason alone, perhaps, readers have reason to be grateful to the author, the Ukrainian lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, who deliberately broke the prohibition.

Gelfand was only twenty-one during the bitter fighting for the Oder crossings, where he apparently displayed courage. He came to Berlin determined to experience something new: to meet people, learn German and, not least, enjoy female company. He was tired of the war that had been his everyday life for three years, and thoroughly tired of bullying, shouting officers who constantly harassed him.

Gelfand comes across as something of an outsider. His dreamy temperament and persistent writing did not make him equally entertaining to everyone. He was refined, intelligent and in his own way poetic, and naturally his relations with women also brought the envy of less fortunate men. In several places he suggests that some Red Army officers also looked down on him because of his Jewish family background.

“...how many hardships I had to endure during the war, how much mockery and abuse, how much insolence simply because my surname is Gelfand; because I was born into a Jewish family and because I myself am a Jew.”

For Gelfand, such phenomena were merely sad remnants of the old society.

“Years will pass—decades, not sooner—and national antagonisms will disappear; the mistrust between people that they produce will pass like an intoxication, and life will become easier. But as long as Black people are lynched in this century—for that vile and cruel custom has not yet vanished from the earth—one must be ready to face this bitter human injustice honestly and with dignity and fight it, fight with one’s last strength in the name of humanity and life. That is what I have decided for the future.”

Gelfand often gets lost in detail, but his evident literary gift cannot be denied. Keeping such a rich diary, even though it could not cover combat itself when writing was impossible, was an achievement in its own right. His account of a young man losing his innocence, discovering his sexuality and passing through an intense year of work, encounters and maturation is candid and revealing.

He was especially weary of the behavior of Lithuanians, because of injustices and humiliating treatment which, in his view, were also keenly felt by other Soviet soldiers. Although Gelfand remained a convinced supporter of the Soviet system and a Party member, he rarely engaged with grand historical events, preferring to focus on himself. He appears more as an egocentric and vain young man.

His ardent heart repeatedly meets disappointment—both from Russian women attached to medical units, some of whom were rumored to have acquired the bad reputation of being “regimental mattresses,” and from Germans he met in the city. Germans often found him vulgar, while girls who attracted him not only physically but emotionally soon proved unreliable or indifferent.

Literary scholar Elke Scherstjanoi notes in the book’s afterword that, as far as Gelfand’s relations with women are concerned, the question of violence hardly arises at all.

Strictly speaking, Gelfand neither took part in nor witnessed rapes. That is striking, given that authors such as Antony Beevor, in Berlin: The Downfall (Historical Media, 2002), have cited a figure of 1.4 million rapes in occupied Germany.

He describes neither systematic mass rape nor systematic looting. On the contrary, he writes about young men who, amid growing postwar disorder, seek companionship, warmth, a measure of love and erotic experience.

Gelfand’s book does mention that a women’s battalion from Berlinchen—now a Polish town—was allegedly subjected to mass rape. According to Elke Scherstjanoi, however, no such battalion existed.

Later, the diary contains an episode with a girl who says she was raped by twenty soldiers and yet then offers to sleep with Gelfand. Why would she voluntarily want a twenty-first? The question, the reviewer says, leaves the reader perplexed.

Gelfand’s problem in Berlin was not finding girls willing to sleep with him. His real problem was finding sincere feeling and love. By June 1946, when he contracted gonorrhea, his depression and homesickness had intensified.

For writers convinced that the Red Army’s entry into Germany was one uninterrupted chain of crimes, testimony like Gelfand’s diary is an obvious exception. But perhaps Gelfand simply chose to remain silent about both his own conduct and rapes committed by others?

Scherstjanoi appears to suggest that Gelfand reproduced an official Soviet attitude in his notes:

“Gelfand’s silence also indicates that the victorious country at the time attached no particular importance to rape and regarded it as something quite harmless. Otherwise the politically active Gelfand would surely have raised the question for discussion,” Scherstjanoi writes.

Official declarations, however, can be set aside. Before the assault on the Berlin stronghold, the article says, Ehrenburg in Krasnaya Zvezda addressed the issue in connection with a March 28 speech concerning violence and looting. Marshal Zhukov warned his subordinates: “When you look at the dresses of German girls, remember why your homeland sent you here.”

Lev Kopelev reported from East Prussia that a division commander, Colonel Smirnov, personally shot a lieutenant who had taken part in a gang rape. In January through March 1945 alone, 4,148 Soviet officers were convicted of various offenses. According to military reports, such incidents became less frequent after Germany’s capitulation.

So why is Gelfand silent? He himself came into conflict with many fellow soldiers whom he regarded as morally corrupt. With irony he called officers who appropriated other men’s awards “telephone heroes.” Speculation and the black market seem to have become widespread. Even Gelfand participated, mainly by selling nonworking watches at the market.

No, as Kjell Albin Abrahamson noted in a review in Sundsvalls Tidning, Gelfand and other Soviet soldiers looked more like Sven Dufva, Švejk or Karlsson than heroic clichés. Yet none of those antiheroes was a rapist. And if the hero was called Sven Dufva, “his head was poor, but his heart was good.”

Given the suffering and humiliation of the Germans, one might imagine that all those Dufvas, Švejks and Karlssons in distant May 1945 were simply struggling to keep afloat. Between the Vistula and Frankfurt an der Oder alone—even before entering German territory—the Red Army lost 77,342 men, 17,032 of them irrecoverably.

Even if Gelfand himself did not mistreat Germans, Scherstjanoi is convinced that he nevertheless despised them and felt a “cold satisfaction” when he saw their everyday hardships.

Gelfand was perhaps not entirely free of anti-German sentiment. He was clearly affected to some degree by Ehrenburg’s heated rhetoric when he wrote:

“Germany is on fire, and for some reason I enjoy watching this evil spectacle. Death for death, blood for blood. I do not pity these haters of humanity, these beasts.”

“In Berlin I defeated fascism,” he carved into the stone of the German parliament—words that, the article says, Soviet censorship would never have allowed to be published.

What is interesting is that Gelfand, though to some extent infected by Ehrenburg’s rhetoric, in practice proved to be one of those who showed the greatest respect for German culture, language and people.

When a fellow soldier smashed several German statuettes, Gelfand rescued a bust of Goethe, saying: “We must respect culture, even when it is the culture of the enemy.”

When ordered to take part in removing books from the German Academy of Sciences library in order to create a regimental library, he reacted sharply against the order. When he learned that the books were Russian volumes that the Germans had removed during their invasion of his homeland, he calmed down.

The fact that he spent an entire year watching German factories being dismantled and sent to the Soviet Union was regarded not as looting but as part of the reparations due to the victors.

However one judges Gelfand’s diary, it can serve as a counterweight to an entire army of revisionists who, in the reviewer’s view, seek to discredit humanity’s great victory over Hitler’s fascism and turn Stalin’s troops into a target of attack by Western civilization.

After the war Gelfand lived a long life in the Soviet Union, worked as a schoolteacher and left records that were first discovered by his son. What the Swedish publisher Ersatz issued in Lars Wiklund’s excellent translation is only a small portion of his wartime memoirs. The years 1941–44 were considered less interesting by both the German Aufbau Verlag and the Swedish publisher, but the entire material is available online in Russian.

Stefan Lindgren

A Critical Response

The left-wing journal Flamman published a review of Soviet soldier Vladimir Gelfand’s Second World War diary, issued by Ersatz. Stefan Lindgren was given nearly complete freedom of expression, the response says, in a spirit of Stalinist generalizations that deny systematic sexual violence committed by the Red Army against German women.

“Strictly speaking, Gelfand neither participated in nor witnessed a single rape,” Lindgren writes, and Flamman places the sentence in italics.

Thus the absence of descriptions of violence in the diary is treated as sufficient grounds to question historians’ conclusions that around 1.4 million German women were subjected to sexual violence. Lindgren describes the advancing Red Army as “young men seeking companionship, warmth, a certain love and eroticism.” He calls the mass rapes in Berlin “the promiscuity of a big city” and then, when the facts can no longer be denied, falls back on the oldest rape myth: “she wanted it herself.”

Lindgren refers to an episode in the diary in which a German woman allegedly voluntarily offers Gelfand sex after being raped by twenty Red Army soldiers. Why, he asks, would she want a twenty-first? At that point one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. After six years of war, Berlin was a city of terror inhabited by women who possessed no other capital than their own bodies. Rape in exchange for food, protection or simply staying alive cannot be called a “search for love” or “promiscuity.”

Lindgren, the response concludes, mixes equal measures of Soviet romance and misogynistic mythology. It is remarkable that part of the Swedish left still prefers Stalin to facts and elementary decency.

Katrine Kielos

Reply by Stefan Lindgren (not yet published)

Katrine Kielos’s report in Expressen (January 16) concerning my article in Flamman is inaccurate. I did not defend rapes committed by the Red Army during its advance into Germany; those facts are well documented. On the contrary, I agree that the politically incorrect line—hate propaganda associated with Ilya Ehrenburg, criticized at the highest level but nevertheless influential to some degree—contributed to these events.

Of course, the fact that Gelfand himself neither participated in nor witnessed rapes does not mean that they did not occur.

But how are we to treat personal testimony if it is ignored altogether? The fact that Gelfand saw and heard nothing that confirmed a vast wave of rape cannot justify the extraordinarily high and weakly substantiated figure cited by Antony Beevor—1.4 million victims. Beevor’s version is also questioned by serious historians (see, for example, Gennady Bordyugov, Wehrmacht und Rote Armee – Verbrechen gegen die Zivilbevölkerung).

I understand, however, that the way Katrine Kielos reasons about the past—more or less accurately—is today regarded as “modern.” It fits better with the spirit of “living history” and a state ideology in which any means are permissible.

Kielos formulates her argument in such a way that the reader cannot tell what is actually quoted from my article and what is her idealized interpretation of what I supposedly said. The phrase “she wanted it herself” does not appear in my article.

It is also quite obvious that Kielos is entering into a discussion about a book she simply has not read—and this is far from the first time that has happened.

When I refuse to support a single, well-worn version of history, I am in good company. Finland’s foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja, for example, recently stated in a speech: “History is never a single truth or a single interpretation” (Hufvudstadsbladet, December 15).

His colleague Olli Rehn, a professor at the University of Helsinki, recently sharply criticized French memory laws in an EU discussion—laws concerning denial of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire and debate about allegedly positive aspects of colonialism.

None of this means that we should forget crimes committed by the Red Army. But we should also not forget that the most prominent victim driven to suicide by those “red hordes” was Adolf Hitler.

Stefan Lindgren
INTERPRES — News and Background from Around the World; independent of party-political and economic interests.