Russian Seven

Red Army Soldiers or Allied Soldiers: Whom Did German Women Fear More?

Also published under the title: “How German Women’s Attitudes Toward Red Army Soldiers and Allied Soldiers Differed.”
March 11, 2019 / November 29, 2018

At the beginning of 1945, the Red Army and the Allied armies crossed Germany’s borders from two sides in order to complete the liberation of Europe from Nazism. The local population, however, reacted differently to the victors.

Unlike the Allied armies, the Red Army entered a Germany that had already been prepared by Goebbels’s propaganda. German media spread stories about savage hordes from the East supposedly capable only of rape, looting and murder. No sooner had Soviet forces crossed the borders of East Prussia than Goebbels announced numerous cases of German women and girls between the ages of ten and seventy being raped in towns and villages.

It is therefore not surprising that a significant part of Germany’s population was seized by panic on the eve of the Soviet arrival. This sometimes led to suicide. According to the statistical collection Berlin in Figures, about 7,000 people took their own lives in the German capital in the spring of 1945, most of them women.

Goebbels’s propaganda naturally rushed to place all responsibility for the wave of suicides on the Red Army. Postwar studies of the subject, however, showed that in the overwhelming majority of cases the immediate cause was not violence by Soviet soldiers but rumors about atrocities they were allegedly committing.

German historians, moreover, cite numerous examples of Red Army soldiers helping local residents and even preventing suicide attempts, pulling mothers and their children from rivers when they tried to drown themselves. After the war, Goebbels’s aide Werner Naumann confirmed that German propaganda itself had driven German women toward suicide.

Judging by eyewitness recollections, many German women expected violence from Red Army soldiers and regarded themselves as booty handed over to the victors. SS veteran Manfred Diener, for example, recalled the following exchange with a Viennese woman: “What will you do when the Russians come?” he asked. “Well, we’ll spread our legs,” she replied.

British historian Antony Beevor noted that many German women found the image of the Soviet soldier frightening and repellent:

“The long columns of Soviet troops entering East Prussia in January 1945 presented a strange mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tank crews in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses, followed by a second echelon made up of carts.”

Soviet commanders did not deny that sexual violence against German women occurred, but they maintained that such incidents were investigated and offenders were severely punished. One story tells of a rifle-battalion commander who personally shot a lieutenant who had allegedly taken part with his subordinates in a gang rape.

According to Soviet veterans, violence was often unnecessary because there were enough German women offering sexual services. Front-line poet David Samoilov described one such episode. In Arendsfelde, a group of women assigned to his unit was temporarily housed in a basement while awaiting registration. The eldest of them, Frau Friedrich, approached Samoilov and said: “Herr Commissar, we understand that soldiers have certain little needs. They are prepared to assign several younger women to them for...” Samoilov said he did not allow the conversation to continue.

German women understood that, given the atrocities committed by their compatriots in the occupied territories of the USSR, they could hardly expect leniency from Soviet soldiers. Berlin resident Elisabeth Schmeer, whose son served in the SS, understood that the Russians had reasons for revenge. If the Red Army came, she said, they would not sprinkle us with “rose oil.” Her actual encounter with Soviet soldiers changed her view:

“It turned out completely differently. The victors give us more food than our former government gave us. We find that difficult to understand. Apparently only the Russians are capable of such humanity.”

Germany’s female population also discovered that Russians were capable not only of fighting but of generosity. Writer Vladimir Gelfand, describing his courtship of a German girl, noted that her mother approved of him: “Of course she did! On the altar of the family’s trust and favor I had laid sweets and butter, sausage, and expensive German cigarettes.” Gelfand observed that food at the time was worth far more to Germans than life itself, “even the life of such a young and sweet sensual girl as the tender beauty Margot.”

Curiously, some Soviet soldiers became so close to their German girlfriends that they did not intend to return home. Commanders had considerable difficulty bringing some deserters back to the USSR. Apparently the German women, too, were not particularly eager to part with their gallant Russian suitors.

At first German women viewed Allied soldiers—Americans, Britons and French—differently from Red Army soldiers, because the Allies were seen as representatives of the “civilized West” rather than the “barbaric East.” Fräuleins and Fraus were full of praise for liberators who offered them chewing gum and gave them nylon stockings. For a long time it was widely believed that German women were quite willing to jump into bed with American servicemen.

The charm began to wear off as German women encountered real cases of violence by Allied troops rather than stories invented by Goebbels’s propaganda. Lutheran pastor Sylvester Michelfelder wrote in his memoirs that large groups of American and British servicemen raped women and girls in public and forced them to walk naked in front of others.

According to calculations by German history professor Miriam Gebhardt, about 190,000 German women were raped by Americans, and roughly 45,000 each by British and French soldiers. She does not provide a figure for violence by Soviet soldiers, but regards the figure of two million, widespread in Western historiography, as greatly exaggerated.

In the Allied armies rape did not carry the same extreme punishment as it could in the USSR—execution—although aggravated sexual violence could lead to life imprisonment. In practice, senior officers often tried to smooth over such incidents. Why discredit themselves in the eyes of world public opinion?

It appears that the American command even facilitated sexual contacts between its troops and German women. According to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, as many as fifty million condoms a month were being shipped from overseas to Germany.

As with Soviet troops, German women often entered into sexual relationships with Allied soldiers in order to obtain food for themselves and their families. The London publication Weekly Review wrote on October 25, 1945: “Homeless young girls openly offer themselves for food or a place to sleep... it is very simple: they have only one thing left to sell, and they sell it.”

Taras Repin
© Russian Seven