Trophies from Germany — What They Were and How It Happened. Who Raped German Women and How People Lived in Occupied Germany

27 October 2021

 

Today Tatyana Tolstaya (the mother of one blogger and, apparently, a writer) made a patriotic remark:

“I think: if Russian soldiers raped millions of German women, as we say here, then those Germans—well, perhaps not all of them, but half—should have had children. So is the population of Germany in certain areas now Russian rather than German?”

People have already expressed outrage at what she said, but it seems to me that the words of Soviet veteran Leonid Rabichev are the best answer to Tatyana Tolstaya. Below are excerpts from memoirs included in his book War Will Write Everything Off.

Women—mothers and their daughters—lie on the right and left sides of the highway. In front of each of them are improvised “canteens” for men in dark-blue trousers.

A sailor with a bloodied face, half-conscious, tries to help children who are being shot at. Everywhere there is guffawing, laughter, growling, shouting and screaming. And their commanders—political officers and colonels—stand on the road: some laugh, some run about, some simply remain silent. All of this is happening with the participation of every soldier, without exception.

No, these are not fists and not blind revenge against the invaders. It is permissiveness, intoxication with power, indifference and the cruel logic of the Golden Horde.

I was stunned. For several days I did not leave the cabin. Demidov’s driver stood in the queue, while I suffered from my own helplessness, thinking of Flaubert’s Salammbô and understanding that war is far from the limit of what a human being is capable of. The colonel with whom I had just spoken could not stand it either, took his place in the queue—and then shot the witnesses: children and old people.

“Fire! To the vehicles!” comes the command. And behind us is the next echelon. Again everything is repeated. I cannot master myself. The next “new” arrivals stand waiting for their fate. Nausea rises in my throat.

On the horizon, among overturned carts, lie the bodies of women, children and old people. The stream of vehicles passes over them as if over a road.

I wish someone would revoke my command—even if only two kilometres from the highway.

Inside the buildings there are bodies everywhere: children, old people, raped women. We are so exhausted that we lie down among them and fall asleep.

In the morning an order comes over the radio: the forward units have finally run into real defenses—German corps and divisions.

The Germans no longer retreat. They die but do not surrender. There is fighting in the air. In ferocity, stubbornness and the number of casualties on both sides, it seems to me comparable to the battles near Stalingrad. It feels as if everything is happening in some future world.

The telephones never stop ringing. I receive orders. I give orders. Only during the day do we carry the bodies out into the courtyard. I do not remember where we carried them.

Perhaps into utility rooms? I do not remember. But I know for certain that we never buried them.

There were burial teams, but they were far behind us.

I help carry the bodies. I long for silence, if only beside the wall of the house.

Spring. The first grass. Sunshine. We are in an old European Gothic-style house with a tiled roof, perhaps two hundred years old. The courtyard is paved with stone that may be five hundred years old.

Europe. We are in Europe!

Suddenly two sixteen-year-old girls appear in the open gateway. There is no fear in their eyes—only desperate anxiety.

One of them sees me, runs up and says something in German. I do not understand, but I hear familiar words: “Mama,” “Vater,” “Bruder.”

I understand: in the panic they have lost their family.

I feel terribly sorry for them. They look in the direction they need to go. I try to help, say, “Vater—nicht!” and point where they should run. They understand, turn away and run. I sigh with relief—I have saved two girls.

I go up to the second floor. While following the movements of the units, about twenty minutes later I hear cries from the courtyard—women crying, laughter and swearing.

This is not a literary text. It is not fiction and not “red propaganda.” These are the memoirs of a Red Army officer who was shaken by what he saw. A man who did not forget. A man who then remained silent for the rest of his life.

These memoirs answer Tatyana Tolstaya better than any indignant commentary.

War was not simply a “battle for liberation,” not only heroism and not only victory. It was also a moral catastrophe, a collapse of human dignity, a disintegration of morality—especially in the treatment of the civilian population of the defeated side. Yes, the enemy was brutal, but we too, unfortunately, were not only liberators. And when someone who calls herself a writer allows herself to talk about “half the Germans” and a “Russian population of Germany,” perhaps she speaks not from ignorance but from a frightening indifference.

It was people like Rabichev—unlike “armchair patriots”—who carried this burden inside themselves for the rest of their lives. They did not boast. They did not excuse themselves. They did not generalize.

I run to the window.

On the steps of the house stands the headquarters announcer, with two sergeants beside him. They are holding the two girls by the arms; the girls are already dead or dying. The entire headquarters service is assembled: drivers, signalmen, messengers, commanders and officers.

“Nikolayev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov…” Senior officer A. gives the order:

“Take the girls by the arms, legs, skirts and blouses. Form two lines!”

“Undo your belts! Trousers down! Forward! Right and left, one at a time. Begin!”

I run down the stairs of the house and hear them organizing the “queue.” The two girls I thought I had saved are lying on an ancient stone slab. Their hands are pinned down, their mouths stuffed with rags, their legs forced apart. They no longer resist—four men are holding them. A fifth tears their clothes to pieces—blouses, bras, skirts and underwear.

The doors of the house are thrown wide open. Someone laughs, someone swears. The queue does not diminish—some leave and others take their place. Around the girls there are already pools of blood. But the guffawing, shouting and obscenities do not stop.

Both have lost consciousness. The orgy continues.

Someone proudly gives commands. Junior ranks carry them out. The last man in line stands up while the others demand that things move faster.

Major A. pulls out a pistol and fires point-blank into the faces of those who are still alive.

The sergeants drag the bodies into a shed and throw them to hungry pigs. The animals begin tearing away ears, noses and breasts. After a few minutes only skulls, bones and scraps of clothing remain. Two small gold crosses. The last things left of the two girls.

Horror overwhelms me. I cannot take any more. Breaking out of the house, I run blindly wherever my feet take me. Later I return—and cannot keep myself from entering the shed where the pigs were.

Pigs. Their bloodied snouts. On the straw—jaws, vertebrae, two skulls. And two gold crosses.

The town commandant, a colonel, tries to organize an all-round defense, but soldiers who have lost control drive women and girls out of their homes. In the critical situation, the command decides to isolate those who have gone berserk.

A runner brings me an order: select eight men and post a guard at the church. Women have taken shelter there, and maddened soldiers are beginning to converge on it.

Another group is sent to their units to return them to the ranks. They are told that the town is surrounded and that we do not have the resources for an all-round defense. But all that interests them is “fun.”

About 250 women and girls approach the church seeking refuge. But thousands of soldiers follow them. The crowd pushes the guards aside, breaks into the church and begins raping women at the altar.

I cannot do anything. One German teenager asks for protection; another drops to his knees.

“Lieutenant Zayats! Lieutenant Zayats!” they call me.

There is no hope of rescue. Everyone is silent. A line has already formed and circles around. Again the guffawing. And my own soldiers are in that queue.

“Back! Get back, damn you!” I shout. I do not know how to stop it. How to protect those breathing at my feet. And the catastrophe keeps growing.

The women are already asking to be killed. Some have been raped dozens of times. One, before reaching the stairs, falls onto the stone slabs, bleeding and losing consciousness.

Tear. Strip. Kill. No one beside me. Not one of our own. I am alone. And no one who would see this.

Dawn comes. The tanks have left. Silence. Night. In front of the church is a mound of bodies.

We cannot stay. We leave. And we do not sleep.

This is probably how Soviet veteran Leonid Nikolayevich Rabichev would “see” Tatyana Tolstaya. Yes, some German women survived. But only those who were not killed. Some were later able to bear children—but only those who were spared.

My parents, Tatyana, did not rape anyone. And they did not kill anyone.

A book of memoirs by Soviet Army officer Vladimir Gelfand has been published in Russia—an unembellished documentary testimony to the bloody everyday reality of war. There is no pathos in his diaries. Only honesty. And pain.

Some believe that taking a critical look at the past is betrayal, that the memory of 27 million dead should not be “contaminated” by such facts.

Others are convinced that only by comprehending the horror can respect for the Victory be earned. Otherwise it is not memory but a lie.

BBC journalist Lucy Ash tried in an article to understand what actually happened during the final months of the war. Her material is not for children, and not for readers unprepared for the subject.

In Berlin’s Treptower Park, at dusk, there is silence before the gigantic monument to the Soviet soldier. In one hand the soldier holds a sword, in the other a rescued German girl. Beneath the monument lie the remains of 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin between 16 April and 2 May 1945.

The inscription on the memorial reads: “The Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.”

But for some people in Germany, the monument evokes other feelings as well.

On the road to Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped—without exaggeration—hundreds of thousands of women. In Russia this is still rarely discussed.

Many Russian media outlets call such stories a myth or a Western fabrication. But testimony such as Vladimir Gelfand’s diaries says otherwise. These voices come from within history, from inside the events—not for accusation, but for understanding.

Vladimir Gelfand kept his diaries with astonishing candor at a time when such openness could have cost him his life.

Lieutenant Colonel Gelfand, a Jew from Ukraine, began writing in 1941 and continued until the end of the war, despite the official Red Army ban on keeping diaries. His son Vitaly found the notebooks after his father’s death and was the first to gain access to the manuscripts. They were later published—first in Germany and Sweden in abridged form, and then in Russia, for the first time in full.

The diaries are striking for their directness. They chronicle disorder in everyday army life: meager rations, omnipresent lice, widespread antisemitism, rampant theft and violence. Gelfand also writes about soldiers stealing even from their own comrades.

In February 1945, while preparations were under way for the offensive on Berlin, Gelfand’s unit was stationed near the Oder. He recalled how soldiers captured a German women’s battalion:

“The day before yesterday a women’s battalion operated on the left flank. It was smashed. The captured women sobbed. Someone died before their eyes. I do not know what happened to them afterward. But the scoundrels would have deserved execution,” Gelfand wrote.

One of the most vivid episodes is dated 25 April 1945, when he was already in Berlin. He rode a bicycle for the first time and went along the bank of the Spree. There he saw a group of women—tired, exhausted, carrying bundles.

He asked one German woman where they came from and why they had left home. Her answer was shocking:

“I grew up here,” she said. “But that night… so much happened. I was a girl. He chose me. The old people could not bear it. Everyone stood up. They took me. No fewer than twenty. I… I cried.”

The girl’s mother stood beside her:

“They raped my daughter together with me,” she said. “They may come back. Again. I am afraid.”

Later, in a cellar, one of the girls approached Gelfand and said:

“Stay here. You will sleep with me. Do whatever you want. Only you.”

Such was the “hour of revenge.”

For many Soviet soldiers Berlin symbolized retribution. Their road had led through destroyed villages, murdered children and annihilated families. Vitaly Gelfand, the officer’s son, recalls:

“Every day—death. Every day—wounds. My father wrote about villages destroyed by the fascists. About children shot because they were Jewish. Even babies. And these were not isolated incidents—it went on for years. People saw this and moved forward with one thought—to take revenge.”

Vitaly Gelfand found the diary only after his father’s death. He hopes that it will be republished in Russia without cuts.

Meanwhile the Wehrmacht, the army of the Third Reich, strictly prohibited its soldiers from having contact with “non-Aryan women”—the so-called Untermenschen. According to historian Oleg Budnitsky, however, these prohibitions were widely ignored.

The command was concerned about the spread of venereal disease among the troops, and soldiers’ brothels were therefore established throughout Eastern Europe.

BBC photograph: Vitaly Gelfand holding his father’s manuscript.

There is little direct testimony about how German soldiers treated women in the occupied territories. Most victims did not survive the violence.

The German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst, Berlin, however, preserves a photograph taken by a Wehrmacht soldier in Crimea: a woman’s body sprawled on the ground, a skirt embroidered with two flowers, her hands covering her face.

“This photograph caused arguments at the museum,” says staff member Jörg Morré. “But we show war as it was. This is not fiction. It is testimony.”

When the Red Army entered Berlin—“the lair of the fascist beast,” as the Soviet press called it—posters carried the slogan: “Soldiers, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!”

Some political officers, for example in the 19th Army, insisted that the Soviet soldier was “so full of hatred” that “the thought of sexual contact with a German woman would be repulsive to him.” Reality contradicted such ideological claims.

British historian Antony Beevor, in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), cites numerous documents from Russian archives, including NKVD reports addressed to Lavrentiy Beria.

“These documents reached Stalin,” Beevor says. “They were initialed. They spoke of mass rape in East Prussia, of women killing themselves and their children rather than face that fate.”

There is another perspective as well, from inside the German experience. The diary of a German soldier’s fiancée describes how women tried to survive by adapting to violence—sometimes deliberately choosing “one” man in order to avoid hundreds.

“Cellar dwellers” was the name given to women hiding in ruins, basements and tunnels in the hope of escaping notice.

The victors came onto foreign soil. Some liberated. Others took revenge. Between them were millions of victims.

By 20 April 1945, an unnamed woman had begun keeping a diary with remarkable honesty and perceptiveness, sometimes using bitter humor bordering on hysteria.

Among her neighbors were “a young man in gray trousers and thick-rimmed spectacles who stared intently at women,” and three elderly sisters whom she described with grotesque gallows humor as “three porn stars lost inside an enormous blood sausage.”

When it became obvious that the Red Army was approaching, the women tried to joke: “Better Russians on top of me than Yanks. Better to be raped than die under the bombs.”

But when Soviet soldiers actually arrived and tried to drag women out of the cellar, the humor disappeared. The women begged the diarist, who knew Russian, to speak to officers and complain about what was happening.

In the ruined streets of Berlin she managed to find a Soviet officer. At first he did not react. Despite an official order forbidding violence against civilians, he admitted: “It happens anyway.”

He nevertheless went down into the cellar and reprimanded the soldiers. One shouted back: “What are you saying?! Did you see what the Germans did to our women?! They took my sister and…” The officer managed to calm him and lead him outside.

When the woman stepped into the corridor to make sure the danger had passed, several soldiers seized her. She was brutally raped and nearly strangled. The other women, her neighbors—or, as she called them, the “cellar dwellers”—shut the cellar door behind them.

Later, when she regained consciousness, two neighbors opened the door. Everyone looked at her in silence. “My stockings were down, my arms bruised, my belt torn. I screamed: ‘Swine! You have already been raped twice, while you left me lying here like a dirty rag!’”

Later she met an officer from Leningrad who began sharing her bed. The relationship between aggressor and victim gradually developed into an ambivalent attachment. They discussed literature and the meaning of life.

“It cannot be said that I was seriously raped,” she wrote. “Why did I stay? Because of bacon, sugar, candles, tinned meat? Probably in part. But also because I needed it too. The less he wanted to take me simply as a woman, the more I saw him as a man.”

Many women around her made similar arrangements with Soviet soldiers.

When the diary appeared in Germany in 1959 under the title A Woman in Berlin, it caused a public scandal. The author was accused of having “dishonored German women.” Unsurprisingly, she prohibited republication until after her death.

Rape was not only a problem associated with the Red Army.

Historian J. Robert Lilly of Northern Kentucky University gained access to the archives of American military tribunals. His book Taken by Force caused such controversy that publishers in the United States initially refused it. The first edition appeared in France.

According to estimates cited in the material, American soldiers committed about 14,000 rapes in Britain, France and Germany between 1942 and 1945.

“In England there were relatively few cases,” Lilly says, “but as soon as American troops crossed the Channel, the figures rose sharply.”

According to him, the issue concerned not only the army’s image but discipline. Eisenhower was said to have ordered rapists to be shot on the spot and the punishments publicized in army newspapers such as Stars and Stripes. In practice, the material states, no American soldier was executed for raping or murdering German civilians.

Sexual violence committed by Allied troops in Germany remained a taboo subject for a long time. It was not discussed in either East or West Germany. A few people dared to speak—and almost no one wanted to listen.

Silence.

It was difficult to speak about it. In East Germany such memories were treated as sacrilege, an attack on the image of the “heroic Soviet soldier-liberator.” In West Germany it was argued that the German people, guilty of Nazi crimes, had no right to the status of victim.

But in 2008 the German film Anonyma — A Woman in Berlin, starring Nina Hoss, was released. It became a turning point. The film provoked intense discussion and encouraged many women who had remained silent for decades to tell their stories.

One of them was Ingeborg, by then a ninety-year-old woman living in Hamburg. Her flat was filled with photographs of cats and books about the theater. In 1945 she was twenty years old, dreamed of becoming an actress, and lived with her mother on a fashionable street in Charlottenburg.

“I thought they would kill me,” she recalls.

When the battle for Berlin began, she, like many others, hid in a cellar. Tanks entered the city. Bodies—German and Soviet—lay everywhere.

“I remember the terrifying howl of the Soviet rockets. We called them ‘Stalins’—Stalin organs,” she says.

Caught between fear and survival, Ingeborg came out of the cellar. Suddenly she saw Russian soldiers pointing pistols at her.

“Someone pushed me to the ground and raped me. Then they changed places. The second man raped me too. I thought I was going to die—it felt as though they were killing me.”

In 1945 Ingeborg told no one what had happened. She remained silent for decades—not because she forgot, but because it was impossible to talk about it.

She remembers:

“Mother liked to boast: ‘Nobody touched my daughter.’ And I kept silent.”

A Wave of Abortions

In postwar Berlin thousands of women experienced sexual violence. Ingeborg remembers that immediately after the capitulation German women between fifteen and fifty-five were required to undergo examinations for venereal disease.

“To receive ration cards you needed a certificate. I remember doctors, queues, waiting rooms full of women…”

What was the real scale of the violence? Figures often cited are 100,000 rapes in Berlin alone and up to a million throughout Germany. These estimates were based partly on surviving medical records.

One photograph in the BBC World Service archive shows medical files: in a single district of Berlin, 995 abortions were officially approved within six months.

At a former military factory that later housed a state archive, staff member Martin Luchterhand showed bundles of blue files. Germany prohibited abortion under Section 218 of the criminal code, as it still generally did at the time the material was written, but in the summer of 1945 an exception was made on humanitarian grounds.

From June 1945 into 1946, almost a thousand applications were recorded in this one district. The files include handwritten statements such as:

“I was raped at home, in the living room, in front of my parents…”

Bread Instead of Revenge

Not all soldiers behaved in the same way. For some, women became trophies just like watches or bicycles. There were others as well. In Moscow the BBC journalist met ninety-two-year-old veteran Yuri Lyashchenko, who recalled:

“Of course it was impossible to feed everyone. But the children… They were very frightened. Their eyes were terrible. I remember that.”

Yuri, wearing his orders and medals on his tunic, received visitors in an ordinary top-floor flat and served cognac and boiled eggs.

He recalled:

“I wanted to be an engineer, but I was drafted. I went through the whole war, right to Berlin, like Gelfand. I saw the Reichstag with the red flag—then I understood that I had lived to see the end.”

Asked about rape, Lyashchenko answered cautiously:

“I don’t know… Everything was different. Every person answers for himself. One will help; another—you cannot tell anything from his face. You cannot guess.”

Looking Back

We will probably never know the true scale of the violence. The archives of Soviet military courts remain inaccessible in the account summarized here. The text also notes contemporary Russian legislation concerning public statements about the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazism.

A young historian, Vera Dubina, says:

“I knew nothing about it. Only when I received a scholarship and went to study in Berlin did I begin learning about it. Later I wrote a post—but it was not published in Russia.”

She says Russian media reacted aggressively.

“People want to see the victory as glorious and heroic. It is becoming harder and harder to do serious research.”

Photograph: a Soviet field kitchen distributing food to residents of Berlin. BBC archive image.

History is repeatedly rewritten. That is why eyewitness testimony matters so much—the testimony of people who found the courage to speak, often only in old age, and the accounts of younger people who managed to listen to them.

“If people do not want to know the truth, they want to be mistaken. It is more comfortable for them to believe a beautiful myth. But without understanding the past, a country has no future,” Vera says.

Editor’s note: On 25 and 28 September 2015 changes were made to the original material. The BBC removed captions from two photographs and Twitter posts because they did not meet editorial standards and could have been perceived as offensive. The editors apologized.

Let Us Talk About Trophies

What did Red Army soldiers actually take home from defeated Germany? Let us try to look at the subject without emotion—only facts and testimony.

Photograph: a Soviet soldier takes a bicycle from a German. In the Russophobic version it is robbery; in the Soviet press version it is assistance. August 1945.

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Soldiers did indeed take whatever came to hand from German houses and warehouses. Armed looting occurred as well.

There were rapes too. Sometimes people were tried for them. Sometimes they were not.

Not every soldier who had gone through the war wanted to return home without a souvenir. Nor did every soldier feel like a victor. For many, returning home could mean Siberia rather than freedom.

Soviet soldiers buying goods on the “black market” in Berlin’s Tiergarten, summer 1945.

Although looting was officially prosecuted, trophies were highly valued in practice. After Red Army units entered German territory, Order No. 0409 was issued on 26 December 1944. Under the order, all servicemen of the active fronts were permitted once a month to send one personal parcel to the Soviet rear.

One of the harshest disciplinary sanctions was deprivation of the right to send such a parcel. The maximum weight depended on rank: up to 5 kg for enlisted men and sergeants, up to 10 kg for junior officers, and up to 16 kg for senior officers and generals. A parcel could not exceed 70 centimetres on any of its three sides.

Formally, parcels were limited to personal belongings, but in practice household appliances, dishes, carpets, furniture, musical instruments and even pianos were sent from the front. Anything that could be obtained in Germany was often regarded as “legitimate booty.”

After demobilization, servicemen were allowed to take from Germany whatever they could carry or transport. Large objects were often carried on the roofs of railway cars or secured to special rail platforms. According to eyewitness stories, individual items were even fastened to poles fixed to the outside of cars—for example, my grandfather said such arrangements could be used while painting telegraph poles as the train moved.

Three Soviet women in Germany carrying wine from an abandoned wine shop. Lippstadt, April 1945.

During the war and in the first months after it ended, Soviet soldiers mainly sent home so-called “home-made parcels.” These often contained captured American army rations—tinned foods, powdered eggs, jam and even instant coffee, an exotic rarity at the time.

Medicines were especially valuable, above all streptomycin and penicillin, which were considered genuine life-saving gifts for relatives. They were often passed to family members or acquaintances because such drugs were scarce in the postwar USSR and had enormous medical and personal value.

American soldiers with young German women combining trade and joking at the “black market” in the Tiergarten. Soviet soldiers can be seen in the background. Berlin, May 1945.

Such trophy goods and scarce medicines could usually be obtained only on the “black market,” which rapidly appeared in almost every German city. Flea markets sold everything—from automobiles to access to women. In the first postwar months the chief currency was not money but food and tobacco.

The German population suffered above all from a shortage of food, whereas Americans, British and French generally dealt more in monetary equivalents. Former Nazi Reichsmarks, occupation marks issued by the victorious powers and Allied foreign currencies circulated simultaneously in postwar Germany, all at unstable and differing exchange rates.

An American soldier talking with a Soviet junior lieutenant. Photograph from Life, 10 September 1945.

Soviet soldiers also had money. American observers regarded them as some of the best customers: generous, not inclined to haggle and, by the standards of the time, relatively well supplied with cash.

One reason was that from December 1944 Red Army servicemen stationed in Germany began receiving double pay—simultaneously in roubles and marks at an officially fixed rate. This system of dual payment continued until it was later formally abolished.

Photographs of Soviet soldiers circulating through a flea market. Photograph from Life, 10 September 1945.

The pay of Soviet servicemen depended on rank and post. In 1945, for example, a formation commander received 1,500 roubles per month and approximately the same amount in occupation marks at the established exchange rate.

In addition, officers from company-commander level upward received supplementary payments connected with the use of hired German civilian labor for the needs of Soviet units.

Price display. A certificate for the purchase by a Soviet colonel of a German automobile for 2,500 marks (stamp: 750 roubles).

Soviet servicemen therefore had substantial means at their disposal. On the black market an officer could afford almost anything he wanted for a single month’s salary. At the end of the war, soldiers also began receiving accumulated arrears in pay, while many still sent rouble transfers home. This left enough money for personal needs.

For that reason it was often irrational to risk looting, to be caught with unauthorized “trophies,” and to face punishment that could include arrest or assignment to penal units. Greedy and reckless men certainly existed, but the text presents such cases as exceptions rather than the norm.

A Soviet soldier with an SS dagger at his belt. Pardubice, Czechoslovakia, May 1945.

Soldiers differed both in character and taste. Some preferred practical objects, others things of aesthetic interest. Some especially valued German weapons and military equipment even when it had little everyday usefulness: naval daggers, ceremonial sabres and decorative blades, for example.

As a child I held one such dagger in my hands. The father of a friend had brought it back from the war. A black-and-silver hilt, heavy steel and predatory elegance made a strong impression. I was fascinated not only by its appearance but by the sinister history hidden in the object.

Great Patriotic War veteran Pyotr Asero with a trophy item marked “Admiral.” Grodno, Belarus, May 2013.

Most Soviet soldiers particularly valued ordinary civilian goods: clothing, watches, cameras, radios, porcelain and crystal. Such things continued to appear on the shelves of Soviet second-hand shops for many years afterward.

Many trophies have survived to the present day. But one should not rush to accuse their owners of looting: the exact circumstances in which any particular object was acquired are often unknown. It may have been exchanged with Germans, purchased, or voluntarily given.

The Photograph “A Soviet Soldier Takes a Bicycle”

A widely reproduced photograph occupies a special place in postwar interpretations of looting. It is usually described as “a Soviet soldier taking a bicycle from a resident of Berlin.” The image regularly appears in Western and anti-Soviet publications, especially around anniversaries of the end of the war.

It is commonly accompanied by captions such as “Looting in Berlin, 1945” or “Red Army soldier takes a bicycle from a German woman.” Yet the character of the scene and the expressions on the participants’ faces do not in themselves confirm an act of violence. The calm behavior of bystanders and other details instead suggest an everyday encounter.

Some researchers have pointed to suspicious details in the uniform of the man shown and suggested that he may not have been a Soviet soldier at all. In the background a soldier can even be seen wearing camouflage associated with Allied armies.

To clarify the photograph’s origin, archival sources were examined. It was found to have been published in the catalogue of the documentary exhibition Territory of Terror, shown in Berlin in 1991 and later in St Petersburg. In the 1994 catalogue the photograph appears on page 257 with the caption: “A Soviet soldier takes a bicycle from a resident of Berlin, 1945.”

The source was identified as the photographic archive of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz). The original was also found in the Life magazine archive under the title Bike Fight. The Life version is not cropped and shows additional details, including an officer in the background who is probably not German.

Most important was the original caption attributed to the American agency Corbis:

“Russian soldier tries to buy a bicycle from a woman in Berlin, 1945. A misunderstanding occurred after he gave her money and considered the transaction complete. The woman, however, thought otherwise.”

Thus the photograph actually depicts an everyday postwar trading dispute rather than, according to this caption, an act of robbery.

Who, Then, “Raped All the German Women”?

This rhetorical question is raised in a text by Sergei Manokov that discusses data on sexual violence in postwar Germany.

Professor J. Robert Lilly in the United States, after studying American military archives, found that by November 1945 U.S. military tribunals had considered 11,040 cases involving serious sexual offenses committed by American soldiers in Germany. Similar accusations were made against British, French and other Allied troops.

Despite this, the text argues, many Western historians focused attention primarily on Soviet crimes while often overlooking material in their own archives.

British historian Antony Beevor, one of the most frequently cited authors on the subject, argued that American soldiers did not need to use violence because they could supposedly “get what they wanted” with chocolate, canned food, cigarettes and nylon stockings. In his account, most contacts were voluntary and concerned survival rather than violence.

This gave rise to a popular Western joke:

“It took the Americans six years to defeat the German army, but only a bar of chocolate to conquer German women.”

Reality, however, was far removed from this ironic picture. Postwar society often failed to distinguish between voluntary prostitution and sexual relations entered into under desperation, hunger and fear. A woman who agreed to sex in exchange for food for her child was also vulnerable to circumstance.

Historian Miriam Gebhardt of the University of Konstanz presented a less idealized picture of the victorious soldiers. Her book When the Soldiers Came was written not to excuse one side, but, in her account, to restore historical justice for victims whose experiences had long been excluded from public discussion.

Gebhardt gathered interviews with women who said they had suffered violence at the hands of American, British and French soldiers. One episode concerns Charlotte, an eighteen-year-old woman who lived with her mother Kathrin in southern Germany. In the spring of 1945 six American soldiers entered their village. The women tried to hide, but were found, dragged from their hiding place and raped. Instead of chocolate and nylon stockings, the soldiers carried submachine guns.

The episode is presented as one of many in the American occupation zone, whose forces numbered about 1.6 million. In the spring of 1945 the archbishop of Munich instructed priests to document cases of violence; part of these church archives was published decades later.

On 20 July 1945 Pastor Michael Merksamer of Ramsau near Berchtesgaden reported: “Eight girls and women were raped, some in front of their parents.” Father Andreas Weing of Haag an der Amper wrote on 25 July: “One married woman and one sixteen-year-old girl were raped.” In August 1945, priest Alois Schimmel of Moosburg recorded: “Seventeen girls and women were hospitalized after repeated rapes by American soldiers.”

The youngest victim cited was seven years old and the oldest sixty-nine. The figures in this passage are drawn from official clergy reports.

Gebhardt’s book caused wide public debate in Germany. The author’s purpose was to emphasize that sexual violence against women in postwar Germany was widespread and was by no means committed exclusively by Soviet soldiers.

Although the book focuses on crimes attributed to Americans, Gebhardt also discusses British and French troops. The passage says that French units, particularly colonial African troops, had the worst reputation. In Stuttgart, according to differing estimates quoted in the text, between 2,000 and 4,000 women were raped in three days, with French soldiers pursuing women in the underground and in the streets.

The psychological background of the violence, the text continues, was reinforced by propaganda: Allied soldiers were told that they would be regarded as liberators and therefore expected gratitude from the population, including sexual submission. It presents this as especially relevant to Americans raised on a culture of heroism, Hollywood clichés and consumer expectations.

After scandals involving torture and killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, interest in Allied crimes during the Second World War increased. New publications brought forward documents about rape, killings of civilians and other crimes by Allied soldiers in Italy, France and Germany. Yet the public image of the U.S. Army, the text argues, remains comparatively gentle: in popular memory they are providers and good-natured victors carrying chocolate and cigarettes.

Gebhardt’s estimate of 190,000 rapes committed by Americans has itself been criticized. Antony Beevor called the number exaggerated and argued that most sexual relations in Germany were voluntary, saying that German women willingly entered relationships for food, protection and survival.

The text responds that such a view overlooks an obvious ethical issue: a woman who agrees to intimacy for a piece of bread may be no less vulnerable than one threatened with a weapon. This is therefore not merely a historical dispute, but a question of ethics, memory and justice.

Another scholar who differs with Gebhardt is Professor Mary Louise Roberts of the University of Wisconsin. In What Soldiers Do she analyzes American servicemen in Western Europe using archival material rather than only memoirs and interviews. According to the figures cited here, 152 cases of rape by American soldiers were formally recorded in France, and 29 servicemen were executed in connection with serious crimes.

Even official confirmed figures, the text notes, would represent only part of the total, because many women did not report rape out of shame. At the time, the stigma of rape was frequently placed on the victim herself and silence was common.

Thus, despite the differences in method between Gebhardt and Roberts, the text draws the same broader conclusion: the image of the “liberator” did not always correspond to reality. Occupation and war were inseparable from violence, and among the victims were people whom official historical narratives later presented only as grateful recipients of liberation.

The source then gives an expanded version of the discussion concerning France.

In France, American perpetrators of sexual violence could have additional motives. Many cases involving French women were treated by soldiers as part of an “adventure abroad.” A significant number of the soldiers had fathers who had served in France during the First World War, and family stories about that service often devoted more attention to romantic episodes than to combat. Such memories helped create a durable stereotype of France as a country of sexually available women.

American military publications such as Stars and Stripes also played a role. They published images of French women kissing American soldiers and printed useful French phrases such as “I am not married,” “You have beautiful eyes,” and “You are very beautiful.” The journalists may not have explicitly encouraged violence, but they contributed to an image of France as a realm of sexual freedom and availability. Against that background, after the Allied landings in the summer of 1944 northern France saw a wave of male misconduct, violence and sexual aggression.

Le Havre was mentioned particularly often. The city archives preserve letters from the mayor complaining about a “wide range of crimes committed day and night.” Rape, including attacks in front of witnesses, was among the most frequently cited offenses, and looting and theft were also recorded.

American soldiers, the text argues, at times behaved in France as though in a conquered colony rather than an allied country. Public attitudes toward them therefore changed rapidly. For some French residents, “liberation” began to feel like another form of occupation. Some witnesses even described American behavior as coarser and more humiliating than that of German soldiers during the Nazi occupation.

French prostitutes were said to warn one another that Americans were interested in more than sexual services. In dealings with the Yanks, women reportedly had to watch their purses and check that jewelry or small possessions had not disappeared. The source claims that some American soldiers did not hesitate to steal from women with whom they had just been intimate. Encounters could therefore be dangerous not only because of sexual violence but also because of ordinary theft.

The text states that twenty-nine American soldiers were sentenced to death in cases involving the killing of French prostitutes. To curb crime among the troops, the U.S. military command circulated an order condemning rape as unacceptable conduct. Military prosecutors, however, are described as acting harshly mainly when an offense could no longer be concealed.

Racial hierarchy in the U.S. Army was also reflected in court practice. Of 152 American soldiers and officers brought to trial for sexual offenses, the passage states that 139 were African American. It argues that white soldiers were often better able to avoid punishment, whereas Black servicemen could expect neither leniency nor equal treatment.

What Was Life Like in Occupied Germany?

After the end of the Second World War Germany was divided into four occupation zones—Soviet, American, British and French. How people lived in these zones remains the subject of sharp disagreement. Some accounts say the Allied armies provided order and protection; others describe arbitrariness, violence and humiliation. The assessments often do not merely differ but directly contradict one another.

Reorientation and Re-education

The first task the Allies set after Germany’s defeat was the reorientation and “re-education” of the German population. A questionnaire prepared under the Allied occupation authorities covered the adult population and was compulsory. The form, referred to here as “Erhebungsformular MG/PS/G/9A,” contained 131 questions. Participation was not voluntary: refusal to complete the form could lead to denial of ration cards.

On the basis of the questionnaire, Germans were divided into five categories: those not implicated, those exonerated, “followers,” offenders, and major offenders. Members of the last three categories could face proceedings to determine the degree of responsibility and punishment. Offenders and major offenders could be sent to forced-labor camps, while “followers” could face fines, confiscation of property or public-service work.

The method was, of course, far from perfect. False information, evasion of responsibility, mutual protection and gaps in the questionnaire system enabled hundreds of thousands of former Nazis to avoid punishment. In later years many left the country by the so-called “ratlines,” networks used by former Nazis to reach Latin America and the Middle East.

Alongside legal purges, a large-scale campaign to re-educate Germans began. Citizens were compelled to attend film screenings showing documentary evidence of Nazi crimes. Failure to attend could likewise threaten access to ration cards. Mass visits to former concentration camps were also organized. Germans were not only shown the horrors of the camps but were required to take part in cleaning the sites and other forms of public work.

For a substantial part of the population this was a shock. Goebbels’s propaganda had operated throughout the war and created a completely different image of the Third Reich. Many people learned for the first time that Nazism had been not merely an ideology but also a system of brutal repression and mass murder.

Dismantling

Under the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, Germany was to be disarmed, including through the dismantling of its military-industrial capacity. The Allied powers, however, implemented these principles differently. In the western occupation zones, dismantling was accompanied by efforts to restore factories. The United States and Britain sought to preserve the industrial potential of western Germany, increasing metal production and supporting an economy capable of rapid recovery.

By 1947, the text states, more than 450 military-related enterprises in the British and American zones had been classified rather than dismantled, and some were modernized.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, pursued dismantling more consistently in accordance with its interpretation of the conference decisions. Historian Mikhail Semiryaga is cited as saying that in the year beginning in March 1945 the highest Soviet authorities adopted about one thousand decisions concerning the liquidation or removal of 4,389 enterprises in Germany, Austria, Hungary and other countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

Even so, the scale of equipment taken to the USSR was presented as incomparable with the destruction Soviet industry had suffered. According to figures attributed to Gosplan chairman Nikolai Voznesensky, trophy deliveries from Germany compensated for only 0.6 percent of the direct damage inflicted on the Soviet economy by the war. The total number of enterprises removed from Germany was also said to equal only 86 percent of the prewar number of Soviet plants destroyed during the war.

Trophies and Private Property

While discussing the postwar order and violence against German civilians, the text also notes that numerous documents describe the victorious powers carrying away property from defeated Germany on a very large scale.

Marshal Zhukov is singled out as having accumulated a particularly large collection of trophies. When an investigation began in 1948, investigators drew up a detailed inventory of property taken from him. It included 194 pieces of furniture, 44 carpets and tapestries, seven crates of crystal, 55 paintings described as museum works, and much more, all brought from Germany to the Soviet Union.

As for ordinary Red Army soldiers and officers, cases of looting were rarely recorded in official documents, at least in the surviving material discussed here. Soviet victors more commonly engaged in what the source calls gathering abandoned property. After the command officially permitted parcels to be sent home, boxes containing sewing needles, lengths of cloth, tools and household utensils went to the Soviet rear.

The soldiers’ attitude toward this practice could be very straightforward. In letters home they openly called such things “stuff” and believed that they were entitled to them as compensation for what they had endured and for the destruction of their own homes and possessions during the war.

Conflicting Accounts of Sexual Violence

The most contentious subject remains violence against civilians, especially German women. At one point the number of German women affected was often estimated at between 20,000 and 150,000 across Germany.

In 1992, however, a book by Hilke Sander and Barbara Johr cited a figure of two million. According to the source text, this number was derived by extrapolating data from one German clinic to the whole country. Antony Beevor later repeated the estimate in his book on the fall of Berlin. When the Russian edition appeared in 2004, the figure became central to arguments about mass sexual violence by Soviet troops in Germany.

The text counters this with Soviet official documents, in which such incidents were categorized as “extraordinary occurrences” and “immoral phenomena,” and says offenders were prosecuted. As an example it cites a report by the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front covering offenses against civilians from 22 April to 5 May 1945. The report recorded 124 offenses, including 72 rapes, in a front whose strength was about 908,500 men. The author therefore rejects the two-million estimate as unreliable.

Violence by Western Allied troops, meanwhile, is described as another fact long left outside public discussion. Writer and eyewitness Naum Orlov recalled British soldiers boasting of trophies and wristwatches while chewing gum. Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who was sympathetic to the Allies, wrote in 1945:

“Strict discipline prevails in the Red Army. Looting, rape and mockery are as rare here as in any other regular army. Wild stories of atrocities that appear from time to time are the result of exaggeration caused by nervousness, misunderstanding of Russian soldiers’ behavior and their fondness for vodka.”

One woman interviewed by White initially spoke of many “horrors” but later admitted that the only incident she had personally witnessed involved drunken officers shooting at bottles with pistols.

How did Germans behave when they first met Soviet soldiers? The text cites a report dated 30 April 1945 by Chikin, deputy head of the Red Army’s Main Political Directorate. It stated that in areas of Berlin entered by Red Army units the population at first showed fear; women cried and trembled at the sight of Soviet soldiers. After initial contact, however, fear diminished, people came out into the streets, offered help and tried to demonstrate loyalty.

Mortarman Naum Orlov recalled an illustrative incident. In one German town a woman approached him and asked for the commandant. She was escorted to an officer and said she could assemble twenty women for the soldiers. The officers responded angrily and contemptuously. The woman was drunk, and she and the person accompanying her were sent away. Orlov interpreted German behavior as conditioned by obedience to authority: “Their psychology is like this: if you are the victor, they immediately stand on their hind legs.”

David Samoilov recorded a similar episode. In the small town of Lesenfeld, where he was billeted, Frau Friedrich approached the Soviet soldiers and asked that all women and children be registered. After some hesitation the request was granted. Soon she made another proposal: “We understand that soldiers have needs… We are ready,” she said, pointing to several women. Samoilov ended the conversation.

After talking with Berlin residents on 2 May 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary:

“We enter one of the surviving houses. Inside it is quiet, dead. A knock at the door, a request to open. Whispering can be heard in the corridor, muffled voices speaking tensely. At last the door opens. Women, especially those of Asian appearance, raped and crushed—fear and hatred on their faces. Yet at times it seems that they have somehow reconciled themselves to defeat and are anxious about their own behavior, and therefore there is ingratiation and sweetness in their voices. In one flat Soviet soldiers encountered a drunken German man. Unable to restrain himself, one of them threw him onto a sofa and pulled off his knitted underwear.”

Among Soviet troops one also encountered the opinion that “all German women are promiscuous; they sleep with anyone.” The source says that such views were reinforced by numerous observations and soon had unpleasant medical consequences.

An order of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front, No. 00343/ш of 15 April 1945, stated:

“During the troops’ stay on enemy territory, the incidence of venereal disease among personnel has risen sharply. Study of the causes has shown that venereal diseases are widespread among the German population. It has been noted that before retreating, and now on occupied territory, Germans resort to deliberate infection with syphilis and other diseases in order to create epidemic centers among Red Army personnel.”

A report of the Military Council of the 47th Army dated 26 April 1945 stated that in March the incidence of venereal disease among servicemen had risen fourfold compared with February, that examinations in some areas found infection among 8 to 15 percent of women, and that there were allegations that women with sexually transmitted infections had deliberately been left behind to infect Soviet soldiers.

Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who was in Europe in 1944–1945 with General Patton’s U.S. Third Army, left another observation. In May 1945, shortly after the fighting in Berlin ended, he wrote:

“I went to one of the nightclubs near Potsdamer Platz. It was a warm, damp night. The air was heavy with the smell of sewage and decomposing bodies. The facade was decorated with risqué pictures of naked women and advertising in four languages. Inside was a ballroom and restaurant packed with Russian officers as well as British and Americans, accompanied by women or trying to meet them. A bottle of wine cost 25 dollars, a hamburger with French fries 10, and a pack of American cigarettes 20. The cheeks of Berlin women were carefully powdered and their lips brightly painted—it almost seemed as though Hitler, rather than anyone else, had won the war. Some wore real silk stockings. The hostess opened the show in German, Russian, English and French. A Russian artillery commander sitting next to me raised his glass, leaned toward me and said in good English: ‘What a rapid transition from patriotism to internationalism! RAF bombs are excellent professors, aren’t they?’”

The general impression European women made on Soviet soldiers was therefore contradictory. They appeared elegant and well groomed, especially in comparison with women the soldiers had seen in the Soviet rear, in devastated liberated territories or among their front-line companions. At the same time they were often stereotyped as sexually available, mercenary, promiscuous or timid. Yugoslav and Bulgarian women were treated as exceptions.

Yugoslav women partisans appeared stern and ascetic. Because of strict social norms in Yugoslavia, women who entered intimate relationships with Red Army soldiers could be regarded contemptuously as low-status “field wives.”

Boris Slutsky wrote of Bulgarian women: “After the Ukrainians and Romanian debauchery, the inaccessibility of Bulgarian women stunned our soldiers. Nobody boasted of conquests there. It was perhaps the only country where officers were more often seen walking with men than with women. Bulgarians proudly said that if Russians returned to Bulgaria, it would only be for brides—the only women who had preserved their purity.”

In other countries, according to soldiers quoted in the text, women commanded much less respect. “In Europe women surrendered first…” Slutsky wrote. “It always shocked and disoriented me. Love affairs were rough and rapid. Respectable women were not interested in us, while prostitutes were too accessible. The desire to avoid courtship, formalities and conversation only increased the disgust. There were neither feelings nor romance in these relations—only automatism and physiology.” Many officers viewed this with contempt. The restraining factors, the passage says, were less moral conviction than fear of infection and pregnancy.

Can these impressions be considered mistaken?

European Women Through the Eyes of Soviet Soldiers

In continuation of the subject, the source introduces another article by Elena Senyavskaya, devoted to the image of European women in the perception of Soviet servicemen at the final stage of the war.

At the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, having liberated the Soviet territory occupied by the Germans and their satellites and pursuing the retreating enemy, the Red Army crossed the state border of the USSR. From that moment, her victorious path began through the countries of Europe - both those who languished for six years under fascist occupation, and those who acted in this war as an ally of the Third Reich, and through the territory of Hitlerite Germany itself. In the course of this advance to the West and the inevitable various contacts with the local population, Soviet servicemen, who had never been outside their own country before, received many new, very contradictory impressions about representatives of other peoples and cultures, from which ethnopsychological stereotypes of their perception of Europeans were later formed. ... Among these impressions, the image of European women occupied the most important place. Mentions, or even detailed stories about them, are found in letters and diaries, on the pages of memoirs of many participants in the war, where lyrical and cynical assessments and intonations often alternate.

The first European country to which the Red Army entered in August 1944 was Romania. In the "Notes on the War" by the front-line poet Boris Slutsky, we find very frank lines: "Sudden, almost knocked into the sea, Constanta is revealed. It almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and after the war. Restaurants. Bathrooms. Beds with clean linen. Reptilian vendors. And - women, smart urban women - girls of Europe - the first tribute we took from the vanquished ... "Then he describes his first impressions of" abroad ": “Where first the dirt from the hands remains, and then the face is washed”, feather beds instead of blankets - out of disgust caused by everyday life, immediate generalizations were made ... In Constanta we first met brothels ... Our first enthusiasm for the existence of free love quickly pass away. Not only the fear of infection and the high cost, but also the contempt for the very opportunity to buy a person, affects ... Many were proud of the type: a Romanian husband complains to the commandant's office that our officer did not pay his wife the agreed fifteen hundred lei. Everyone had a distinct consciousness: "It is impossible with us" ... Probably, our soldiers will remember Romania as a country of syphilitics ... ". And he concludes that it was in Romania, this European backwater, that "our soldier most of all felt his elevation over Europe."

Another Soviet officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Smolnikov, on September 17, 1944, wrote down his impressions of Bucharest in his diary: “Hotel Ambassador, restaurant, ground floor. I see the idle audience walking, they have nothing to do, they wait. They look at me like a rarity. "Russian officer !!!" I am very modestly dressed, more than modest. Let be. We will still be in Budapest. This is as true as the fact that I am in Bucharest. First class restaurant. The audience is dressed up, the most beautiful Romanians climb their eyes defiantly (Hereinafter, it is highlighted by the author of the article) ... We will spend the night in a first-class hotel. The metropolitan street is seething. There is no music, the audience is waiting. Capital, damn it! I will not give in to advertising ... "

In Hungary, the Soviet army faced not only armed resistance, but also with insidious stabs in the back from the population, when "drunken and stragglers were killed in farmsteads" and drowned in silos. However, "women, not as depraved as Romanians, yielded with shameful ease ... A little love, a little dissipation, and most of all, of course, fear helped." Quoting a Hungarian lawyer, “It’s very good that Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much, "Boris Slutsky comments:" He did not take into account that Hungarian women also loved Russians, that along with the dark fear that pushed the knees of matrons and mothers of families apart, there was the tenderness of the girls and the desperate tenderness of the soldiers who surrendered themselves to the murderers their husbands. "

Grigory Chukhrai described such a case in Hungary in his memoirs. Part of it was quartered in one place. The owners of the house, where he and the soldiers settled down, during the feast "relaxed under the influence of Russian vodka and admitted that they were hiding their daughter in the attic." The Soviet officers were indignant: “For whom do you take us? We are not fascists! " “The owners were ashamed, and soon a skinny girl named Mariyka appeared at the table and eagerly began to eat. Then, having got used to it, she began to flirt and even ask us questions ... By the end of dinner, everyone was in a friendly mood and drank to "borotshaz" (friendship). Mariyka understood this toast too bluntly. When we went to bed, she appeared in my room in one undershirt. As a Soviet officer, I immediately realized that a provocation was being prepared. “They expect that I will be seduced by the charms of Mariyka and will make a fuss. But I will not give in to provocation, ”I thought. Yes, and the charms of Mariyka did not appeal to me - I showed her to the door.

The next morning, the hostess, putting food on the table, rattled dishes. “She's nervous. The provocation failed! " - I thought. I shared this thought with our Hungarian translator. He burst out laughing.

This is not a provocation! You have been shown a friendly disposition, and you have neglected it. Now you are not considered a person in this house. You need to move to another apartment!

Why did they hide their daughter in the attic?

They were afraid of violence. It is accepted in our country that a girl, before getting married, with the approval of her parents, can experience intimacy with many men. They say here: they don't buy a cat in a tied sack ... "

Young, physically healthy men had a natural attraction to women. But the lightness of European morals corrupted some of the Soviet fighters, while others, on the contrary, convinced that the relationship should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant Alexander Rodin wrote down his impressions of the visit - out of curiosity! - a brothel in Budapest, where part of it stood for some time after the end of the war: “... After leaving, a disgusting, shameful feeling of lies and falsehood arose, a picture of a woman's obvious, frank pretense did not go out of my head ... It is interesting that such an unpleasant aftertaste from visiting a brothel remained not only with me, a young man, who was also brought up on principles such as “do not give a kiss without love, but also with most of our soldiers, with whom I had to talk ... Around the same days, I had to talk with one a pretty Magyark (she knew Russian from somewhere). When she asked if I liked Budapest, I replied that I liked it, only brothels are embarrassing. "But why?" the girl asked. Because it is unnatural, wild, - I explained: - a woman takes money and after that, immediately begins to "love!" The girl thought for a while, then nodded in agreement and said: "You are right: it is ugly to take money forward" ... "

Poland left a different impression of itself. According to the poet David Samoilov, “... in Poland they kept us strict. It was difficult to escape from the location. And pranks were severely punished. " And he gives the impressions of this country, where the only positive moment was the beauty of Polish women. “I cannot say that we liked Poland very much,” he wrote. - Then in it I did not come across anything noble and chivalrous. On the contrary, everything was bourgeois, farmer - both concepts and interests. Yes, and in eastern Poland they looked at us wary and semi-hostile, trying to rip off the liberators what was possible. However, the women were comfortingly beautiful and flirtatious, they captivated us with their mannerisms, cooing speech, where everything suddenly became clear, and they themselves were captivated at times by a rude male force or a soldier's uniform. And their pale, emaciated former admirers, gritting their teeth, went into the shadows for a while ... ".

But not all assessments of Polish women looked so romantic. On October 22, 1944, junior lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: with beautiful Polish women, proud to the point of disgust ... … I was told about Polish women: they lured our soldiers and officers into their arms, and when it came to bed, they cut off their penises with a razor, strangled their throats with their hands, and scratched their eyes. Crazy, wild, ugly females! You have to be careful with them and not get carried away by their beauty. And the Poles are beautiful, ugly. " However, there are other moods in his notes. On October 24, he records the following meeting: “Today, beautiful Polish girls turned out to be my companions to one of the villages. They complained about the absence of the guys in Poland. They also called me "Pan", but they were inviolable. I patted one of them gently on the shoulder in response to her remark about men, and consoled me with the thought of an open road for her to Russia - there are many men there. She hastened to step aside, and to my words she replied that there would be men for her here too. Said goodbye by shaking hands. So we didn’t come to an agreement, but nice girls, even if they’re Pole ”. A month later, on November 22, he wrote down his impressions of the first large Polish city he met in Minsk-Mazowieckie, and among the description of the architectural beauties and the number of bicycles that amazed him among all categories of the population, he devotes a special place to townspeople: “Noisy idle crowd, women, as one, in white special hats, apparently put on from the wind, which make them look like forty and surprise with their novelty ... Men in triangular caps, in hats - fat, neat, empty. How many there are! ... Dyed lips, lined eyebrows, pretentiousness, excessive delicacy ... How unlike the natural life of a human being. It seems that people themselves live and move on purpose only to be looked at by others, and everyone will disappear when the last spectator leaves the city ... "

Not only Polish city dwellers, but also villagers left a strong, albeit contradictory, impression of themselves. “The vitality of the Poles, who survived the horrors of war and German occupation, was striking,” recalled Alexander Rodin. - Sunday afternoon in a Polish village. Beautiful, elegant, in silk dresses and stockings, Polka women, who on weekdays are ordinary peasant women, rake dung, barefoot, tirelessly work on the farm. Older women also look fresh and youthful. Although there are black frames around the eyes ... "He further cites his diary entry dated November 5, 1944:" Sunday, the inhabitants are all dressed up. They are going to visit each other. Men in felt hats, ties, jumpers. Women in silk dresses, bright, unworn stockings. Pink-cheeked girls - "panenki". Beautifully curled blonde hairstyles ... The soldiers in the corner of the hut are also animated. But whoever is sensitive will notice that this is a painful revival. Everyone laughs loudly to show that they are not bothered by this, that it does not even bother them at all and is not enviable at all. Are we worse than them? The devil knows what happiness it is - a peaceful life! After all, I have not seen her at all in civilian life! " His brother-soldier, Sergeant Nikolai Nesterov, wrote in his diary on the same day: “Today is a day off, the Poles, beautifully dressed, gather in one hut and sit in pairs. Even somehow it becomes uncomfortable. Wouldn't I be able to sit like this? .. "

Galina Yartseva, a serviceman, is much more ruthless in her assessment of the "European morals" reminiscent of "a feast during the plague". On February 24, 1945, she wrote to a friend from the front: “… If there was an opportunity, it would be possible to send wonderful parcels of their trophy things. There is something. It would be ours stripped and undressed. What cities have I seen, what kind of men and women. And looking at them, you are possessed by such evil, such hatred! They walk, love, live, and you go and set them free. They laugh at the Russians - "Schwein!" Yes Yes! Bastards ... I do not like anyone except the USSR, except for those peoples who live with us. I don’t believe in any friendship with Poles and other Lithuanians ... ”.

In Austria, where Soviet troops broke into in the spring of 1945, they faced a "general surrender": "Whole villages were covered with white rags. Elderly women raised their hands up when they met a man in a Red Army uniform. " It was here, according to B. Slutsky, that the soldiers "got hold of the blond women." At the same time, “the Austrians did not turn out to be overly stubborn. The overwhelming majority of peasant girls married "spoiled". The holiday soldiers felt like Christ in their bosom. In Vienna, our guide, a bank official, marveled at the persistence and impatience of the Russians. He believed that gallantry is enough to get everything you want from the wreath. " That is, it was not only a matter of fear, but also of certain peculiarities of the national mentality and traditional behavior.

And finally Germany. And the women of the enemy - mothers, wives, daughters, sisters of those who, from 1941 to 1944, sneered at the civilian population in the occupied territory of the USSR. How did the Soviet servicemen see them? The appearance of German women walking in a crowd of refugees is described in the diary of Vladimir Bogomolov: “Women - old and young - in hats, in headscarves with a turban and just a canopy, like our women, in smart coats with fur collars and in ragged clothes of an incomprehensible cut ... Many women wear dark glasses so as not to squint from the bright May sun and thus protect their face from wrinkles. ... "Lev Kopelev recalled a meeting in Allenstein with evacuated Berliners:" There are two women on the sidewalk. Intricate hats, one even with a veil. Solid coats, and they themselves are sleek, sleek. " And he cited the soldiers' comments addressed to them: "chickens", "turkeys", "that would be so smooth ..."

How did the Germans behave when they met Soviet troops? In the report of the deputy. Head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army Shikin in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G.F. begin to gradually take to the streets, almost all of them have white armbands on their sleeves. When meeting with our servicemen, many women raise their hands up, cry and tremble with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all the same as their fascist propaganda painted them, this fear quickly passes, more and more people take to the streets and offer their services, trying in every possible way to emphasize their loyalty to the Red Army. "

The greatest impression on the winners was made by the humility and prudence of the German women. In this regard, it is worth citing the story of N.A. Orlov, a mortarman, who was shocked by the behavior of German women in 1945: “Nobody in the minbat killed civilian Germans. Our special officer was a "Germanophile". If this happened, the reaction of the punitive authorities to such an excess would be quick. About violence against German women. It seems to me that some, talking about such a phenomenon, "exaggerate" a little. I remember an example of a different kind. We went into some German city, settled in houses. "Frau", 45 years old, appears and asks "the commandant's hera." They brought her to Marchenko. She claims to be in charge of the quarter, and has gathered 20 German women to sexually (!!!) serve Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood the German language, and to the deputy political officer Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me, I translated the meaning of what the German woman said. The reaction of our officers was angry and abusive. The German woman was driven away, together with her "detachment" ready for service. In general, German obedience stunned us. They expected partisan warfare and sabotage from the Germans. But for this nation, order - Ordnung - is above all. If you are a winner, then they are "on their hind legs", and deliberately and not under duress. This is such a psychology ... ".

David Samoilov cites a similar case in his military notes: “In Arendsfeld, where we have just settled down, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by a huge mustachioed German woman of about fifty - Frau Friedrich. She stated that she was a representative of the civilian population and asked to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant's office appeared.

It's impossible, ”said Frau Friedrich. “There are women and children here. They need to be registered.

The civilian population with screams and tears confirmed her words.

Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they take the basement of the house where we were accommodated. And they, calmed down, went down to the basement and began to be accommodated there, awaiting the authorities.

Herr Commissioner, Frau Friedrich told me complacently (I wore a leather jacket). “We understand that soldiers have small needs. They are ready, - continued Frau Friedrich, - to provide them with several younger women for ...

I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich. "

After talking with the inhabitants of Berlin on May 2, 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary: “We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock, please open. You can hear whispering in the corridor, talking dully and excitedly. Finally the door opens. The women without age, huddled in a close group, bow down in fear, low and obsequiously. German women are afraid of us, they were told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them ... Fear and hatred on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like to be defeated - their behavior is so helpful, their smiles are so sweet and their words are sweet. These days, there are stories about how our soldier entered a German apartment, asked for a drink, and the German woman, as soon as she saw him, lay down on the sofa and took off her tights. "

“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them. "

such an opinion was prevalent in the Soviet troops and was supported not only by many illustrative examples, but also by their unpleasant consequences, which were soon discovered by military doctors.

The directive of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front No. 00343 / Ш of April 15, 1945 read: “During the stay of the troops on the enemy's territory, the incidence of venereal diseases among military personnel has sharply increased. A study of the reasons for this situation shows that venereal diseases are widespread among Germans. Before the retreat, and also now, in the territory we occupied, the Germans took the path of artificial infection with syphilis and gonorrhea of ​​German women in order to create large foci for the spread of venereal diseases among the soldiers of the Red Army ».

On April 26, 1945, the Military Council of the 47th Army reported that “... In March, the number of venereal diseases among military personnel increased as compared with February of this year. four times. ... The female part of the German population in the surveyed areas is affected by 8-15%. There are cases when the enemy specifically leaves German women sick with venereal diseases to infect military personnel. "

To implement the Decree of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front No. 056 of April 18, 1945 on the prevention of venereal diseases in the troops of the 33rd Army, a leaflet was issued with the following content:

“Comrades, servicemen!

You are being seduced by German women, whose husbands went around all brothels in Europe, got infected themselves and infected their German women.

Before you are those German women who were deliberately abandoned by the enemies in order to spread venereal diseases and thereby incapacitate the soldiers of the Red Army.

We must understand that our victory over the enemy is close and that soon you will be able to return to your families.

What kind of eyes will the one who brings a contagious disease look into the eyes of his loved ones?

Can we, the soldiers of the heroic Red Army, be the source of infectious diseases in our country? NO! For the moral character of a Red Army soldier must be as pure as the image of his Motherland and family! "

Even in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, who angrily describes the facts of violence and looting of Soviet servicemen in East Prussia, there are lines reflecting the other side of the "relationship" with the local population: they sell a loaf of bread and wives and daughters. " The squeamish tone in which Kopelev renders these "stories" implies their unreliability. However, they are confirmed by many sources.

Vladimir Gelfand described in his diary his courtship with a German girl (the entry was made six months after the end of the war, on October 26, 1945, but still very characteristic): “I wanted to enjoy the caresses of pretty Margot to my heart's content - kisses and hugs were not enough. I expected more, but did not dare to demand and insist. The girl's mother was pleased with me. Still would! I brought sweets and butter, sausage, expensive German cigarettes to the altar of trust and affection from my relatives. Already half of these products are enough to have a complete basis and the right to do anything with the daughter in front of the mother, and she will not say anything against it. For food products today are more expensive even than life, and even such a young and sweet sensual woman, like the gentle beauty Margot. "

Interesting diary entries were left by the Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944-1945. was in Europe in the ranks of the 3rd American Army under the command of George Paton. Here is what he wrote in Berlin in May 1945, just a few days after the end of the assault: “I walked through the night cabaret, starting with the Femina near Potsdammerplatz. It was a warm and humid evening. The air was filled with the smell of sewers and rotting corpses. Femina's façade was covered in futuristic nude pictures and advertisements in four languages. The ballroom and restaurant were filled with Russian, British, and American officers escorting (or hunting down) the women. A bottle of wine cost $ 25, a horse meat and potato hamburger $ 10, a pack of American cigarettes a mind-boggling $ 20. The cheeks of the Berlin women were rouged, and their lips were painted in such a way that it seemed that Hitler had won the war. Many women wore silk stockings. The lady-hostess of the evening opened the concert in German, Russian, English and French. This provoked a taunt from the captain of the Russian artillery, who was sitting next to me. He leaned over to me and said in decent English: “Such a quick transition from national to international! RAF bombs are great professors, aren't they? "

The general impression of European women that Soviet servicemen have is sleek and smart (in comparison with their war-worn compatriots in the half-starved rear, in the lands liberated from the occupation, and with front-line friends dressed in washed tunics), available, selfish, loose or cowardly submissive. The exceptions were Yugoslav women and Bulgarians. The harsh and ascetic Yugoslav partisans were perceived as comrades in and were considered inviolable. And given the severity of manners in the Yugoslav army, "the partisan girls probably looked at the PW [field wives] as being of a special, nasty sort." Boris Slutsky recalled about Bulgarians as follows: “... After Ukrainian complacency, after Romanian debauchery, the severe inaccessibility of Bulgarian women amazed our people. Almost no one boasted of victories. It was the only country where officers were often accompanied on a walk by men, almost never by women. Later, the Bulgarians were proud when they were told that the Russians were going to return to Bulgaria for brides - the only ones in the world who remained clean and untouched. "

The Czech beauties, who joyfully greeted Soviet soldiers-liberators, left a pleasant impression. Embarrassed tankers from combat vehicles covered with oil and dust, decorated with wreaths and flowers, said among themselves: “... Something tank bride, to clean it up. And their girls, you know, they put on. Good people. I have not seen such a sincere people for a long time ... ”The friendliness and hospitality of the Czechs was sincere. “… - If it were possible, I would kiss all the soldiers and officers of the Red Army for liberating my Prague, - to a general friendly and approving laugh, said… a Prague tram worker”, - this is how he described the atmosphere in the liberated Czech capital and the mood of local residents May 11, 1945 Boris Polevoy.

But in other countries, through which the army of victors passed, the female part of the population did not command respect. “In Europe, women gave up, changed before anyone else ... - wrote B. Slutsky. - I was always shocked, confused, disoriented by the lightness, shameful lightness of love relationships. Decent women, of course, disinterested, were like prostitutes - hastily availability, a desire to avoid intermediate stages, no interest in the motives pushing a man to get closer to them. Like people who learned three obscene words from the entire vocabulary of love lyrics, they reduced the whole thing to a few body movements, causing resentment and contempt among the most yellow-eyed of our officers ... Restraining motives were not ethics at all, but the fear of infection, fear of publicity, of pregnancy. - and added that under the conditions of conquest "general depravity covered and hid a special female depravity, made her invisible and shameful."

However, among the motives that contributed to the spread of "international love", despite all the prohibitions and harsh orders of the Soviet command, there were several more: female curiosity for "exotic" lovers and the unprecedented generosity of Russians to the object of their sympathy, which favorably distinguished them from tight-fisted European men.

Junior lieutenant Daniil Zlatkin at the very end of the war ended up in Denmark, on the island of Bornholm. In his interview, he said that the interest of Russian men and European women to each other was mutual: “We did not see women, but we had to ... And when we arrived in Denmark ... it is free, please. They wanted to check, test, try a Russian person, what it is, how it is, and it seemed to work better than the Danes. Why? We were disinterested and kind ... I gave a box of chocolates half a table, I gave 100 roses to an unknown woman ... for her birthday ... "

At the same time, few people thought about a serious relationship, about marriage, in view of the fact that the Soviet leadership clearly outlined its position on this issue. The Decree of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front of April 12, 1945 said: “1. Explain to all officers and all personnel of the front troops that marriage with foreign women is illegal and strictly prohibited. 2. To report immediately on command about all cases of military personnel entering into marriage with foreign women, as well as about the connections of our people with hostile elements of foreign states, in order to bring those responsible to account for the loss of vigilance and violation of Soviet laws. " The directive of the head of the Political Directorate of the 1st Belorussian Front of April 14, 1945 read: “According to the head of the Main Directorate of Human Resources of the NCO, the Center continues to receive applications from officers of the active army with a request to authorize marriages with women of foreign states (Polish, Bulgarian, Czech and etc.). Such facts should be seen as dulling vigilance and dulling patriotic feelings. Therefore, it is necessary in political and educational work to pay attention to a deep explanation of the inadmissibility of such acts on the part of the officers of the Red Army. Explain to all the officers who do not understand the futility of such marriages, the inexpediency of marrying foreign women, up to a direct prohibition, and not to allow a single case. "

The women, too, had no illusions about their suitors' intentions. “At the beginning of 1945, even the stupidest Hungarian peasant women did not believe our promises. European women already knew that we were forbidden to marry foreigners and suspected that there was a similar order against appearing together in restaurants, cinemas, and the like. This did not prevent them from loving our womanizers, but it gave that love a strictly carnal character," wrote B. Slutsky.

Overall, with rare exceptions, the image of European women formed among Red Army soldiers in 1944–1945 was very far removed from the suffering figure with shackled hands, gazing hopefully from the Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” ...

 

Notes 

Slutsky B. War Notes. Poems and ballads. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 174.
Ibid. p. 46-48.
Ibid. p. 46-48.
Smolnikov F.M. We are at war! The diary of a front-line soldier. Letters from the front. Moscow, 2000, p. 228-229.
Slutsky B. op. cit. p. 110, 107.
Ibid. p. 177.
Chukhrai G. My war. Moscow: Algoritm, 2001, p. 258-259.
Rodin A. Three thousand kilometers in the saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 127.
Samoilov D. People of one option. From military notes // Aurora. 1990. No. 2.p. 67.
Ibid. p. 70-71.
Gelfand V.N. Diaries 1941-1946. http://militera.lib.ru/db/gelfand_vn/05.html
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rodin A. Three thousand kilometers in the saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 110.
Ibid. p. 122-123.
Ibid. p. 123.
Central archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. F. 372. Op. 6570. D; 76.L. 86.
Slutsky B. op. cit. p. 125.
Ibid. p. 127-128.
Bogomolov V.O. Germany Berlin. Spring 1945 // Bogomolov V.O. My life, or did I dream about you? .. M .: The magazine "Our contemporary", No. 10-12, 2005, No. 1, 2006. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
Kopelev L. Keep forever. In 2 books. Book 1: Parts 1-4. M .: Terra, 2004. Ch. 11.http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (hereinafter - RGASPI). F. 17. Op. 125.D. 321.L. 10-12.
From an interview with N.A. Orlov on the site "I remember". http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/orlov-naum-aronovich/stranitsa-6.html
Samoilov D. op. cit. p. 88.
Bogomolov V.O. My life, or did I dream about you? .. // Our contemporary. 2005. No. 10-12; 2006. No. 1. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
From the Political report on bringing to the personnel the directives of Comrade Stalin No. 11072 of 04/20/1945 in the 185 rifle division. April 26, 1945 Quoted. Quoted from: Bogomolov V.O. op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
Cited in: Bogomolov V.O. op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
Ibid.
Ibid.
State Archives of the Russian Federation. F. p-9401. Op. 2.D. 96.L.203.
Kopelev L. op. cit. Ch. 12.http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
Gelfand V.N. op. cit.
White Osmar. Conquerors "Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003. XVII, 221 pp. Http://www.argo.net.au/andre/osmarwhite.html
Slutsky B. op. cit. p. 99.
Ibid. p. 71.
Polevoy B. Liberation of Prague // From the Soviet Information Bureau ... Journalism and sketches of the war years. 1941-1945. T. 2. 1943-1945. Moscow: APN Publishing House, 1982, p. 439.
Ibid. pp. 177–178.
Ibid. p. 180.
From an interview with D.F. Zlatkin on June 16, 1997 // Personal archive.
Cited in: Bogomolov V.O. op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/04.html
Ibid.
Slutsky B. op. cit. pp. 180–181.
The article was prepared with financial support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, project No. 11-01-00363a.
The layout used the 1944 Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” by artist V. Koretsky.