German Women in the Battle of Berlin: Did Soviet Soldiers Rape 100,000 Berlin Women 70 Years Ago?

中新健康娱乐网
Published: 6 November 2021
Original language: Chinese

After Soviet troops captured Berlin, they marched through the streets with columns of German prisoners of war.

On 2 May 1945 the Red Army took Berlin. According to German historians cited by the article, around 100,000 Berlin women were raped by Soviet soldiers at that time. On the same date the BBC broadcast a documentary about rape in Berlin, bringing attention to a humanitarian catastrophe that had long been treated ambiguously and largely kept out of public discussion.

Although the Red Army brought liberation from fascism, for the women of Berlin its arrival became the beginning of a nightmare.

Seventy years after the war, the collective and individual crimes of the Nazi regime had been investigated and condemned, while suffering inflicted on civilians by Allied forces — intentionally or unintentionally — had received much less attention. The article names the bombing of Dresden, the air raids on Tokyo, and mass sexual violence committed by Allied troops, especially the Red Army after it entered Germany.

On 2 May 1945 the troops defending Berlin surrendered. Although the war was ending, suffering for civilians, especially women, was only beginning. According to a historical research association at Göttingen University cited in the article, as many as one third of Berlin’s women were raped. Historians Sanders and Johr are said to have offered a more cautious estimate of around 100,000 victims, 40 percent of whom were raped repeatedly. The article adds that in Russian public discourse, discussion of wartime rape is often perceived as an insult or slander.

The BBC documentary broadcast on 2 May addressed the scale of this humanitarian tragedy.

One Third of Berlin Women Raped During the Capture of the City

In Treptower Park in Berlin stands a Soviet war memorial designed by Soviet architects. Five thousand of the roughly 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin are buried there. The memorial opened in 1949 and is one of the three principal Soviet war memorials in Berlin.

Caption: Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park.

The central sculpture depicts a twelve-metre Soviet soldier standing on a broken Nazi emblem. He holds a sword in one hand and a small German girl in the other. According to the official story, the image was inspired by a real incident in which a Soviet soldier rescued a three-year-old German girl under fire. The inscription on the memorial states that the Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.

The article notes that others associate the memorial with a very different memory. As Soviet forces advanced through the eastern front toward the heart of the Third Reich, countless women became victims of sexual violence.

Chinese researcher Zhu Weiyi, who studied in Germany, is cited from his book about German soldiers in the Second World War. He refers to research from Göttingen according to which, between 24 April and 5 May 1945 — from the Red Army’s entry into Berlin to the end of German resistance — around one third of the city’s women were raped. Historians Sanders and Johr are again cited with the estimate of 100,000 women, 40 percent of them repeatedly.

Caption: Ukrainian lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand.

Although archival documentation concerning sexual violence by the Red Army is limited, surviving personal documents preserve fragments of what happened. One of them is the diary of Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish officer from Ukraine. After his death, the diary was found among his papers by his son, Vitaly Gelfand.

As the Red Army entered what Soviet propaganda called “the lair of the fascist beast,” banners encouraged soldiers with slogans such as: “Soldier! You are on German soil! The hour of revenge has come!”

Gelfand’s diary contains a disturbing account of a group of German women fleeing a suburb of Berlin:

“Their faces were full of fear,” he wrote. “They told me what happened on the first night after the Red Army arrived. One German girl lifted her skirt and said: ‘They poked me here — no fewer than twenty men.’ She burst into tears. ‘Stay here,’ the girl suddenly pleaded. ‘Sleep with me. You can do anything you want to me, but only you.’”

The article presents the scene as an example of the desperation of women trying to avoid another gang rape.

The Author of A Woman in Berlin Was Once Condemned by German Women

Similar experiences were recorded in another diary, written by an unidentified thirty-year-old German journalist. Her diary later became the bestselling book A Woman in Berlin. She began writing on 20 April 1945, ten days before Hitler’s suicide, while sheltering from shelling in the basement of an apartment building.

While she and her neighbors hid in the cellar, they joked that it was “better to have a Russian on top of you than an American above you,” meaning that rape by Soviet soldiers seemed preferable to death in an American air raid. When Soviet soldiers entered the basement and tried to drag women away, she spoke Russian in an effort to dissuade them. Within minutes, however, she was attacked and brutally raped.

Eventually, the diarist concluded that she needed to find one “wolf” who could protect her from repeated gang rape by what she called the “male beasts.” She entered into a relationship with a senior officer from Leningrad, with whom she discussed literature and the meaning of life.

“It cannot really be said that the major is raping me,” she wrote. “Am I doing this for bacon, butter, sugar, candles or canned meat? To some extent, yes. But I also like him. The less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person.”

When the diary was first published in 1959, the author’s decision to survive in this way was sharply criticized by some German women, who accused her of disgracing herself.

The article says that new research continues to appear about rape committed by Allied forces — American, British and French troops as well as, above all, Soviet forces — but that the subject remained taboo for decades. In East Germany, criticizing the Soviet “heroes” who had defeated fascism was politically unacceptable; in West Germany, guilt over Nazi crimes made it difficult for Germans to speak about their own suffering.

The Film A Woman in Berlin Encouraged Survivors to Speak

In 2008 a film adaptation of the diary, Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), was released and had a major impact in Germany. It encouraged a number of survivors to speak publicly. One of them was Ingeborg Bullert.

At the time of the article, Ingeborg, then ninety, was living in Hamburg. In 1945 she had hidden in a cellar in Berlin like the diarist. During a pause in the fighting she went upstairs to find a piece of cord to use as a lamp wick. Two Soviet soldiers threatened her with guns and raped her.

She recalled that rape in Berlin was so widespread that all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five were ordered to undergo examinations for sexually transmitted infections. A medical certificate was required to obtain food ration cards. “I remember that the waiting room for the examinations was packed with women,” she said.

The true scale of the sexual violence may never be known. The article states that records of Soviet military tribunals and other sources remained inaccessible or classified. It also refers to a Russian law providing penalties for public statements deemed to defame the Soviet Union’s record during the Second World War.

Vitaly Gelfand, Vladimir Gelfand’s son, stresses that he does not deny the courage and sacrifice shown by many Soviet soldiers during the war. He hopes, however, that publication of his father’s diary will help the public see a fuller and more honest historical picture.

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