Soviet Soldiers Rape German Women

The Soviet Union's role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War is regarded as one of the most glorious moments in the country's history.

Yet there is another, less widely known story: the rape of German women by Soviet Red Army soldiers in the final days of the war.

Some readers may find this story disturbing.

Sunset in Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin. I look up at a statue casting its shadow against the purple afternoon sky.

The 12-metre-high statue depicts a Soviet soldier holding a sword in one hand and a German girl in the other, with a shattered swastika beneath his foot.

Here lie 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin between 16 April and 2 May 1945.

The monument's massive columns convey the scale of the losses. From the upper steps one can look down at the base of the statue, illuminated like a shrine.

An inscription declares: “Soviet soldiers saved European civilization from fascism.”

Yet some people call this memorial the “Tomb of the Unknown Rapists.”

Stalin's soldiers assaulted an unknown number of women as they entered the German capital, although after the war this was rarely discussed in either West or East Germany. To this day the subject remains taboo and highly contentious in Russia.

Russian media often dismiss accounts of rape as myths invented by the West. Yet among the sources describing these events is the diary of a young Soviet officer.

Diary of a Red Army Soldier

Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish lieutenant from central Ukraine, kept his diary from 1941 until the end of the war despite Soviet military prohibitions on personal diaries for security reasons.

The still-unpublished manuscript paints a picture of chaos in the army: meagre rations and acute food shortages, lice epidemics and theft, with soldiers stealing everything from one another — even boots.

In February 1945 Gelfand and his unit were stationed near the Oder River, preparing for the final advance on Berlin. He described how his comrades surrounded and defeated a unit of women fighters.

“The captured German women said they were avenging their husbands who had been killed in battle,” he wrote. “They must be destroyed without mercy. My soldiers wanted to stab them in the genitals with bayonets, but I ordered that they be executed.”

The situation grew worse.

One of Gelfand's diary entries is dated 25 April, when the lieutenant had reached Berlin.

Gelfand was cycling along the River Spree during his first attempt at riding a bicycle when he came across a group of German women carrying suitcases and bundles.

In broken German he asked where they were going and why they had left their homes.

“With frightened faces they told me what had happened on the first night after the Red Army entered,” he wrote.

“They pushed into me here,” a pretty German girl explained, lifting her skirt, “all night,” before bursting into tears.

“They raped my daughter right in front of me,” the girl's mother added, “and they will come back and rape her again.”

“Stay,” the girl suddenly threw herself at me. “Sleep with me! You can do anything you want, but only you!”

At the same time German soldiers were being tried for sexual and other grave crimes committed in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had endured German aggression for almost four years, and Gelfand had witnessed the consequences as Soviet forces advanced toward Berlin.

“He passed through many villages where the fascists had killed everyone — even children. And he saw evidence of rape,” his son Vitaly said.

Violence Flourishes

The German SS portrayed itself as a disciplined force of superior Aryans who would never have sexual relations with “Untermenschen” — peoples the Nazis regarded as inferior.

Yet according to historian Oleg Budnitsky of Moscow's Higher School of Economics, this prohibition was routinely ignored. German commanders were so concerned about venereal disease that they established a network of military brothels throughout occupied territories.

Direct evidence of how German soldiers treated Russian women is difficult to find — many victims did not survive the war. Nevertheless, at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, director Jörg Morré showed me a photograph from a wartime album taken by a German soldier in Crimea. A dead woman lies on the ground.

“It looks as though she was killed during or after a rape. Her skirt has been pulled up and her hands are in front of her face,” he said.

“It is a shocking image. We discussed at length whether photographs like this should be shown. But this is war — an act of sexual violence that took place in the Soviet Union. The German presence in the USSR must not be concealed if people are to understand the full brutality of the war.”

When the Red Army entered territory that Soviet propaganda called the “lair of the fascist beast,” posters urged soldiers to give vent to their anger: “Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has come!”

In fact, the political officer of the 19th Army Corps, which entered Germany along the Baltic coast, claimed that a true Soviet soldier would be so full of hatred that he would refuse to have sex with German women.

The soldiers once again proved such theories completely wrong.

While researching his 2002 book Berlin: The Downfall, historian Antony Beevor found documents on sexual violence in Russia's state archives. The records had been sent by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, to its chief Lavrentiy Beria at the end of 1944.

“They were passed on to Stalin,” Beevor said. “You can tell from the markings whether they were read. These documents report widespread rape in East Prussia and describe how many German women tried to kill their children or themselves in order to escape assault.”

Diary “A Woman in Berlin”

Another wartime diary, written by the fiancée of a German soldier, shows how some women had to adapt to their fate in order to survive.

Beginning on 20 April 1945 — ten days before Hitler's suicide — the anonymous diarist, like Vladimir Gelfand, recorded what was happening with unsparing honesty.

She describes herself as a “pale-faced blonde, always in the same coat” and sketches portraits of neighbours sheltering in the air-raid cellar beneath her apartment building. Among them are “a man in grey trousers and spectacles who, on closer inspection, turns out to be a young woman,” and three women who form “an elder-sister trio, all seamstresses, huddled together like a large lump of ham.”

While waiting for the Red Army they joked that it was “better to have a Russian on top of you than an American bomb overhead” — in other words, better to be raped than killed in an air raid. But when soldiers reached the cellar and dragged women away, they begged the diarist to use her Russian to complain to a Soviet commander.

Making her way through the chaos and ruins of the streets, she found a senior officer. He shrugged and, despite Stalin's order forbidding violence against civilians, said: “It is still happening.”

The officer returned with her to the cellar and reprimanded the soldiers, but they did not care.

“What do you mean? How did the Germans treat our women?” one of them shouted.

But when the woman stepped into the corridor to see whether the soldiers had gone, they were waiting for her and seized her. She was brutally raped and nearly strangled. Her terrified neighbours, whom she called the “cave dwellers,” shut the hatch.

“At last the iron door opened. Everyone stared at me,” she wrote. “My stockings had fallen down over my shoes; I was still clutching the remains of one stocking. I screamed: ‘You swine! They raped me here twice, and you left me lying there.’”

Eventually the diarist concluded that she needed to find one “wolf” to protect her from the “wild beasts” and from gang rape.

The relationship between assailant and victim gradually became less violent and more negotiated. She slept with a senior officer from Leningrad and talked with him about literature and the meaning of life.

“I cannot say that the major raped me,” she wrote. “I did it in exchange for bacon, butter, sugar, candles and canned meat. In a way, I suppose, yes. Besides, I liked the major, and the less I liked what was happening, the more I liked him as a person.”

Many of her neighbours likewise formed relationships with men from the army that had come to conquer ruined Berlin.

When her diary was published in Germany in 1959 as A Woman in Berlin, her frank account of choices made under coercion drew fierce criticism for supposedly “slandering” German women. It is hardly surprising that the author consented to a new edition only after her death.

Seventy years after the end of the war, research continues into sexual violence committed by all Allied armies — American, British, French and Soviet.

“Russian Media Do Not Report It”

In 2008 the diary A Woman in Berlin was adapted into the film Anonyma, starring the well-known German actress Nina Hoss. The film had a modest impact on public discussion in Germany and encouraged more women to speak about what they had experienced.

Rape affected women throughout Berlin. A frequently cited estimate is around 100,000 victims in Berlin alone and approximately two million across Germany.

Abortion was prohibited in Germany at the time under Section 218 of the Criminal Code, but Martin Luchterhandt of the Federal Archives notes that an exceptional rule was introduced for women affected by the special circumstances following the mass rapes of 1945.

We may never know the true scale of these crimes. Soviet military court records and many archives remain classified.

More recently, the Russian parliament adopted a law under which attempts to denigrate Russia's achievements in the Second World War can be punished by fines and imprisonment of up to five years.

Vera Dubina, a young historian from Moscow's University for the Humanities, admitted that she knew nothing about the rapes until she received a scholarship and went to study in Berlin. After returning she wrote an article on the subject, but it was rejected for publication.

“Russian media reacted very harshly,” she said. “Everyone wants to hear only about the glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to research this subject fully.”

History is being rewritten to serve present-day propaganda. That is why eyewitness testimony remains invaluable.

image:

The handwritten German document is dated “Berlin, 27 July 1945.” In the sworn statement, the woman says that on 16 May she was raped under threat to her life, taken away with several other women, and raped three times by two Russians. She reports subsequent medical examinations, says that a doctor found her to be in the second or third month of pregnancy, and asks for authorization to terminate the pregnancy. Several names and words in the cursive handwriting are not reliably legible in the photograph and have therefore not been invented.