The Great Rape of Berlin

While the world breathed a sigh of relief in the middle of 1945, after the nightmare of the Second World War had ended, Hitler had committed suicide and the Nazi Reich had fallen, and while the world hoped for peace without the persecution of particular groups of people, the situation in Berlin was different. After the Allies had destroyed the city, a horrific crime took place in the German capital. This time, however, the accused were not the Nazis but the Allied forces, which had finally entered Germany after a fierce war lasting five years. As usual, the victims of the crime were women. Soviet and American troops raped large numbers of German women; the number of victims reached two million women in what became known as the "rape of Berlin."

There are major disagreements among historians over the number of victims. Soviet historians, representing the side most prominently accused, considered the figures exaggerated, as did others. These events were unlike other events documented in photographs, but there is a range of evidence pointing to details of the rapes.

The British military historian Antony Beevor, in his book The Fall of Berlin, and on the basis of testimony from a number of Soviet soldiers and from German women who were raped, confirms that rapes "occurred to women from the age of 8 to 80." He also wrote that Soviet officers believed these acts took place with the consent of German women because they were supposedly happy finally to have been liberated from the Nazis.

The Soviet soldier Vladimir Gelfand also recounts in his memoirs of entering Berlin the anger he felt toward his fellow soldiers, who sought to punish German women for what the German army had done before; their desires went so far as wanting to stab women in their genitals.

In a modest attempt to document these events, memoirs entitled A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City were published in 1959. The anonymous author recounts her memories of Berlin as the city fell to the Allies, her gang rape by a number of Soviet soldiers, and then her decision to obtain protection by entering into an intimate relationship with a Soviet officer, as many German women also did.

The book was regarded as "sullying the reputation of German women." As a result, the anonymous author decided that it should not be published again during her lifetime, according to the German writer Hans Enzensberger, who republished it in 2003 without naming the author. Later, however, the editor Jens Bisky revealed the author's identity as the German journalist Marta Hillers, who died in 2001.

The book topped the bestseller list for 19 weeks in its second edition. It was also selected by The New York Times as an Editors' Choice, and a German film based on the book's story, entitled The Fall of Berlin: Anonymous, was made and earned 219 million dollars.

The Belarusian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, also cited in her book The Unwomanly Face of War the testimony of a former Red Army officer, who said:

"We were young, strong, and had lived for four years without women, so we tried to hunt German women. Ten men raped one woman. There were not enough women; the entire population fled from the Soviet army, so we took a little girl, between twelve and thirteen years old, and if she cried we put something in her mouth. We thought it was funny. Now I do not understand how I did this. I grew up in a good family, but that is what I was like during the war."

In another testimony from the same book, a female telephone operator in the Soviet army recounts:

"When we occupied any city, there were three days for looting and rape. This was not official, of course, but after the three days anyone who did it could face a military trial... I remember a German woman who had been raped, sitting naked with her hands between her legs. Now I feel ashamed of it, but at the time I was not ashamed at all. Do you think it was easy for us to forgive the Germans? We hated seeing their houses white, decorated with flowers and undestroyed. I wanted to see them suffer; I wanted to see their tears. Ten years had to pass before I began to feel pity for them."

In another attempt to document the events, the German historians Rainer Gries and Silke Satjukow published their book Occupation Children: The Children of Occupied Germany after 1945, in which they tried to document the testimony of German children born after the fall of Germany. According to the authors' estimate, their number reached 300,000. Most of these children are now around 70 years old, but they are still searching for their parents and their lost identity.

Although the accusations are directed more heavily at the Soviet army, James Lilly, professor of psychology and criminology at Northern Kentucky University, states in his book Taken by Force that American troops also committed numerous rapes of women in France, Germany and Britain. According to the documents he cites, the number of female victims reached 14,000.