Swedish

Are the Rapes of War a Myth?

Once, when I served in the Royal Vasternorrland Infantry Regiment, I belonged to the elite — at least within our own small world. I did my military service in the Life Company, where in time all of us became junior commanders. In the barracks we dreamed about women because we were twenty years old. Like other young men, we boasted about our erotic exploits — including some that had never happened.

Every day we learned more about killing foreign fellow human beings — “the nasty enemy” — and sometimes discussed how we might behave if war really came. The question arose: how would we treat the enemy’s girls in a captured city after spending a long time killing enemy soldiers and seeing our own comrades killed by that enemy?

Despite our youth and limited experience, we concluded that we would probably not be especially chivalrous: blinded by hatred and lust, we might simply take what we wanted and disregard the respect for women that seemed self-evident in peacetime.

People who follow fashionable opinions are reluctant to question the deafening glorification of the victors of the Second World War, especially the Western Allies. Yet as early as September 1945 the major American magazine Time wrote that “we too are an army of rapists.”

The prominent American sociologist Robert Lilly had a book manuscript ready for publication in 2001. After 11 September the publisher refused to release it, and the book instead appeared in a French translation in 2003. It dealt with at least 10,000 rapes committed by American soldiers at the end of the Second World War. The French complained that the American “liberators” violated women even more often than the German occupiers had done.

Several years ago, the veteran Swedish foreign correspondent Sven Oste spoke on Radio Tuff about American “double veterans” in Vietnam — men who raped Vietnamese women and then killed them. I expressed my doubts, but Oste had been there and convinced me with great intensity.

At the end of the Second World War it was claimed that 6,000 German women had been raped in Stuttgart. The Americans investigated, found the figure accurate, but blamed the French. French soldiers certainly committed many rapes. In the small Black Forest town of Freudenstadt alone, 600 German women required hospital treatment after being raped by French servicemen.

The British appear not to have raped as many women as the Americans, French and Russians. Yet the British historian Patricia Meehan’s 2001 book A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British 1945-50 gives many grim examples not only of torture, assault, executions and brutal interrogation methods in British camps holding German prisoners, but also of rape.

The Germans themselves, who rapidly transformed from National Socialists into “national masochists,” tread cautiously around crimes committed against their own people. Three days after Hitler’s death, the British air force sank the German ships Cap Arcona and Thielbek in the roadstead off Neustadt near Lubeck, killing about 7,000 evacuated prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp. British troops took Neustadt only a few hours later. Wilhelm Lange, a German whom I interviewed in 1995 and who wrote a book about these tragedies, is fashionably positive when discussing British conduct. He writes only of a fifteen-year-old girl in Neustadt who was murdered by them after being raped. How many others were raped he prudently does not say.

It is said that one or two million German girls, women and elderly women were raped in the east. The British historian Antony Beevor has recently described this in Berlin: The Downfall 1945, as has the author of A Woman in Berlin. In 1984 eight volumes appeared in German containing roughly a thousand eyewitness accounts of the ethnic cleansing surrounding the expulsion of 14 million Germans at the end of the war; more than two million of them died or were killed. If even half of these witnesses were telling the truth, rape by Soviet soldiers was widespread.

Stanford professor Norman Naimark, in The Russians in Germany (1995), described how Communist women’s groups in the Soviet occupation zone protested to the Russians that their members did not dare attend party meetings after dark because of the risk of being raped by vodka-intoxicated Soviet soldiers.

But now I read in the “independent socialist” Flamman and in the normally matter-of-fact Ryska Posten that, as the headlines put it, this is a “rape myth.” Ukrainian lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, who was twenty-one in 1945, has had his German Diary 1945-46 published in Swedish, and he certainly neither took part in nor witnessed rapes. On the contrary, he describes German women as vulgar and readily available.

Among the several thousand radio interviews I have conducted with people around Tyreso are several hundred with Swedes born abroad, including some born in Germany. My neighbor Eva told me in tears about the terrible assaults she suffered as a fifteen-year-old during a year of hell in Soviet-occupied Hinterpommern: both she and her mother were raped several times. Ten-year-old Erika was visiting a playmate in Sassnitz when three Russian soldiers forced their way in and raped the mother in front of the children; she later became mentally ill. Edeltraut had witnessed rapes of little girls in East Prussia. Marianne told me about Edith von Dobbeler, the thirty-year-old pastor’s wife in the village of Linstow, who was gang-raped in the church in front of her three small children. She later drowned herself and the children. I did not want to believe the story, but when I visited Linstow the villagers confirmed it, and the gravestone states that the mother and her three young sons died on 3 May 1945. Sunhild, a Green Party county councillor in Trollbacken, told me about the rape of her mother and how the family seriously considered suicide before they managed to flee to the American occupation zone. But Sunhild added: “The women who were ‘welcomed’ by the Americans could not walk upright for several days afterwards.”

A review of Vladimir Gelfand’s book says that the Soviet intelligence officer and writer Lev Kopelev reported that Soviet Colonel Smirnov personally shot a lieutenant who had taken part in a gang rape in East Prussia. That recalls what Alexandra told Tyreso Radio. Her Polish mother was pregnant when three Russian soldiers attacked her. She screamed so loudly that a Russian officer intervened and shot the attackers, although the mother nevertheless miscarried. Kopelev himself describes such incredibly brutal violations of German women in East Prussia that one sincerely hopes he exaggerated.

Eva, Erika, Sunhild, Marianne, Edeltraut, Alexandra and the other witnesses are not mythical. But it is surely also true that Lieutenant Gelfand did not take part in these outrages.

Ake Sandin, Tyreso Development and Peace Association, Radio Tuff, programme no. 1116, 21 January 2007.