What Soviet Soldiers Did to German Women in the Final Months of World War II — Red Army, 1945

A woman in Berlin

She kept her winter coat on indoors. It was April. The coat stayed on because the windows were gone.

Glass lay across the stairwell where the frames used to be. She was 34 years old, pale blonde by her own description. She wrote in pencil.

Every night she filled those notebooks with what happened in the building. Not the war. The building.

Who ate that day. Who did not. And who came down the cellar stairs after dark.

She had studied at the Sorbonne and traveled half of Europe. She spoke Russian well enough to be useful. That last detail was about to decide her life.

Her building had a cellar, and the cellar had a door. Everyone inside it already understood what that door was for. She had no weapon, no way out of the city, and no illusions.

She had a pencil. What she did with it outlasted everyone who came through that door. East of her, more than a million Red Army soldiers were closing on the city.

They had crossed 2,000 kilometers of their own burned country to reach it. What happened next to German women has an estimated number attached to it. Historians still argue about that number.

Nobody serious argues about whether it happened. She wrote it down while it was being done to her. Then she spent the rest of her life refusing to let Germany read it.

The war reaches Germany

In October 1944, the Red Army touched German soil for the first time. Not Poland. Not Ukraine.

Germany. For three years, the killing had run the other way. The Wehrmacht had taken Kiev, Minsk, and Kharkov.

German troops had starved Leningrad through two winters. Soviet dead would eventually reach roughly 27 million. Most of them were civilians.

Whole districts of Belarus had been emptied and burned to the ground. Every Soviet soldier walking west in 1944 had walked through that. They carried reasons beyond the ordinary reasons of war.

German planning for the East had never been about occupation alone. The Hunger Plan assumed tens of millions of Soviet civilians would starve. General Plan Ost mapped the removal of entire populations from the map.

Around three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity. Most of them starved deliberately rather than dying of wounds. Villages were burned with their inhabitants still inside.

Men marching west in 1944 had seen the results with their own eyes. Many had lost whole families and did not yet know it. None of that excuses what came afterwards.

All of it explains the temperature. Now the border posts read Deutsches Reich. And the farms on the far side were intact.

Barns full. Livestock alive. Bicycles leaning against the walls.

The men who saw it understood at once where their own country had gone. Berlin knew this was coming. Berlin made a choice about it.

The Nazi party forbade the eastern provinces to evacuate. Gauleiter Erich Koch held East Prussia's civilians in place. Leaving without a permit was treated as defeatism.

So two million people waited in the path of an army with every reason to hate them. East Prussia held roughly two and a half million people at the start of 1944. Most men of fighting age were already gone.

What remained was women, children and the elderly. That is who the Red Army met at the frontier. The trap was not built by the Red Army.

Nemmersdorf

It was built in advance by their own government and it was locked from the inside. A woman named Gerda Meczulat went into a bomb shelter in a village called Nemmersdorf. Fourteen villagers were down there with her.

Soviet tanks of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps had crossed the Angerab Bridge that morning. German aircraft were hitting the bridgehead hard, so Soviet soldiers came into the shelter too. Then the shooting started inside.

Meczulat was hit and left for dead. She lived. She gave testimony afterwards and that testimony is why we know her name.

German troops retook the village within 48 hours. What they found there, they photographed. A Volkssturm officer named Karl Potrek testified to a count of 72 dead.

Women, children, one old man. Around 50 French and Belgian prisoners of war were killed nearby. German officials laid the dead out and counted them.

An international commission of observers was brought in from neutral countries. Berlin wanted the world to look at East Prussia and recoil. The world barely noticed.

Germany noticed. Nemmersdorf became the first documented mass killing of German civilians on German soil. It would not be the last.

It would not even be the worst. But it was the one Josef Goebbels chose. He sent camera teams into the village.

A foreign press commission followed them in. The images ran in the Völkischer Beobachter and in the weekly newsreels. Post-war historians established that the reporting had been embellished for effect.

Bernhard Fisch, an East Prussian veteran, spent years separating the record from the staging. The killings were real. The framing around them was not entirely.

Goebbels believed those pictures would harden Germany into fighting to the last man. They did something else instead. Every woman in Eastern Germany saw those newsreels.

That was the point. The propaganda ministry wanted terror. It manufactured terror at industrial scale.

Here is the decision and here is what it cost. Goebbels ordered maximum publicity for Nemmersdorf across every German channel. He needed a population that would not surrender and fear works faster than patriotism.

Terrified civilians run and refugee columns wreck the roads an army needs. They ran. Tens of thousands abandoned East Prussia without authorization.

They clogged the highways and the rail junctions that army group center depended on. Goebbels had told German women precisely what to expect from the Red Army. Afterwards, they would be told to say nothing about what actually arrived.

The propaganda of revenge

On the other side of the line, a second machine was running. Soviet posters at the frontier carried one message. Soldier, you are now on German soil.

The hour of revenge has struck. The writer Ilya Ehrenberg had produced three years of the war's most effective hate journalism. Frontline soldiers read him religiously.

His columns ran in the army newspaper and were read aloud to whole units. Soldiers were said to save his pages when they used the rest for cigarettes. Berlin marked him personally as an enemy of the German people.

Moscow eventually pulled him back. On April 14, 1945, Pravda ran a rebuke headlined, Comrade Ehrenberg simplifies. Georgi Alexandrov, the party's propaganda chief, wrote it.

The state was signaling that it did not want the whole German people destroyed. But the deadliest thing moving west was never a slogan. It was a very large number of exhausted men with nobody watching them after dark.

Flight from East Prussia

On the 12th of January, 1945, the Red Army opened the offensive that would end the war. Within nine days, East Prussia was cut off by land. Two million people now had one route out.

It went across water. Erich Koch had governed East Prussia since 1928. He had also run occupied Ukraine, where his administration killed on an industrial scale.

A Polish court would later count his victims in the hundreds of thousands. Koch delayed the evacuation of his own province until January 20, 1945. By then, the roads were frozen and Soviet armor was already among them.

He had told East Prussians that leaving was cowardice. Then he left. Koch got himself out and reached the west under a false name.

He hid in Schleswig-Holstein for four years as a farm laborer. British troops arrested him in 1949, and Poland put him on trial. A Warsaw court sentenced him to death in 1959.

The sentence was never carried out. He died in a Polish prison cell in November 1986, aged 90. The woman he refused to evacuate had been dead for 41 years.

Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered the evacuation on January 23. Operation Hannibal became the largest seaborne evacuation ever attempted. It moved more people than Dunkirk.

Almost nobody outside Germany has heard of it. Around a thousand vessels ran the Baltic that winter. Fishing boats, whalers, liners, anything that floated.

People who could not reach a port walked. They crossed the frozen Vistula Lagoon on foot at night with their children. Soviet aircraft worked the ice in daylight.

The ice held, or it did not. Temperatures on the Baltic coast fell to 20 degrees below freezing. Children died on the carts without anyone noticing for hours.

The crossing became known simply as the Ice Road. Nobody has ever counted the people who went into it. On January 30, the liner Wilhelm Gustloff left Gotenhafen.

She carried roughly 10,000 people. Most were refugees, and most of those were women and children. The Soviet submarine S-13 put three torpedoes into her that night.

She went down in under an hour in freezing water. Around 9,000 people died. It remains the worst maritime disaster ever recorded.

Fewer than 1,300 came out of that sea alive. Now remember why those ships were full. Every passenger on the Gustloff had made a calculation.

Lev Kopelev

They had decided that something waiting on land was worse than a torpedo, and roughly 1.5 million civilians never got a place on any ship. A Red Army major named Lev Kopelev walked into East Prussia that January. Kopelev was 32, Jewish, born in Kiev.

He had been a committed communist since his teens. His German was fluent, so the army made him a propaganda officer. His job was broadcasting surrender appeals across the line.

That put him in the villages on the first days. What he saw there, he objected to, loudly, to officers, in writing, and in letters that other people were reading. He argued that looting and rape were destroying the Red Army's own case for existing.

Kopelev formally protested against atrocities committed by his own troops. He believed the crimes disgraced the Soviet Union, and handed Goebbels his best material. Article 58 covered anti-Soviet agitation, and it covered almost anything.

Counterintelligence arrested him on April 5, 1945, five weeks before victory. The charge sheet accused him of bourgeois humanism. It also accused him of pity for the enemy.

They gave him ten years. He served them in the camps. In a prison research institute outside Moscow, he met Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn had been arrested in East Prussia, too, in February 1945. His crime was criticizing Stalin in private letters to a friend. He received eight years.

He had watched the same things Kopelev watched. Later, he wrote about them in verse, and he did not spare himself. Two Soviet officers, arrested weeks apart, for the offense of noticing.

Solzhenitsyn later put him into a novel. The Soviet Union released Kopelev in 1954, and rehabilitated him in 1956, which tells you the state understood perfectly well what he had been arrested for. Königsberg surrendered on April 9th, four days after his arrest.

The pattern he had tried to stop was now running across an entire province. Nobody was left inside the army to argue about it. Every account so far has rested on one assumption, that this was revenge.

German crimes, then Soviet retaliation, and a terrible arithmetic joining them. Hold on to that, because a single document breaks it. The political department of the First Ukrainian Front filed a report to Moscow.

It went to the Central Committee of the Komsomol. The subject was Soviet women, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian women, seized by the Wehrmacht as slave labor. They had been held for years, and they had prayed for the Red Army.

Their own soldiers raped them. Polish women were assaulted. Jewish women who had just survived the camps were assaulted.

Antony Beevor found that material in the Russian archives. He said the discovery shook him to the core. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav communist and an ally of Moscow, reported the same in Serbia.

Hungary went through it in the winter of 1944 and 1945. Budapest was still burning when it began there. Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Austria saw the same pattern arrive.

It did not begin at the German border, so it did not stop there. So the question has to change now. If the victims included the people the Red Army came to liberate, revenge explains nothing.

Königsberg and the witness

Something else was operating inside that army, and the men at the very top already knew what it was. A surgeon named Hans von Lehndorff ran a military hospital in Königsberg. He was 34, from an old East Prussian family, and deeply religious.

When the city fell, he could have run. He stayed with his patients instead. Königsberg had been bombed flat by the RAF the previous August.

Then Soviet artillery worked it for three days in April. The garrison surrendered on the 9th. Tens of thousands of civilians were still inside the city when it fell.

Most of them had nowhere left to go. Lehndorff kept writing through what followed. His entry for that day asked a question rather than describing a scene.

He wanted to know what he was actually watching. Not wildness, he decided. Not revenge either.

Or not only revenge. He concluded he was seeing human beings with nothing above them. No God.

No restraint. No witness they feared. He wrote the account out properly in 1947, from rescued notes and memory.

That was also the year he finally left East Prussia. The province he was born in no longer exists on any map. 200,000 German civilians remained in the region after the fighting.

Most were dead or deported within three years. Djilas raised it with Stalin in person. He was a senior Yugoslav.

Communist, not an enemy. He expected the complaint to be taken seriously. Stalin was reportedly furious at the slander of his army.

His answer, as Djilas recorded it, was a question. Could a soldier who had crossed thousands of kilometers not have fun with a woman? That is the whole of it. Now weigh that against the paperwork.

On January 19th, 1945, Stalin signed an order on conduct inside Germany. It stated plainly that those guilty of rape would be shot. Marshal Rokossovsky issued order number 006 on January 21st.

Konev followed on January 27th. Zhukov followed on January 29th. A further high command directive landed on April 20th, 1945.

That one demanded better treatment of German civilians to speed the end of the fighting. The orders existed. Every one of them existed, in writing, signed.

Russian historians point at those documents and at the prosecutions that followed. Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky worked from declassified files. He documented more than 4,000 Red Army officers convicted of offenses against German civilians.

Western historians read the same shelf differently. An order reissued four times in four months is an order nobody is obeying. Both readings can be partly true at the same time.

The Soviet state did not order mass rape. It also did not stop it while stopping it was still possible. Real discipline arrived once the fighting ended and garrisons were confined.

Vladimir Gelfand’s diary

By then, the spring was over. A young Jewish lieutenant from central Ukraine kept a diary he was forbidden to keep. Vladimir Gelfand had fought from Stalingrad to the Oder.

The Red Army banned personal diaries for security reasons. He wrote one anyway, which is the only reason we have it. His son Vitaly found the notebooks decades later, clearing out his father's papers.

Gelfand recorded the lice and the stolen boots. He recorded the hunger and the anti-Semitism inside his own unit. Then he recorded what German women told him outside Berlin.

He was riding a bicycle along the Spree when he met a group of them. They were carrying suitcases and leaving their homes. In broken German, he asked why.

They described the first night the Red Army had entered the city. Gelfand wrote it down. A Soviet officer describing what Soviet soldiers had done in a document that should not exist.

That diary is a large part of why the denial is difficult. Now, Natalya Gesse was a Soviet war correspondent and a close friend of Andrei Sakharov. She watched those months from inside the army.

Her verdict was that the troops were raping every German female from 8 to 80. She said it as a Soviet citizen, about Soviet soldiers, with nothing at all to gain. On April 16, 1945, two and a half million Soviet soldiers opened the final offensive.

Berlin in April

Marta Hillers was in an attic flat in Berlin, still writing. The city held it for two weeks. Then it stopped holding.

Berlin's population was overwhelmingly female by that spring. The men were dead, captured, at the front, or 14, and holding a Panzerfaust. What remained in the cellars was women, children, and the old.

It is the last week of April. There is no running water in most districts. Women queue at the standpipes between artillery barrages, because thirst does not negotiate.

That queue is where a great many of them are taken. Two words travel across the whole of Eastern Germany that spring. Frau kam.

Woman come. Every German woman alive in April 1945 learns what those words mean. Hillers is in her building with her neighbors.

She speaks Russian, so the others push her forward to translate and to plead. She is assaulted repeatedly in those first days. Then she makes a decision German readers would punish her for.

She seeks out a senior Soviet officer and attaches herself to him deliberately. Not affection, not collaboration, arithmetic. One man inside the room means the others stay outside the door.

She writes it in exactly those terms, without self-pity and without excuse. Thousands of women across the eastern zone make the same calculation in the same weeks. Two hospitals later put a number on the city.

The Charité and the Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria estimated between 95 and 130,000. Most of those women were attacked more than once. One doctor calculated that around 10,000 of them died, mostly by their own hand afterwards.

Atina Grossmann worked through the Berlin figures carefully. Roughly one and a half million women were in the city. Estimates suggest perhaps one in three of them was assaulted.

The worst concentration falls between 24th April and 5th May. 11 days. That is the window in which most of Berlin's women are attacked.

Demmin

Some towns do not wait to find out. Demmin sits in Pomerania, where two rivers meet. About 15,000 people live there, plus refugees from the east.

Nazi officials leave, the police leave, the Wehrmacht leaves. Retreating German engineers blow the bridges, which seals the civilians inside the town. Soviet troops arrive on the 30th of April.

Negotiators come forward under a white flag and three men are shot. Then the town burns. What follows over the next three days is the largest mass suicide in German history.

Estimates run from around 700 to more than a thousand people. Entire families go together. Parents take their children with them.

Many of them go into the Peene. Karl Schlösser is 10 years old and watches it happen. He will spend his adult life collecting the names.

Malchin records around 500 suicides in three days. Stavenhagen follows. The wave moves through Mecklenburg and Pomerania town by town.

Neubrandenburg records its own dead, and so does Teterow. Local registrars simply stop being able to keep up. In Berlin alone, 3,881 people take their own lives that April.

These are not battle casualties. These are people who watched Goebbels newsreels for six months and believed every frame. Propaganda meant to make Germany fight had persuaded Germany there was nothing left to survive for.

After the war

The war in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945. The assaults did not end on May 8th, 1945. Violence continued through the summer and tapered into 1946.

It fell as garrisons were disciplined and confined to barracks. Now, the numbers. Barbara Johr worked with the filmmaker Helke Sander and produced the figure that entered public memory.

Around 2 million German women. Norman Naimark of Stanford wrote that the true total will never be known. He placed it in the hundreds of thousands, possibly reaching 2 million.

Beevor estimated at least 1.4 million in East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia alone. Then, Atina Grossmann challenged the method directly. She showed the estimates lean heavily on 1945 abortion applications.

Abortion had been illegal in Germany until that year. Once the clinics opened, an affidavit was enough to obtain one. Grossmann was not denying the crimes.

Disputed numbers and surviving evidence

She was arguing that a contested number should not be stated as though it were counted. Russian scholars reject the Western figures outright and point back to the tribunal records. Here is what survives every version of the argument.

Hospital records exist. The diaries exist. The suicide statistics exist.

NKVD reports to Lavrentiy Beria described mass rape in East Prussia in late 1944. Beevor found them in the archive in 2002. Roughly 90% of raped women in Berlin contracted venereal disease.

Children were born from those months. Germany called them the Russenkinder. Many of them learned what the word meant only as adults.

The violence was one chapter inside a far larger displacement. Between 12 and 14 million Germans were driven west from the eastern territories. East Prussia stopped existing as a German province.

Königsberg became Kaliningrad. Villages emptied, were renamed, and the parish records went with them. Women who survived the spring were in refugee camps by the autumn.

Many arrived pregnant, ill, and carrying nothing at all. West Germany registered them as expellees and moved on quickly. Doctors in Berlin were granted discretion to end pregnancies from that spring.

The applications survive in the archives, and historians still argue over them. Each file is a woman who walked into an office and said what happened. Most of the rest never said anything to anyone.

The long silence

Then both Germanies agreed not to discuss it. In the east, the Red Army was the liberating army, and the subject was closed. Dämon's death was not commemorated.

The monument built in that town honored the liberators instead. Women who had survived 1945 lived beside memorials to the men who had been there. In the west, the silence took a different shape.

The subject was politically useful and personally unspeakable, so families buried it inside themselves. Husbands came home to wives who could not tell them. Some were told and could not hear it.

Hillers published her diary anonymously in English in 1954. The German edition followed in 1959, and the reaction was brutal. Critics accused her of besmirching the honor of German women.

She had written honestly about survival. Her own country treated that honesty as a betrayal, so she refused to allow another German edition while she lived. The taboo held in the east until the Soviet Union collapsed.

It held more broadly until 1992, when Sander's film and Yor's study forced the argument open. Beaver's book landed in 2002, and the argument turned international. A German feature film of the diary reached cinemas in 2008.

Nina Hoss played the woman with no name. By then, almost every witness was already dead. Sixty years of silence, ended by historians rather than by the people who lived it.

Most of those women never spoke at all. Ingeborg Bullert was 20 in 1945 and waited decades to describe what happened. Her mother spent those decades telling people her daughter had been untouched.

That sentence is the entire post-war settlement in miniature. A mother protecting a daughter by erasing her. These women were asked to carry the shame of what was done to them.

Germany treated their survival as an embarrassment rather than an injury. The east could not admit it because the Red Army was sacred. The west could not dwell on it because German victimhood was politically dangerous.

Both positions were understandable. Both left the same women alone with it for 60 years. Naimark argued the damage was never only individual.

The witnesses’ later lives

Each survivor carried her own version until she died. The society around them carried a second version, unspoken, for two generations. Lev Kopelev came out of the camps in 1954.

He had lost nine years for saying in 1945 what historians would say in 2002. Moscow rehabilitated him in 1956. He went back to his work and to his party card.

Then in 1968, he signed protest letters and defended arrested dissidents. He condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia out loud. They expelled him from the party and from the writers' union.

In 1981, they stripped his citizenship while he was abroad. Kopelev spent his last years in Cologne. He died there in 1997 among the people he had once tried to protect.

Vladimir Gelfand went home to Ukraine and taught school. He told almost no one about the notebooks.

His diary reached print in Germany in 2005, 60 years later.

Marta Hillers

Marta Hillers left journalism, married, and moved to Switzerland. She never published another major work. She died in Basel on June 16, 2001, aged 90, still anonymous.

Two years later, an editor named Jens Bisky printed her name in a newspaper. The book she wrote in a coat, in a room with no windows, is now taught in schools. She kept her winter coat indoors, because the windows were gone, because there was no water, no glass, and nobody coming, and because a coat is what you wear when you are not sure you are staying.

Why the record matters

She wrote anyway. Every night. In pencil.

In a building where everyone knew what happened after dark. Not for a publisher. Not for history.

For the ordinary reason people write things down. To stay a person while it is happening. Somewhere between hundreds of thousands and two million women lived through those months.

We will never have their number. Almost none of their names survive. We have hers, because she refused to look away from her own life.

And we have Kopelev's, because he objected out loud and lost nine years for it. Two people who wrote it down. That is very nearly the whole archive of conscience from the spring of 1945.

A surgeon in Königsberg wrote as well, and a lieutenant on a bicycle. Four voices for a catastrophe that touched more than a million lives. That ratio is the real horror of this story.

Not the number of victims, the number of witnesses. The coat was still on when the shooting stopped. If you sat all the way through this one, you understand why these stories get told quietly.

Subscribe, and the next one finds you. Send it to the person you'd normally talk to about this. That is how the names stay above water.

What happened to German women in Berlin and East Prussia in 1945 became the largest mass rape in recorded history.