Can We Put an Equals Sign Between Nazi Atrocities and Atrocities Committed by Soviet Soldiers?

Two views. Pyotr Lyukimson, a journalist who interviewed veterans, versus testimony by a Red Army soldier who took part in the capture of Berlin.
May 9, 2017

About twenty years ago I interviewed one of the many veterans of the Great Patriotic War who were still alive at the time. It was an ordinary anniversary interview for Victory Day. But that year the world’s media were full of stories about “atrocities by the Soviet Army in Germany,” “the killing of civilians,” and “millions of raped German women.” I could not avoid the subject, so I asked my interviewee, who had finished the war as a captain, directly whether such things had happened.

“Of course they did,” he answered. “I remember that in 1944 we entered a small Ukrainian village and stayed in one hut. The owner, an elderly Ukrainian, was hospitable: he put vodka, chickens and salo on the table. We sat, drank and talked about what life had been like under the Germans. Then he said, ‘They did at least one useful thing—they wiped out the Jews. I personally handed them over.’ By that time I already knew that no one from my own family had survived.

“So I got up and said, ‘Come outside, old man. Let’s get some air; I want to ask you something.’ He must have sensed something and became alarmed: ‘What is it?’ ‘Nothing. I just want to ask you a few things.’ I took him into the barn and shot him in the head. I came back and sat at the table. My two comrades did not ask anything. They simply poured more of the old man’s vodka, cut some salo, and we carried on drinking and talking. If they had reported me, I could have been court-martialed for killing a civilian.”

“And did soldiers rape German women in Germany?” I asked.

“Why would you need to rape them when almost any German woman would do anything for you for a loaf of bread?”

Ever since then, that old conversation comes back to me whenever the subject of “Soviet Army atrocities” arises. Unfortunately, it comes up more and more often—in Poland or Germany, in Lithuania or Ukraine. In those countries, the author argues, a number of historians have tried to equate the two sides that fought the war: Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, portraying the conflict as a clash between two equally inhuman totalitarian regimes that both committed monstrous war crimes, so that one side should no longer be cast as heroes and the other as criminals.

But, the author says, this equation does not produce the equality those historians want. German troops entered the USSR as occupiers, executioners and punitive forces, while Soviet soldiers moved first across their own land and then into foreign territory as liberators. Whatever one thinks of that formulation, the author presents it as the fundamental distinction.

Soviet soldiers marched through burned villages and ruined cities and saw what the German occupation had done. There was ample reason for rage. The author notes that this was not unique to Soviet troops: some American soldiers who had seen the liberated Dachau concentration camp later committed acts of violence against Germans and then suffered psychological collapse after realizing that they themselves had crossed a moral line.

One can imagine what Jewish soldiers felt at the gates of Auschwitz and how fiercely they desired revenge. The article mentions a Jewish tank soldier who deliberately crushed several houses in a German village with civilians inside. He was executed for it, even though he was the last survivor of a large Jewish family annihilated in the Holocaust.

Several Jews serving in the British Army formed a “revenge group” in July and August 1945. They used occupation records to identify former SS officers, entered their homes at night, dragged them into courtyards, pronounced immediate death sentences and carried them out on the spot. When the group was exposed, the command reportedly chose to overlook what had happened in exchange for a promise that the killings would stop.

“Everything happened,” the author concludes, “but there cannot be an equals sign between murderer and victim, between those who deny another people’s right to exist and those who defend that right—not in Germany in 1945 and not in the Middle East in 2017.”

He also argues that the German and Soviet armies had fundamentally different official policies toward violence against civilians. He cites Israeli historian Aron Shneer, who points to the Wehrmacht’s pre-invasion decree on special jurisdiction in the area of Operation Barbarossa, which effectively protected German soldiers from ordinary criminal prosecution for many acts committed against Soviet civilians. In the Red Army, by contrast, crimes against civilians could be punished, including by execution.

For that reason, the author says, every attempt to smear those “who went off to become soldiers in 1941 and humanists in 1945” and to diminish the significance of victory produces in him a visceral reaction.

Pyotr Lyukimson

The editor then presents a contrary testimony: not the recollections collected by a journalist who did not fight in the war, but the words of a soldier who took part in the capture of Berlin and whom editor Yuri Magarshak says he knew personally.

The soldier recalled entering Berlin house by house. Doors to houses and apartments were kicked open because a German soldier with a submachine gun might be waiting inside. Sometimes soldiers fired a burst first and moved on. Men were often in hiding; women were visible. He then described, in extremely graphic terms, raping young women and stabbing people hiding under beds while continuing the assault. His account portrays such conduct not as an isolated incident but as something he regarded as routine wartime behavior.

The editor then introduces a Russian BBC article based in part on the wartime diary of Vladimir Gelfand, The Rape of Berlin: The Unknown Story of the War, noting that the BBC account is considerably more restrained than Gelfand’s own video interviews. According to the editor, Gelfand recalled that more than one hundred Soviet soldiers under his command were at one point raping German women simultaneously, individually or in groups, and that he was unable to stop them because the practice was so widespread.

The Rape of Berlin: The Unknown Story of the War

A remarkable book was being published in Russia: the wartime diary of Soviet Army officer Vladimir Gelfand, describing the bloody everyday reality of the Great Patriotic War without embellishment or censorship.

Some people believe that a critical approach to the past is unethical or simply unacceptable in light of the heroic sacrifices and the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens. Others argue that future generations deserve to know the true horrors of war and should be allowed to see an unvarnished picture.

BBC correspondent Lucy Ash examined some of the lesser-known pages of the history of the Second World War. Some of the facts and circumstances described in her report are unsuitable for children.

At dusk in Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin, the enormous Soviet war memorial rises against the evening sky. The twelve-metre soldier stands on the broken remains of a swastika, holding a sword in one hand and a small German girl in the other.

Five thousand of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin between April 16 and May 2, 1945 are buried here. The monumental proportions reflect the scale of the sacrifice. At the top of the long staircase, the entrance to the memorial hall is illuminated almost like a religious shrine. An inscription declares that the Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.

But for some Germans, the memorial also evokes other memories. Soviet soldiers raped an incalculable number of women on the road to Berlin, yet after the war the subject was rarely discussed in either East or West Germany. It is still little discussed in Russia.

Vladimir Gelfand’s Diary

Many Russian media outlets dismiss accounts of rape as a Western myth. Yet one of the many surviving sources describing what happened is the diary of a Soviet officer.

Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jewish man from Ukraine, kept his diary from 1941 until the end of the war with extraordinary frankness, despite the danger associated with recording sensitive military information.

His son Vitaly, who allowed the BBC reporter to read the manuscript, found the diary while sorting through his father’s papers after his death. The diary had been available online and was now being published in Russia for the first time as a book. Two abridged editions had previously appeared in Germany and Sweden.

The diary describes disorder and indiscipline in regular units: meager rations, lice, routine antisemitism and endless theft. Soldiers, Gelfand wrote, even stole boots from one another.

In February 1945 Gelfand’s unit was stationed near the Oder River preparing for the advance on Berlin. He wrote that his comrades had surrounded and captured a German women’s battalion.

“The day before yesterday a women’s battalion operated on the left flank. It was smashed completely, and the captured German cats declared themselves avengers for husbands killed at the front. I do not know what was done with them, but the wretches ought to have been executed without mercy,” Gelfand wrote.

One of his most revealing entries is dated April 25, when he was already in Berlin. That day Gelfand rode a bicycle for the first time in his life. Cycling along the Spree, he encountered a group of women carrying suitcases and bundles.

“In broken German I asked the German women where they lived and why they had left their homes,” he wrote. “With horror they told me about the grief inflicted on them by the front-line troops on the first night after the Red Army arrived.”

“‘They poked here,’ a beautiful German woman explained, lifting her skirt. ‘All night long, and there were so many of them. I was a virgin,’ she sighed and began to cry. ‘They ruined my youth. There were old men among them, men with pimples, and all of them climbed on me, all of them did it. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes.’ And she dissolved into tears.”

“‘They raped my daughter in front of me,’ the poor mother added. ‘They may come again and rape my girl again.’ At that everyone was overcome by terror again, and bitter sobbing swept from one corner of the basement to the other. ‘Stay here,’ the girl suddenly threw herself toward me. ‘You will sleep with me. You can do anything you want to me, but only you!’”

“The Hour of Revenge Has Struck!”

By then German soldiers had stained themselves with monstrous crimes committed for almost four years on Soviet territory. Gelfand repeatedly encountered evidence of those crimes as his unit fought its way toward Germany.

“When there are killings every day, wounds every day, when they pass through villages destroyed by the Nazis... Father has many descriptions of villages where everyone was killed, including children, little Jewish children—even one- and two-year-olds,” Vitaly Gelfand said. “And this went on not for a short time but for years. People walked forward and saw it. They went with one aim: to take revenge and to kill.”

Nazi ideology imagined the Wehrmacht as a disciplined Aryan force that would avoid sexual contact with “Untermenschen,” or “subhumans.” But, historian Oleg Budnitsky notes, soldiers frequently ignored that prohibition. The German command became so concerned about venereal disease that it organized a network of military brothels in occupied territories.

Direct evidence of how German troops treated Soviet women is difficult to find because many victims did not survive. At the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, director Jörg Morré showed the BBC reporter a photograph from a German soldier’s private album taken in Crimea. It depicts the body of a woman lying on the ground.

“It looks as if she was killed during or after a rape. Her skirt is raised and her hands cover her face,” Morré said. “It is a shocking photograph. We debated whether such pictures should be shown in the museum. But this is war; this is sexual violence in the Soviet Union under German occupation. We show the war—we do not merely talk about it.”

When the Red Army entered what Soviet newspapers called “the lair of the fascist beast,” propaganda posters encouraged rage: “Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!”

The political department of the 19th Army, advancing toward Berlin along the Baltic coast, declared that a true Soviet soldier was so full of hatred that the very thought of sexual contact with German women should disgust him. Once again, reality proved the ideologues wrong.

Historian Antony Beevor, researching his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945, found in Russian state archives NKVD reports describing an epidemic of sexual violence in Germany. The reports were sent to Lavrentiy Beria in late 1944.

“They were passed to Stalin,” Beevor said. “You can tell from the markings whether they were read. They report mass rapes in East Prussia and German women trying to kill themselves and their children to avoid that fate.”

The “Cellar Dwellers”

Another wartime diary, written by the fiancée of a German soldier, describes how some women adapted to the horrific situation in an effort to survive.

Beginning on April 20, 1945, the anonymous author recorded ruthlessly honest observations, perceptive and at times laced with gallows humor. She described herself as “a pale blonde, always wearing the same winter coat” and drew vivid portraits of the neighbors sheltering in the basement beneath their apartment building.

Among them were “a young person in gray trousers and thick-framed glasses who, on closer inspection, turns out to be a woman,” and three elderly sisters, all seamstresses, whom she described as “three women merged into one large black pudding.”

As the Red Army approached, the women joked: “Better a Russian on me than a Yankee over me,” meaning that rape seemed preferable to being killed by American carpet bombing.

But when Soviet soldiers entered the cellar and tried to pull women out, the others begged the diarist to use her knowledge of Russian to complain to the Soviet command.

In the ruined streets she managed to find a Soviet officer. He shrugged. Despite Stalin’s order against violence toward civilians, he said, “it happens anyway.” He nevertheless went down to the cellar with her and reprimanded the soldiers. One soldier exploded in anger: “What are you talking about? Look what the Germans did to our women! They took my sister and...” The officer calmed him and led the soldiers outside.

But when the diarist went into the corridor to see whether they had really left, other soldiers waiting there grabbed her and brutally raped her, nearly strangling her. Terrified neighbors—the “cellar dwellers,” as she called them—hid in the basement behind a locked door.

“At last the two iron bolts opened. Everyone stared at me,” she wrote. “My stockings were down; my hands were holding the remains of my belt. I began screaming: ‘You pigs! I have just been raped twice, one after the other, and you leave me lying here like a piece of dirt!’”

Eventually she decided that she needed to find one “wolf” to protect her from repeated gang rape by what she called “male beasts.” She found an officer from Leningrad and shared his bed. Gradually the relationship between aggressor and victim became less violent, more reciprocal and ambiguous. They even discussed literature and the meaning of life.

“It would be wrong to say that the major is raping me,” she wrote. “Why am I doing it? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent, yes. But I also like the major, and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person.”

Many of her neighbors made similar arrangements with the victors in defeated Berlin.

When the diary was published in Germany in 1959 as A Woman in Berlin, its frankness provoked accusations that it had dishonored German women. Anticipating that reaction, the author asked that the diary not be published again until after her death.

Eisenhower: Shoot Offenders on the Spot

Rape was not a problem confined to the Red Army. Bob Lilly, a historian at Northern Kentucky University, gained access to U.S. military court records. His book Taken by Force caused so much controversy that no American publisher initially wanted to issue it, and the first edition appeared in France.

Lilly estimates that about 14,000 rapes were committed by American soldiers in Britain, France and Germany between 1942 and 1945.

“There were very few cases of rape in Britain, but as soon as American soldiers crossed the English Channel, the number rose sharply,” Lilly said.

According to him, rape was not only an image problem but a military-discipline problem. “Eisenhower said soldiers should be shot at the scene of the crime and the executions reported in military newspapers such as Stars and Stripes. Germany was the peak of the phenomenon.”

Were soldiers actually executed for rape? “Oh yes,” Lilly answered. But none, he acknowledged, were executed for raping or killing German civilians.

Historians continue to investigate sexual crimes committed by Allied troops in Germany. For many years, sexual violence by American, British, French and Soviet troops was officially suppressed. Few people reported it, and even fewer wanted to hear about it.

Silence

Such experiences are difficult to discuss in any society. In East Germany, criticizing the Soviet heroes who defeated fascism was treated almost as blasphemy. In West Germany, guilt over Nazi crimes overshadowed discussion of German suffering.

In 2008 the film Anonyma – A Woman in Berlin, starring Nina Hoss and based on the Berlin diary, was released in Germany. The film came as a revelation and encouraged many women to speak publicly about what had happened to them. One of them was Ingeborg Bullert.

Bullert, then ninety years old, lived in Hamburg in an apartment filled with photographs of cats and books about theatre. In 1945 she had been twenty, dreamed of becoming an actress, and lived with her mother on a prosperous street in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district.

When the Soviet assault on the city began, she hid in her building’s basement, just like the author of A Woman in Berlin.

“Suddenly tanks appeared on our street, and the bodies of Russian and German soldiers lay everywhere,” she recalled. “I remember the terrifying drawn-out sound of the Russian rockets. We called them Stalinorgeln—‘Stalin organs.’”

During a pause in the shelling, Ingeborg left the basement and ran upstairs to fetch a piece of rope she wanted to use as a lamp wick.

“Suddenly I saw two Russians pointing pistols at me,” she said. “One forced me to undress and raped me. Then they changed places and the other raped me. I thought I was going to die; I thought they would kill me.”

At the time she told no one what had happened and remained silent for decades because speaking about it was too painful. “My mother liked to boast that her daughter had not been touched,” she recalled.

A Wave of Abortions

Many Berlin women were raped. Ingeborg remembered that immediately after the war, women between fifteen and fifty-five were ordered to undergo tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

“You needed a medical certificate to receive food ration cards, and I remember that the waiting rooms of all the doctors issuing them were full of women,” she said.

What was the real scale of the rapes? Figures of 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany are often cited, although both are hotly disputed. The estimates were extrapolated from the sparse medical records that survived.

In a former military factory now used by a state archive, archivist Martin Luchterhand showed the reporter bundles of blue cardboard folders containing abortion records from June to October 1945 in Neukölln, one of Berlin’s districts. Their survival is remarkable.

Abortions were normally prohibited under Paragraph 218 of the German criminal code, but Luchterhand explained that for a short period after the war women were permitted to terminate pregnancies because of the exceptional situation created by mass rape in 1945.

From June 1945 into 1946, 995 abortion requests were approved in this district alone. The files contain more than a thousand pages of different colors and sizes. One young woman, writing in rounded childlike handwriting, stated that she had been raped in her own living room in front of her parents.

Bread Instead of Revenge

For some soldiers, especially after drinking, women became trophies just like watches or bicycles. Others behaved very differently. In Moscow the reporter met ninety-two-year-old veteran Yuri Lyashenko, who remembered Soviet soldiers sharing bread with German civilians instead of seeking revenge.

“Of course we could not feed everyone,” he said. “But whatever we had, we shared with the children. The little children were so frightened—their eyes were terrible to look at. You felt sorry for them.”

Wearing a jacket covered in decorations and medals, Lyashenko invited the reporter into his small top-floor apartment and offered cognac and boiled eggs. He had wanted to become an engineer but was drafted and, like Vladimir Gelfand, went through the entire war to Berlin.

As he poured cognac he proposed a toast to peace. Such toasts can sound formulaic, but here the words clearly came from the heart.

They discussed the beginning of the war, when his leg had nearly been amputated, and what he felt when he saw the red flag over the Reichstag. Eventually the reporter asked him about rape.

“I do not know; in our unit there was nothing like that,” he said. “Of course such cases obviously happened. It depended on the person. One man will help someone, another will abuse them. You cannot see it written on a man’s face; you do not know what he will do.”

Looking Back

We will probably never know the real scale of rape. Records of Soviet military tribunals and many other documents remain closed. The Russian State Duma recently approved a law on “encroachment on historical memory,” under which those accused of diminishing the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of fascism can face a fine and up to five years in prison.

Vera Dubina, a young historian at a humanities university in Moscow, said she knew nothing about the rapes until she received a scholarship to study in Berlin. After studying in Germany, she wrote a paper on the subject but could not publish it.

“The Russian media reacted very aggressively,” she said. “People want to know only about our glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct serious research.”

History is often rewritten to suit present political needs. That is why eyewitness testimony is so important: the accounts of elderly survivors who have only now dared to speak, and the records made by young people during the war itself.

Vitaly, the son of wartime diarist Vladimir Gelfand, says that many Soviet soldiers displayed extraordinary heroism during the Second World War. But that is not the whole story.

“If people do not want to know the truth, if they want to remain mistaken and say that everything was beautiful and noble, that is foolish—it is self-deception,” he said. “The whole world understands this, and Russia understands it. Even those behind laws about ‘distorting the past’ understand it. We cannot move into the future until we have dealt with the past.”

Editorial note: On September 25 and 28, 2015, the BBC amended the original material, removing two photograph captions and social-media posts based on them because they did not meet BBC editorial standards and were regarded by many as offensive. The BBC apologized.

The page ends by returning to its opening question: can an equals sign be placed between Nazi atrocities and atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers in Germany? The reader is invited to decide.