In May 1945 Berlin lay in ruins. Destroyed streets and buildings, interruptions to electricity and water supplies, and the virtual disappearance of normal trade had become the new reality of the capital of the Third Reich. To obtain food, residents had to turn to the black market. The city’s population had fallen from 4.3 million to 2.8 million. Almost no adult men remained in Berlin: they had been killed, imprisoned by the Allies, or had vanished without a trace, buried in a ditch or left in the open.

Women paid for the crimes of the dead. They became the principal targets of the Soviet soldiers who had taken the German capital. Mass rapes occurred mainly at night, and the victims could be teenage girls, adult women, or elderly women. Many soldiers who committed these assaults justified their actions by saying that they themselves had witnessed similar atrocities committed by German soldiers in their homelands. Violence, however, did not always take the form of a direct attack. With the entire system of everyday survival shattered, accepting the protection and food offered by a single soldier could reduce the danger of gang rape and improve a woman’s chances of surviving.

This is the world described by the German journalist Marta Hillers in her memoir A Woman in Berlin, first published anonymously in the United States in 1954 and in Germany in 1959. The author’s name became public only in 2003, two years after Hillers’s death, during the preparation of a new edition associated with the publisher Uma Müller.

The situation described in the book is supported by other testimonies that gradually became public. Hillers writes that when men began returning to Berlin, women—wives, daughters, and mothers—often chose to remain silent about what had happened to them. One example is Gabriele Köpp, who was subjected to rape for fourteen consecutive days when she was fifteen. Only at the age of eighty did she decide to publish a book, Warum war ich bloss ein Mädchen? (“Why Did I Have to Be a Girl?”).

The records of Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand, who had kept a diary since 1941, corroborate the accounts of German women. Nevertheless, the article states that the Russian government continues to deny that rape became widespread and systematic.

Rapes continued during the three years following the beginning of the occupation, until conditions began to stabilize and Allied servicemen were increasingly stationed in separate garrisons. Berlin experienced an especially acute crisis, but the broader reality was that sexual violence accompanied armies on both the Axis and Allied sides wherever they advanced.

Along the route from France into Germany and Austria, groups of American, British, Australian, Canadian, and French soldiers—some of them driven by anger over the German occupation—broke into homes and committed gang rapes. The problem became serious enough that the U.S. Army command circulated a euphemistic slogan suggesting that sexual contact with foreign women was not necessarily voluntary: “Copulation without conversation is not fraternization.”

Cases of sexual violence were also recorded in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB). Ten incidents were officially documented. The most horrific and notorious case involved soldiers from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Adão Damasceno Paz and Luiz Bernardo de Morais.

On 9 January 1945 they attacked fifteen-year-old Giovanna Margelli. After drinking, they arrived at the house where she was with her family. During the meal, Adão suggested taking the girl in the dark and shot out the lamp. Giovanna was seized while the other family members fled in panic. Luiz stood at the door with a weapon while Adão raped her. When the girl’s uncle tried to intervene, Luiz shot him. The two soldiers then raped Giovanna in turn.

At the military trial, Paz and Morais were sentenced to death—not for the rape, but for the murder of her uncle. The case became the only instance of a death sentence being carried out in Brazil since the imperial era. Despite this, a celebratory, triumphalist mood prevailed within the FEB. President Getúlio Vargas later pardoned the convicted men.

Source: História – Superinteressante
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