Looking Back into the Past

FAKEOFF

“Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!”

During the Great Patriotic War, keeping personal diaries was prohibited in the Soviet army.

Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jew from Ukraine, fought in the Soviet forces from the beginning of the war and, despite the prohibition, kept notes describing what was happening around him.

Gelfand’s diary became publicly known only after his death.

It describes the everyday life of the Soviet army: lack of order and discipline, meagre rations, lice, antisemitism and endless theft, including soldiers stealing from their own comrades.

In February 1945 the military unit in which Gelfand served was stationed near the Oder River preparing for the advance on Berlin.

He recalled how his comrades surrounded and captured a German women’s battalion:

“The day before yesterday a women’s battalion was operating on the left flank. It was completely defeated, 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 scoundrels should have been executed without mercy.”

One of Gelfand’s most revealing accounts dates from 25 April, when he was already in Berlin.

While traveling along the River Spree, he saw a group of women carrying suitcases and bundles:

“I asked the German women where they lived, in broken German, and asked why they had left their home. With horror they told me about the grief caused to them by the front-line troops on the first night of the Red Army’s arrival here.”

A German woman, lifting her skirt and bursting into tears, told him:

“They poked me here all night, and there were so many of them. I was a girl. They ruined my youth. Among them were old men, men with pimples, and all of them climbed on me, all of them poked me. There were no fewer than twenty, yes, yes.”

The girl’s mother added:

“They raped my daughter in front of me. They may come again and rape my girl again.”

Gelfand then recorded the girl saying:

“Stay here. You can do anything you want with me. You will sleep with me, but only you.”

“The Hour of Revenge Has Struck!”

By that point German soldiers had stained themselves with monstrous crimes committed on Soviet territory over nearly four years.

Vladimir Gelfand encountered evidence of those crimes as his unit fought its way toward Germany.

His son Vitaly later explained:

“When every day there is killing, every day there are wounds, when they pass through villages destroyed by the fascists... Father has many descriptions of villages being destroyed, including children being killed, small Jewish children... even one- and two-year-olds. And this was not something that lasted for a short time; it went on for years. People went forward and saw all this. And they went with one purpose — to take revenge and kill.”

Vitaly Gelfand discovered the diary after his father’s death.

Nazi ideologues had claimed that Wehrmacht soldiers should never descend to sexual contact with “Untermenschen,” or “subhumans.” In practice, the prohibition was ignored.

German military commanders became sufficiently concerned about venereal disease that they organized a network of military brothels in occupied territories.

At the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, the author saw a photograph from a German soldier’s private album, taken in Crimea. It showed the body of a woman lying on the ground.

Museum director Jörg Morré is quoted as saying:

“It looks as though she was killed during or after a rape. Her skirt is pulled up and her hands cover her face. It is a shocking photograph. We had arguments in the museum about whether such photographs should be exhibited. This is war; this is sexual violence in the Soviet Union under the Germans. We show war. We do not merely talk about it — we show it.”

When the Red Army entered what the Soviet press called “the lair of the fascist beast,” posters encouraged soldiers’ rage:

“Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!”

The political department of the 19th Army, advancing toward Berlin, declared that a genuine Soviet soldier was so filled with hatred that the very thought of sexual contact with German women should disgust him.

Once again, however, soldiers showed that ideologues’ assumptions did not match reality.

Historian Antony Beevor, while researching his 2002 book Berlin: The Downfall 1945, found reports in the Russian state archives concerning sexual violence in Germany. The reports were sent by NKVD officials to Lavrentiy Beria at the end of 1944 and then passed to Stalin.

Beevor is quoted as saying:

“You can tell from the markings whether they were read or not. They report mass rape in East Prussia and describe German women trying to kill themselves and their children in order 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 terrifying situation in order to survive.

She paints vivid pictures of the neighbors who shared an air-raid shelter beneath their apartment building.

She describes herself as a “pale blonde, always wearing the same winter coat.” One neighbor is described as “a young man in grey trousers and thick-rimmed glasses who, on closer inspection, turns out to be a woman,” and three elderly sisters as “all three seamstresses, huddled together like one large black pudding.”

As the Red Army approached, the women joked:

“Better a Russian on top of me than a Yankee over me,”

meaning that rape seemed preferable to dying in an American air raid.

When soldiers entered the basement and tried to drag women away, the women begged the diarist to use her knowledge of Russian to complain to Soviet command.

In the ruined streets she managed to find a Soviet officer, but he initially only shrugged.

Despite Stalin’s decree prohibiting violence against civilians, the violence continued.

The officer eventually went down to the basement with her and reprimanded the soldiers. One of them, furious, protested:

“What are you talking about? Look at what the Germans did to our women! They took my sister and...”

The officer calmed him down and led the soldiers outside.

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

She wrote:

“At last the two iron bolts were drawn back. Everyone stared at me. My stockings were down and my hands were holding what was left of my garter belt. I started screaming: ‘You swine! I was raped here twice in a row and you leave me lying here like a piece of dirt!’”

Eventually she decided she needed to find one “wolf” to protect her from further gang rapes by the “male beasts.”

She found an officer from Leningrad and shared a bed with him. Gradually their relationship became less violent, more reciprocal and more ambiguous. The German woman and Soviet officer even discussed literature and the meaning of life.

She wrote:

“It cannot in any way be claimed that the major is raping me. Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent, I am sure that is so. But I also like the major, and the less he wants to get from me as a man, the more I like him as a person.”

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

In 1959 the diary was published in Germany as A Woman in Berlin. The frank account prompted accusations that it dishonored German women.

Anticipating such a reaction, the author demanded that the diary not be republished until after her death.

Eisenhower: Shoot Them at the Scene

Rape was not a problem confined to the Red Army.

Bob Lilly, a historian at Northern Kentucky University, obtained access to U.S. military court archives. His book Taken by Force was so controversial that no American publisher initially agreed to publish it; the first edition appeared in France.

Lilly estimated that about 14,000 rapes were committed by American soldiers in England, France and Germany from 1942 to 1945.

He is quoted as saying:

“There were very few rapes in England, but as soon as American soldiers crossed the Channel, the number rose sharply.”

Rape became a problem not only for the army’s image but also for military discipline.

The article says that Eisenhower ordered soldiers caught committing rape to be shot at the scene and that executions were to be reported in military newspapers such as Stars and Stripes.

Germany was described as the peak of the problem.

The interview in the article continues:

“Were soldiers executed for rape?”
“Oh yes.”
“But not in Germany?”
“No. Not one soldier was executed for raping or killing German civilians.”

Today historians continue to investigate sexual crimes committed by Allied troops in Germany.

For many years, sexual violence by Allied forces — American, British, French and Soviet — was officially kept quiet. Few people reported it and even fewer wanted to hear about it.

Silence

It is difficult for any society to speak about such things. In East Germany, criticizing Soviet heroes who had defeated fascism was treated almost as blasphemy.

In West Germany, guilt over Nazi crimes overshadowed discussion of German suffering.

In 2008 the German film Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin, based on the Berlin woman’s diary and starring Nina Hoss, was released.

The film was a revelation for many Germans and encouraged women to tell what had happened to them. Among them was Ingeborg Bullert.

At the time of the article, ninety-year-old Ingeborg lived in Hamburg in an apartment filled with photographs of cats and books about the theatre. In 1945 she had been only twenty. When the Soviet assault on the city began, she hid in the basement of her home, just like the author of A Woman in Berlin.

During a pause in the bombing, she climbed upstairs to fetch a piece of cord to use as a lamp wick.

She recalled:

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

Ingeborg remained silent about the attack for decades because it was too difficult to speak about.

“My mother liked to boast that her daughter had not been touched,” she recalled.

A Wave of Abortions

Immediately after the war, women aged fifteen to fifty-five were ordered to undergo tests for venereal disease. Food ration cards were not issued without a medical certificate, and doctors’ waiting rooms were crowded with women.

What was the real scale of the rapes?

The figures most often cited are 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany.

These much-disputed numbers were extrapolated from the limited medical records that survive.

The state archives, housed in a former military factory, contain records of abortions carried out from June to October 1945.

Abortions were illegal in Germany under Section 218 of the criminal code. But for a short period after the war, women were allowed to terminate pregnancies because of the mass rapes of 1945.

From June 1945 into 1946, 995 applications for abortion were approved in just one district of Berlin.

Bread Instead of Revenge

For some soldiers, especially after drinking, women became trophies in the same way as watches or bicycles.

Others behaved very differently.

In Moscow, the reporter met ninety-two-year-old veteran Yuri Lyashenko, who remembered soldiers giving bread to Germans rather than taking revenge.

He recalled:

“Of course we could not feed everyone, could we? But we shared what we had with the children. The little children were so frightened, their eyes were so terrible... you felt sorry for them.”

They discussed the beginning of the war, when his leg had almost been amputated, and what he felt when he saw the Red Flag over the Reichstag. Eventually the interviewer asked him about rape.

He replied:

“I don’t know; nothing like that happened in our unit... Of course, evidently there were cases, depending on the individual, on the people. You might meet one person like that... One would help, another would abuse someone. It is not written on his face; you do not know him.”

Looking Back into the Past

We will probably never know the true scale of the rapes. Records of Soviet military tribunals and many other documents remain closed.

The article says that the State Duma had recently approved a law concerning attacks on historical memory under which people who were deemed to diminish the USSR’s contribution to the victory over fascism could face fines or up to five years’ imprisonment.

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 was unable to publish it.

She said:

“The Russian media reacted very aggressively. 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 political circumstances. That is why eyewitness testimony is so important.

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

He says:

“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. The whole world understands this, and Russia understands it. Even those behind these laws about distorting the past understand it too. We cannot move into the future until we deal with the past.”

© FAKEOFF