Infobae / Lapatilla 

“The Ordeal of Women after the Fall of Berlin: Mass Rapes by the Red Army and a Wave of Suicides”

HISTORY 
2 May 2023

The end of the war is known as Germany’s Zero Hour, but peace and well-being did not arrive immediately. There was great pain and horror, food shortages and abuse. Children born nine months after the fall of Berlin became known as “Russian babies.” The reasons for the later silence.

By Matías Bauso

The fall of Berlin left the city in ruins. Its inhabitants suffered hunger and great pain. Women were systematically raped. (Getty Images)

Berlin, May 1945.

Anyone who thought the worst had already passed was mistaken.

Vladimir Gelfand was a lieutenant in the Red Army. He was young, Ukrainian, and Jewish. He had been fighting for years. Now he was advancing on Berlin. Secretly he kept a diary of his days at the front, even though his superiors prohibited it: they feared the material might fall into enemy hands, and they also feared that criticism of the command and the political leadership might leak out.

Gelfand is in Berlin. During a free moment he took a bicycle he found in fairly good condition and rode along the banks of the River Spree. During his ride he encountered a group of women. He wrote in his diary: “I met several German women walking in a group. They carried suitcases and several bundles. As best I could, in my bad German, I asked where they were going and why they were leaving their homes. With horror on their faces they told me what had happened to them on the first night the Red Army arrived in the city. ‘They raped me,’ said one of the younger women, lifting her skirt. ‘All night. Some were old and others still had acne. They all climbed on top of me. They stood in line. I lost count, but there were no fewer than twenty men,’ she said before bursting into tears. Then she threw herself on me and told me I could sleep with her. ‘Do whatever you want with me—but only you!’”

Germany, Zero Hour

There is a German expression—which is not surprising—that defines the new era that arose after the fall of Nazism and the Allied victory: Stunde Null, a radical break with the past.

Germany’s Zero Hour—and that of the new world.

It is often believed that from that moment everything changed for the better. But before that could happen, a great deal of time, far too many deaths, and unimaginable wounds had to be endured.

The inertia of pain, death, destruction, horror, and inhumanity took a long time to stop.

That Zero Hour became a dark period for Germans. It was not merely the humiliation of defeat, nor even the destruction of their homes and industries. It was much worse.

Germany was devastated. Eighty percent of its infrastructure was destroyed. In Berlin the rubble amounted to millions of tons; some estimates put the figure at seventy-five million tons. One third of the homes were completely destroyed. The entire city was one enormous, decaying fire. Vasily Grossman said that “from outside the city one could see a terrifying blaze, the worst I have ever seen in my life—and I have seen many.” There was no supply of water, electricity, or gas. It was a post-apocalyptic landscape in the literal sense of the term.

One image: a woman walks with difficulty among the stones. She drags a cart containing a few possessions, all that remains to her. Her face carries every possible trace of exhaustion and pain. Behind her are her children. The youngest girl must be six and the oldest child twelve. They are warmly dressed; scarves cover their mouths and their eyes are empty. Every visible building around them is destroyed. Only structures corroded by bombs remain. It seems that not a single windowpane in the entire city has survived. Arms of flame protrude through those openings. One can no longer distinguish the street from what used to be the sidewalk. Rubble is piled chaotically over every square meter. Upright, ghostly columns of smoke form the backdrop.

After several days of total lack of supplies, the Soviet commander ordered that the population be fed from large communal pots.

Fights over Food

Food shortages in the last days of the war became a severe problem. When some product reached a shop, word spread rapidly and long lines formed. Sometimes the need was so great that the queues remained in place even during bombardments. People did not leave their spots or run to an air-raid shelter as they would have done at another time, because they did not want to lose their place. Food was rationed, and there was less and less of it.

General Berzarin ordered field kitchens to be installed in the destroyed streets to feed the civilian population. Large food warehouses that had previously supplied the black market were looted by Soviet soldiers, who used those goods both to satisfy their hunger and to satisfy other appetites. Barter began to function as a partial remedy, but many Germans stole as well. A new term appeared: Fringsen, meaning something like “stealing in order to survive.” It came from statements by Joseph Frings, the Cardinal of Cologne, who gave his blessing to those who stole to feed their families. There were also rumors that, faced with such desperate circumstances, some people resorted to cannibalism.

Red Army soldiers received special permission to send a parcel of up to five kilograms home. The soldiers literally sent anything: vases, tablecloths, lamps, pens, jewelry, shoes, dresses, coats. Everything was the product of systematic and uncontrolled looting.

Anthony Beevor, in his book Berlin: The Downfall, recounts that one soldier tried to send a saw home without any packaging, with his father’s home address written directly on the blade. Others brought boxes weighing three or four times the permitted limit and demanded that they nevertheless be shipped to the Soviet Union in recognition of the effort they had made during the campaign. One of the most prized goods was watches. The Russians showed a particular devotion to them. Berliners were stopped in the streets and the watches torn from their wrists. Several soldiers wore three or four watches on each arm.

Aglia Nesteruk, a communications sergeant, told Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich: “Some people sent shoes. The Germans made them very durable, and very good watches and fur coats. I could not do it. I could not take anything. When I returned I told my mother, and she embraced me: ‘I would not have been able to take anything either. They killed your father.’”

The city was devastated. Everything was rubble. For a long time there was no electricity or drinking water.

The Horror of Mass Rape

But there was another kind of war booty over which the victors fought.

Berlin became a hunting ground for women of every age.

Soviet soldiers raped them under every imaginable circumstance. Adolescents, adults, elderly women, healthy or sick, were subjected to soldiers who celebrated each violent assault with jubilation. The victims ranged from twelve-year-old girls to seventy-year-old women. According to historian William Hitchcock, most were assaulted repeatedly. Some suffered sixty rapes. It is estimated that ten thousand women died as a result of these events, whether directly from the assaults, from complications of abortions, or by suicide.

“I remember a German woman who had been raped. She lay naked, and a grenade had been inserted between her legs. Now I feel ashamed, but at the time I did not. Once some German women came to our battalion to see the commander, crying. When the doctor examined them he saw that they had wounds there. They were completely torn. Their panties were completely soaked in blood,” says A. Ratkina in testimony collected by Alexievich in The Unwomanly Face of War. The woman later asked Svetlana not to publish it, to erase the tape, even as she said: “It is true. It is all true.”

The Red Army command was indulgent toward these atrocities. There were no orders authorizing them, but neither were there punishments or a will to stop the chain of crimes. Some claim there was a grace period during which anything was permitted. Repression and punishment of rape took months to arrive. Once, someone dared complain to Stalin, who replied: “They were boys who had fought thousands of kilometers, risking their lives. They had the right to enjoy themselves with a woman and keep a few trifles to send to their families.”

Let us return to Lieutenant Gelfand’s diary. On his way toward Berlin he encountered some weak, poorly supplied battalions made up, because of the shortage of men, entirely of women. Gelfand recorded: “The German women we captured said they were avenging their dead husbands. We must destroy them without mercy. Many of my comrades want to stab them in their genitals and rape them, but I would only execute them.”

Some claim that there were more than two million rapes in Berlin in the weeks after the Allied victory. (Getty Images)

A Diary of Horror

A journalist kept a diary during those days in 1945. In time the notebook was found and published under the title A Woman in Berlin.

The author remained anonymous. The text is a cruel, dry, and revealing testimony. She tells how one evening people came to fetch her so that, with her rudimentary knowledge of Russian, she could persuade Soviet soldiers not to rape the owner of a liquor shop. The woman was considerably overweight. The Soviets preferred women that way, believing that more flesh meant more life. The first targets of rapists were fuller-figured women. But in Berlin there were few people who had maintained their weight. Most had lost many kilograms in the preceding months. Because the woman’s business was doing well—everyone bought alcohol to forget the bad times—it became one of the first targets of the rapes.

When the journalist went to intervene she found the woman on the floor, surrounded by Soviets in the middle of an air-raid shelter. Many other German civilians stood by impassively. The conversation with the newcomer distracted the soldiers. They left the shelter to talk and made her follow them. In the corridor they began pulling at the interpreter. They tore her dress and ripped apart her underwear. The shelter door immediately closed. She had been left alone. When the three Soviet soldiers grew tired and went away, she returned, but to make the others open the door she first had to assure them that the soldiers were gone. When she entered, she reproached them for abandoning her. No one could look her in the eyes.

As the author advances through the pages of the book, which reflects the events and atmosphere of those days in Berlin, she explains how she negotiated with herself in an effort to survive and accepted visits from a Red Army commander. In that way she ceased to be the prey of dozens of soldiers. Only a week had passed between one episode and the other.

A Woman in Berlin has an extraordinary history. The author made these notes during April, May, and June 1945 in three notebooks made of very poor, grayish, rough wartime paper. She had two battered pencils that she had managed to preserve. She wrote by candlelight; there was no electricity in the city. She entrusted the manuscript to a German publisher who had achieved major success in the United States under a pseudonym with the book Gods, Graves and Scholars. It was first published in English, then translated into several languages, and took six years to appear in Germany. It did not receive much attention there. It drew harsh criticism, and the author was accused of immorality. Germans were neither prepared nor willing to hear certain truths. When Hans Magnus Enzensberger contacted the widow of the original publisher, he learned the author’s identity but also learned that she did not want the book republished in her country until after her death. Many years later, in the new millennium, Enzensberger received the call informing him that the anonymous author had died and that permission to republish had been granted.

Sometimes, however, the assault was not an ambush in the street or an intrusion into a private home. Some women heard a knock at the door from men carrying food. An officer might bring a piece of meat or some vegetables for the German woman living there to cook for him. The women had to pretend that everything was fine and that the situation was natural. After the friendly dinner, the soldier sexually assaulted the woman of the house.

Vasily Grossman, war correspondent and author of Life and Fate, recounts that a Frenchman approached him and warned him: “What your soldiers are doing to women is an unforgivable disgrace.”

The Soviets had accumulated hatred toward the Nazis. Any “payback” seemed appropriate to them; nothing appeared excessive. They were convinced that the Germans deserved the worst. The acquiescence and lack of punishment by the authorities of the victorious force helped the rapes to continue. Impunity was the rule. One must also take into account the dehumanization caused by war, which can make even the most aberrant acts seem bearable or proportionate.

Some women disguised themselves as men; others tried to flee the city. But most, regardless of age, could not escape. (Getty Images)

Svetlana Alexievich collected another testimony: “We were young and strong, and we had not been with a woman for four years. So we went hunting for German women. Ten men would abuse one girl. There were not many women; they escaped and hid. So if we found a girl of twelve or thirteen, we took her. If she screamed too much we put a rag in her mouth. We thought it was funny at the time. Only now do I realize what we were doing. But that was me.”

Another factor was drink. Nazi leaders had decided not to destroy the country’s alcohol reserves as they retreated toward Berlin. Their theory was that the Soviets, with what they saw as a cultural inclination toward alcohol combined with long abstinence, would consume the stored drink and their combat ability would decline sharply. They believed this was their chance to defeat them. Once again, the calculation was wrong. The uncontrolled drinking made the situation even more unmanageable.

Hiding the Horror

These events were not widely publicized. Silence and concealment prevailed for decades, for various reasons. On one side the Soviet regime denied and dismissed the accusations. As it often did, the Kremlin claimed that it was all a Western-coordinated smear campaign and that the New Communist Man was incapable of such acts.

German women, for their part, kept silent out of shame; they concealed the violation to avoid being judged and to avoid carrying such a burden publicly. But in Germany there was another cause of silence: the men in those women’s lives made them keep quiet. It was the men who did not want those terrible stories to become known. At a certain point, because rape had been so frequent, women began sharing their experiences with one another. Many had suffered the same thing. In this way individual experiences became a collective experience. The exceptions were those who had managed to avoid rape.

The figures used by historians are chilling. It is believed that during that period there were around two million rapes throughout Germany. Some women were assaulted by twenty men taking turns. The number of abortions also rose drastically. It is estimated that ninety percent of pregnancies resulting from those events were terminated in German clinics. There was a dramatic increase in female suicides and deaths caused by them. Children born nine months later became known as “Russian babies.”

Although less massive and systematic, there were also rapes committed by American soldiers. Numerous testimonies attest to this.

Germany, during those months after the surrender, became the scene of one of the most significant and terrible phenomena of mass rape in modern history.

The Stunde Null, Germany’s Zero Hour, was also a time of rubble, hunger, and pain.

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