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Revelations of atrocities committed by Russian forces against women in Ukraine have drawn international condemnation.
Many Ukrainian women are still suffering from sexual crimes committed during the war.
Life for women in wartime is horrific. Under international law, violence against women in war is clearly an act of torture and a war crime. And however terrible the sexual assaults themselves may be, the lives of surviving victims often remain miserable afterward.
Seventy-seven years ago, the same thing was happening in Germany as is happening now in Ukraine. Russia denies the sexual crimes committed in Germany, just as it denies those being committed now, but evidence and witness testimony continue to accumulate.
“A Woman in Berlin” — a film about the fate of German women after World War II.
Vladimir Gelfand, a captain in the Russian — then Soviet — army, recorded the horrors of World War II in his diary.
“A German woman with a face distorted by horror told me what had happened on the first night after the arrival of the Russian army,” he wrote in his diary on 25 April 1945.
“She sobbed that twenty men had raped her. Her mother told me that the Russians had raped her daughter in front of her, and that they were preparing to leave the house because they feared the men would return.”
Another German woman wrote:
“I realized that I needed a ‘wolf’ who would protect me from gang rape, so I entered into a relationship with a Russian officer.”
The film “A Woman in Berlin”
Ingeborg Blutt, a German woman who was sexually assaulted by Russian troops, recalled that women between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five were ordered to undergo tests for sexually transmitted infections and that “to receive a food-ration card, you had to have a medical certificate.”
Figures of 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany are often cited in connection with mass sexual assaults by Russian soldiers, the BBC has previously reported.
In Neukölln, one of Berlin’s twenty-four districts, 995 applications for abortion were approved between June 1945 and the following year, according to the BBC.
Soviet soldiers raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag during the fall of Berlin / Yevgeny Khaldei.
According to Miriam Gebhardt’s book When the Soldiers Came, at least 860,000 women were sexually assaulted by Allied soldiers in Germany before and after 1945.
In 1945 German women were freed from the Nazi regime, but the memory of their suffering was not forgotten.
It was a terrible crime that everybody knew about, but discussion of it was virtually prohibited because of fears that the issue would be exploited for propaganda by far-right political groups.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky / GettyimagesKorea
Human-rights violations, including sexual crimes committed during wars and civil conflicts, are often regarded as especially serious because they destroy any sense of safety and accountability.
Now, almost eighty years later, similar war crimes committed in the past by the Soviet Union are, according to the article, being repeated in Ukraine.
Unprotected Ukrainian women live in fear and struggle from day to day.
“Russian forces have killed thousands of civilians, including children, used torture including the amputation of limbs, and sexually assaulted women,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.