Catherine Merridale - Ivan's War

7 Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (London, 1991), p. 274.

8 Cited in Werth, p. 965.

9 See Beevor, Berlin , p. 34.

10 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 82.

11 Khronika chuvstv (Vladimir, 1991), pp. 175–6.

12 Pis’ma s fronta i na front , p. 93. Letter dated 26 February 1945.

13 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 86.

14 Werth, p. 944.

15 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.

16 Kopelev, p. 14.

17 Ibid ., p. 13.

18 Julius Hay, cited in Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation , 1945–49 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 70.

19 See Naimark, loc. cit ., and also RH2-2686, 37.

20 See Glantz and House, p. 235.

21 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-01.

22 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2686, 33.

23 Kopelev, p. 36.

24 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 9.

25 Ibid .

26 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine , p. 100 (23 February 1945). This formula echoed a time-honoured earlier phrase about capitalism, used in the harsh years of class war (collectivization). Then, the catchword was that the class enemy would resist with greatest desperation as the victory of the proletariat approached.

27 Ermolenko, p. 105.

28 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 35.

29 Ibid ., 38.

30 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13 (captured letter).

31 For a parallel story of captivating inhumanity, see the account of the slaughtered buffalo in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried , pp. 75–6.

32 Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet’, Znamya , 2005, no. 2, p. 163.

33 Ibid , p. 163.

34 Ibid , p. 159.

35 Ibid , p. 165.

36 Kopelev, p. 37.

37 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 44-10, 3.

38 Kopelev, p. 50.

39 Werth, p. 964.

40 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 12.

41 Kopelev, p. 39.

42 Ibid ., pp. 46–53.

43 Naimark, p. 74.

44 This seems clear despite the bland statement by Werth (p. 964) that the rapes were just an outlet for the soldiers’ sexual frustration.

45 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.

46 Overy, p. 260.

47 For discussions, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (London, 1975); Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Eds), Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford, 1986).

48 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.

49 Rabichev, p. 164.

50 Set in a culture of almost total denial, Rabichev’s article and Kopelev’s book are, to date, among the only discussions of this question in Russian. The time for an honest assessment of the war is still far off, as the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in 2005 testified.

51 Atina Grossman, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,’ October , 72, spring 1995, p. 51.

52 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.

53 Cited in Naimark, p. 112.

54 Anonymous (sic), A Woman in Berlin , trans. James Stern (London, 1955), pp. 93–4.

55 Temkin, p. 197.

56 Beevor, Berlin , p. 326.

57 A Woman in Berlin , p. 64.

58 Temkin, p. 202.

59 Igor Kon and James Riordan, Sex and Russian Society (London, 1993), pp. 25–6.

60 For a more recent parallel, see Gilles Kepel’s comments about Algerian Islamists, those ‘impoverished young men’ whose crowded family conditions forced them into abstinence and who, in consequence, ‘condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived’. Cited in Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London, 2004), p. 133.

61 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.

62 N. Inozemtsev, Tsena pobedy v toi samoi voine: frontovoi dnevnik N. Inozemtseva (Moscow, 1995), p. 108.

63 GARF 7523/16/79, 56.

64 For an example of such propaganda, see Pravda , 13 July 1944, p. 3 (account of Olga Ivanovna Kotova and her ten children).

65 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny , p. 154.

66 Belov, p. 469.

67 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1414, 57.

68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 67.

69 Kopelev, p. 29.

70 GARF, 7523/16/79, 59, has another letter demanding that soldier fathers have control over their children.

71 Exotic German women’s clothes – ‘Gretchen knickers’ – would often scandalize the soldiers’ wives who received them as gifts from their husbands. See Beevor, Berlin , p. 407.

72 Cited in Naimark, p. 108.

73 RH2-2688, 51.

74 Ibid ., 52.

75 On this aspect of rape, see Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Race, Rape and Nationalism during the First World War,’ Past and Present , 141 (November 1993), pp. 170–206.

76 A Woman in Berlin , p. 219.

77 The most comprehensive figure, from Barbara Johr, is a total of two million in the whole of Germany. See Naimark, p. 133. See also Helker Sander, ‘Remembering/Forgetting’, October , 72, spring 1995, p. 21.

78 Atina Grossman, ‘Silence’, p. 46.

79 Venereal disease statistics are available in NKVD files and also in the records of hospitals near the front throughout and just after the war. Although it generally maintained a cool attitude towards the epidemic, the NKVD did occasionally note the pace of infection, as in RGVA 32925/1/516, 178.

80 A Woman in Berlin , p. 17.

81 RGVA, 32925/1/526, 43. See also Naimark, p. 74.

82 Velikaya Otechestvennaya , 2(3), p. 304 (order of 11 July 1944).

83 For example, the three cases of gang rape dating from April 1945 are cited in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 132. The guilty men in each case were turned over to SMERSh.

84 Rabichev, p. 164.

85 Kopelev, p. 51; Temkin, p. 201.

86 GARF, 7523/16/424, 85 and 98, for example.

87 See Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich , pp. 23–4.

88 Naimark, p. 10.

89 Botting, p. 99.

90 Snetkova, p. 47.

91 GARF, R7317⁄6⁄16, 81.

92 This confirmed the GKO’s resolution of 23 December 1944. Velikaya Otechestvennaya , 2(3), 344–5.

93 Temkin, p. 199.

94 Velikaya Otechestvennaya , 2(3), 344.

95 Kopelev, pp. 39–40.

96 Beevor, p. 35.

97 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 146.

98 Snetkova, p. 47.

99 See Beevor, Berlin , pp. 407–8.

100 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 157.

101 Ibid ., 152.

102 Ibid ., 158.

103 GAOPIKO, 1/1/3754, 5–9.

104 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 139.

105 TsAMO, 233/2354/1, 28.

106 A Woman in Berlin , p. 60.

107 See photo, p. 280.

108 For an account from Poland, see RGVA, 32925/1/527, 86–7.

109 Ibid ., 108.

110 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 125.

111 Beevor, Berlin , pp. 177–8. For a different perspective, see Glantz and House, p. 255.

112 The numbers given are two and a half million Red Army and Polish troops and roughly a million German defenders. Glantz and House, p. 261; Overy, p. 266.

113 Glantz and House, p. 260.

114 Pis’ma s fronta i na front , p. 160.

115 Chuikov, Reich , p. 146.

116 Beevor, Berlin , p. 218.

117 Chuikov, Reich , p. 147.

118 Overy, p. 268.

119 Beevor, Berlin , p. 222.

120 Chuikov, Reich , p. 184.

121 A Woman in Berlin , pp. 13 and 17.

122 See Beevor, p. 412. As a military nurse who worked in Belorussia told me, ‘They were all infected with venereal diseases. All of them!’ This was an exaggeration, naturally, but she must have wondered when she would see a patient who was not.

123 A version appears in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 10–11.

124 A Woman in Berlin , p. 107.

125 Overy, p. 273; Beevor, Berlin, p. 372; Chuikov, Reich , pp. 242–9.