Miriam Gebhardt - Crimes Unspoken - The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War

But the Soviet sources also mention cowardice and the lack of solidarity among the Germans, saying that the abandoned German population were capable of anything in their fear of the Red Army. People hid in cellars and would not come out onto the street. When they encountered Soviet soldiers and officers, many threw their arms up in the air as if pleading for mercy. White flags flew from many buildings to indicate that the soldiers would meet no resistance and that the occupants were willing to follow all orders. Many Germans claimed to be Poles or Jews so that they would be spared, or pretended to be Communists and revolutionaries, with pictures of Stalin hanging on the walls. [43] A. A. Smirnov, head of the IIIrd Section of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR on 21 March 1945 on the situation in the German territories occupied by the Red Army, quoted in Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland , p. 121. It would almost seem as if the inglorious behaviour of the Germans – the struggle to hold out as ordered by the regime, the habit of obeying, the state terror that brutally nipped any signs of premature surrender in the bud, the vain attempts to hole up in the fortified towns, the ongoing panic – offered fertile soil for the aggressive behaviour of the Red Army soldiers. Social psychologists have described the phenomenon in which expectant behaviour fosters the corresponding reaction. At the same time, this is not to say that the Germans could have averted the calamity by acting differently.

The demographer Gerhard Reichling, who collected statistics in the 1950s on flight and expulsion, calculates that 1.9 million women and girls were raped by Red Army soldiers as they advanced on Berlin, 1.4 million of them while fleeing from the former German territories in the East and 500,000 in the Soviet occupied zone. He further estimates that 292,000 children were born as a result of these rapes. This would mean that a quarter of the women became pregnant after having been raped and did not abort, which sounds implausible in the light of other research and my own findings. As mentioned earlier, my own estimates differ considerably from Reichling’s. At all events, the data on occupation and children born of rape in West Germany point to a much smaller number of victims and a much higher abortion rate. My calculations nevertheless put the number of victims in the hundreds of thousands. While it is true that most of the mass rapes typically took place during flight and expulsion from the East, there were nevertheless hundreds of thousands of German women for whom the danger was yet to come.

The sound was unlike anything Berliners had heard before, unlike the whistle of falling bombs, or the crack and thud of anti-aircraft fire. Puzzled, the shoppers who were queued up outside Karstadt department store on Hermannplatz listened: it was a low keening coming from somewhere off in the distance, but now it rose rapidly to a terrible piercing scream. For an instant the shoppers seemed mesmerized. Then suddenly the lines of people broke and scattered. But it was too late. Artillery shells, the first to reach the city, burst all over the square. Bits of bodies splashed against the boarded-up store front. Men and women lay in the street screaming and writhing in agony. It was exactly 11.30 a.m., Saturday, April 21. Berlin had become the front line. [44] Ryan, The Last Battle , p. 328.

In his popular war book The Last Battle , the Irish-American journalist and writer Cornelius Ryan gives a vivid account of the start of the battle for Berlin, which lasted until 2 May and was to lead to house-to-house fighting and more civilian casualties than the air raids on the city. These weeks are also symbolic in terms of the mass rapes. Nowhere else are there so many well-known accounts of what happened to the Germans at the end of the war and afterwards: Barbara Noack, Hildegard Knef, Margret Boveri, Bert Brecht, Leon Uris and Erich Kuby, to mention but a few, have all written about it. For our discussion of the mass rapes in Berlin, however, the most important is the description by a woman who wanted to remain anonymous, and whose book, A Woman in Berlin , was to cause a sensation decades later and, because a film was made out of it, has left the most intense trace in our visual memory. The (subsequently destroyed) anonymity of the author was one decisive reason why her story became the collectively perceived version. We would like for that reason to concentrate first on other cases.

The significance of Berlin has to do with the magnitude of the events but even more so with the fact that the rapes by the Soviets (other perpetrators are hardly mentioned) also stand as symbols for the overthrow of the German Reich. The raping of the women of Berlin is part of the narrative of the downfall of a proud Prussian German city, one where the ‘greatest general of all times’ had recently withdrawn into his bunker and prepared to commit suicide, a city that would in future be the pawn in the East–West conflict.

Let us allow Cornelius Ryan once again to set the scene: the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, the Reichstag building and the Royal Palace are in flames. People are running along the Kurfürstendamm, dropping briefcases and packages, bobbing frantically from doorway to doorway. At the Tiergarten a stable of riding horses receives a direct hit. The screams of the animals mingle with the cries and shouts of men and women; an instant later the horses stampede out of the inferno and dash down the Kurfürstendamm, their manes and tails blazing.

Within this inferno, Ryan is a great storyteller, weaving descriptions of the last days of the war in Berlin with the fate of the women who were raped. His book, which is still used by academics as a reference, speaks of Gotthard Carl, an air force captain, who believed until the end in the final victory. He hurried home and ordered his wife to go down to the cellar and stay there, sitting right opposite the cellar entrance. Gerda was amazed but her husband was insistent: he had heard that in other cities the Russians entered the cellars with flamethrowers and most people were burnt alive. ‘I want you to sit directly before the cellar door so that you will be killed first. You won’t have to sit and wait your turn.’ [45] Ibid., p. 329. Gerda numbly did as she was told. For the first time since their marriage she didn’t include Gotthard in her prayers. In the afternoon, she disobeyed his orders and returned to the apartment. She never saw her husband again.

The truncated impression we have today, thanks to the historical films of the fall of Berlin, is of a sudden invasion by dark powers of a hitherto unsuspecting city. The violence did not explode all of a sudden, however, but gradually increased and smouldered for months and years. At first the Soviet soldiers wanted above all to put an end to the fighting. They were not looking for women but for German soldiers and members of the Volkssturm in hiding. They shared their rations and sweets with children on the streets. One anecdote in Ryan’s book is of two women, one a widow and the other the wife of a major, who were sitting in a cellar when a huge shadow appeared on the wall. In the shadow’s hands was a gun. To them the apparition appeared like a cannon being held in the paws of a gorilla, and the soldier’s head seemed huge and deformed. They were unable to breathe. The Russian came into view, followed by another, and ordered them out of the cellar. ‘Now it is going to take place’, they thought. The two women were led outdoors, where the Russians handed them brooms and pointed to the debris and broken glass that littered the walk. Their surprise and relief were so obvious that the Russians burst out laughing. [46] Ibid., pp. 362–3.