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

Much to the surprise of the Germans, many of the Soviets were highly disciplined. When they discovered that someone was an opponent of the Nazi regime or had been persecuted, they were usually courteous. Helena Boese came face to face with a Red Army trooper on her cellar steps. He was young, handsome and wearing an immaculately clean uniform. He just looked at her when she came out of the cellar and then, gesturing to indicate good will, gave her a stick with a white handkerchief tied to it as a sign of capitulation. Ilse Antz was asleep in the basement of her apartment house when the first Russian entered. She started in terror at the young, dark-haired trooper. He just smiled and said: ‘Why afraid? Everything all right now. Go to sleep.’ [47] Ibid., p. 363.

The Communists, the few resistance fighters and the hidden Jews of Berlin, like the 20-year-old Hans Rosenthal, who was later to become a popular television talk-show host, felt relief at the first sight of the Russians. Rosenthal had spent twenty-eight long months hidden in a small allotment garden. For him the arrival of the Red Army was obviously liberating. There were embraces, scenes of fraternization with the Red Army soldiers, who were happy for their part that the fighting was finally over and that they had survived.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich belonged to a resistance group and distributed flyers until the end urging the people of Berlin to surrender. It was the werewolves – a handful of Germans who continued to resist long after the Red Army had taken Berlin – not the Russians, who were the enemy. Her initial feeling when the Red Army arrived was one of incredible relief. She and her fellow resisters joyfully welcomed the Soviets, attempted to communicate with them in broken Russian and to show them the way so as help them put an end to the Nazi regime once and for all.

Berlin fell little by little. Some districts, like Weissensee, which had a large Communist population, surrendered immediately, with red flags hanging from the windows. Pankow and Wedding put up resistance for several more days. Hitler Youth, Heimatschutz, police and fire brigade members fought in the hope that they could turn the tables one last time. In Wilmersdorf and Schöneberg, the Soviets had to fight from house to house and clear their path with rocket launchers. In Grunewald and Tegel, it was possible to read the newspaper at night by the light of the flares. SS men continued to patrol the streets executing anyone in uniform who looked as if he had deserted, blowing up bridges and destroying as much infrastructure as possible to delay the conquest of Berlin.

In the perception of many eyewitnesses, the first line of Soviet conquerors consisted of disciplined and well-mannered soldiers who did not harm women. But then the others arrived, not with sweets but demanding the rights due to the conquerors: the women of the conquered. [48] Ibid., p. 382. I doubt if it was really like that. The difference between civilized and aggressive soldiers can also have had to do with the internal hierarchy and the different values in societies at war. It was a question of protecting the honour of the true warriors who were the first to reach Berlin as opposed to the units that arrived afterwards. I therefore believe that once again it was more the dynamic of interaction between Germans and Soviets that caused things to spin increasingly out of control.

Ryan describes the torment of Ursula K. in Zehlendorf, mother of 6-year-old twin daughters and a 7-month-old son, who, after having been raped in the night by four Russian soldiers, was set upon again in the morning by two Soviets with knives in their boots and fur caps. She ran out of the house into a building across the street, where she found a bathtub. Turning it upside down, she crawled in with her children. Or the 18-year-old Juliane B., who blackened her face and blond hair and hid under the sofa. In the adjoining cellar were two old people. Suddenly one of them shouted: ‘She’s there! There! Under the sofa.’ While a young, neat-looking soldier began to disrobe her, she used various strategies to defend herself. First she cried and pleaded, then told him firmly and politely to behave himself. The soldier began to look annoyed. Finally she cried at him: ‘I simply don’t love you! There’s no point in this! I simply don’t love you!’ That was enough for the soldier. He swore and dashed out of the cellar. [49] Ibid., p. 383.

Her friend and the friend’s mother were not so lucky. They swallowed poison after they had been raped. Even the maternity home Haus Dahlem was not spared. The Ukrainian cook was shot at during an attempted rape, pregnant women and ones who had recently given birth were abused. The longer the fighting continued and the soldiers were in danger, the greater their rage. Alcohol, which was suddenly readily available, did the rest. [50] Ibid., p. 352.

The Soviets did not only assault German women. They also raped the Soviet slave labourers, Jews recently released from concentration camps and opponents of the Nazi regime. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the pro-Russian resistance fighter, wrote in horror in her diary on 6 May 1945:

For four years Goebbels told us that the Russians would rape us. That they defile and plunder, murder and burn. Propaganda, we said appalled, and looked forward to the arrival of Allied liberators. We didn’t want to be disappointed now. We couldn’t have stood it if Goebbels had been right. We had been in opposition for twelve years and now for once we wanted to be on the right side.

But this wish was not to come true. She could not possibly be in favour of what was happening now.

She was dismayed and bewildered. Wherever she went, she found the same misery: theft, looting, violence.

The victorious army set upon the women of Berlin with uninhibited avidity. We visited Hannelore Thiele, Heike’s friend and classmate. She was huddled up on her couch. She barely looked up as we entered the room. ‘I want to kill myself’, she wept. ‘I can’t live like this.’ ‘Was it really so bad?’ I asked cautiously. She looked at me miserably. ‘Seven’, she grimaced. ‘Seven in succession. Like animals.’

In Klein-Machnow, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich met Inge Zaun, an 18-year-old who had been completely innocent in sexual matters:

Now I know everything. Sixteen times over. ‘How can you defend yourself’, she mused dully and indifferently, ‘when they hammer on the door and fire off their rifles indiscriminately? New ones, different ones every night. When they took me for the first time and forced father to watch, I thought I would die. Later…’ she makes a weary gesture with her hand. ‘Since their captain has had a relationship with me, he’s the only one, thank goodness. He listens to me and helps to ensure that the other girls are left alone.’

The disappointment felt by this opponent of Hitler is great. ‘They defile our daughters, rape our women’, say the men. There is no other talking point in the city. The girls are hidden in the roof timbers or buried in coal bunkers or wrapped up like old women. Almost no one sleeps in their own home.’ Ruth Andreas-Friedrich hears a perturbed father say:

‘Honour gone, everything gone.’ [He] gives his daughter, who has been defiled twelve times, a rope. She takes it obediently and hangs herself on the nearest mullion. ‘If you are defiled, there’s nothing left but death’, said the teacher of a girls’ class two days before the collapse. More than half of the pupils drew their own conclusions and drowned themselves in the nearest lake. Honour gone, everything gone. [51] Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin: Ein deutsches Tagebuch (Berlin 1964 [1946]), p. 193.

Soon Ruth Andreas-Friedrich was also to be a witness to the consequences of the mass rapes. On 18 August 1945, she noted that the official doctors were talking about relaxing the abortion laws: ‘The seed that our victors sowed in the first weeks of May has now started to sprout. Another six months and thousands of children will see the light of day without knowing who their father is, conceived in fear and born into a grey world. Should they be allowed to live?’