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

Finally, at the beginning of 1945, two major offensive operations heralded the end of the Great Patriotic War. Large battalions reached East Prussia, Wartheland, Silesia and the Oder. Now around 3.5 million Soviet soldiers from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts, the 1st Ukrainian Front and parts of the Baltic, and the 4th Ukrainian Front combined with Polish units in January to form a 900-kilometre front from Memel to the Carpathian mountains. They hoped that, despite the heavy losses, the Vistula-Oder and East Prussian offensives would bring about the final and total victory over Hitler’s Germany.

For the Red Army soldiers who now entered German territory in large numbers for the first time, it was not just any enemy territory but, as Elke Scherstjanoi writes, ‘the soil of the main enemy, the places where they trained and where there most important reserves and homes were to be found’. Further operations in eastern Pomerania and the advance on Berlin from the Oder were the fulfilment of a statement made by Stalin a year earlier: ‘Follow the tracks of the wounded German beast and deal it the death blow in its own lair.’ [59] Elke Scherstjanoi, ‘Sowjetische Feldpostbriefe vom Ende des Grossen Vaterländischen Krieges als Quelle für historische Forschung’, in: Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland , pp. 28–9.

Vladimir Gelfand, a 21-year-old lieutenant in the 1052nd Artillery Regiment, a good-looking Jew from Ukraine with a high school diploma, literary pretensions, a Party member and admirer of the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, kept a diary throughout his entire war service and his time in the occupying army in Germany. His mental transformation, inurement and brutalization in the last months of the war are reconstructed here as a typical example of what was almost certainly a more general process.

On 14 January 1945, his unit was to the south of Warsaw. He and his soldiers were worn out from the fighting, but as Gelfand was an officer, he tried not to let it show:

All around you artillery shells are booming, whistling, howling and roaring, and you sit there, between life and death, and can only wait for fate, which has already played its part several times in your life, to decide…. We are in sight of the enemy, and its furious assaults are aimed at our position and fill our hearts with desperate fear. The soldiers curse – they are in terrible shape. But I keep quiet and don’t show my fear, because an officer has to have nerves of steel. [60] Vladimir Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch , pp. 13–14.

Three weeks later, Gelfand’s unit was 70 kilometres from Berlin. The fighting was still causing huge losses, and half of his men had been caught ‘in the jaws of death’; ‘It’s an indescribable nightmare and nothing else.’ [61] Ibid., p. 31. A week later, in Frankfurt an der Oder – Gelfand was being eaten up by lice, and it was raining incessantly. Two of his men had mutilated themselves in order to be sent home, and were shot for it. He had problems with his superior, was mobbed and denied military honours. But he would still have nothing to do with the crimes committed by his army against German civilians. He noted that the enemy women had disappeared ‘since we pierced one with a lance and brought her back naked to the German positions’. [62] Ibid., p. 44.

The sight of German girls and Soviet prostitutes aroused him but he still didn’t want to buy sex or obtain it by force. When Gelfand reached Berlin with the Red Army, he was overwhelmed by the prosperity and culture of his enemy. He thought that now it would all be Soviet, and he rejoiced at the great victory. He was convinced of the superiority of the Red Army, not only because of the way the war had turned out. When he stood near Colonel Antonov during a parade, he was deeply moved.

The first days in Berlin were the most memorable experiences in his life. He learned to ride a bicycle and met a wonderful girl, who urged him to protect her after having been raped for a whole night in front of her parents. She apparently said to him: ‘You can sleep with me. You can do anything you want with me, but just you. I’m willing to fuck with you, to do anything you want, but just save me from these men with this sh…!’ Gelfand was tempted, but he decided, according to his diary, to do his soldierly duty. [63] Ibid., pp. 79–80.

But soon he started to get bored in Berlin. He started thinking more and more about the German women. His attitude was more than ambivalent: they attracted him but repelled him ideologically at the same time: ‘The girls here are either dainty but cool, or passionate but moody. Others are ugly or have no figure. Russian girls are proud and very sensitive to all the refinements of conversation.’ [64] Ibid., p. 89. The idealization of the virtuous Soviet woman at home and the demonization of the immoral Western woman was a traditional theme in the Communist ideology. The distinctions even included outward appearance: the made-up German woman with her fur coat and the unspoiled woman at home with her peasant’s blouse. The Soviet image of German women was of a tantalizing but debauched creature, and German sexual morality, no doubt as a result of ideological indoctrination, was perceived as a pornographic cesspool.

Gelfand cultivated an ambivalent picture of women, not unusual for the time, as saints and whores. In the Soviet Union of Stalin’s time, the relationship between the sexes was somewhat prim. Manliness was demonstrated ideally by fighting the enemy and in an ideological devotion to duty. Sexual passion was seen as a bourgeois vice. Lenin took a dim view of lust and advocated monogamy, claiming that healthy exercise and long sessions with piles of books were preferable to sexual activities. [65] Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1939–1945 (London 2005), p. 272. After long hours at the workbench, a good Communist would rather attend a meeting or read Pravda than go to a woman. After ‘bourgeois morality’ had been abolished after the Revolution, divorce, abortion and family law relaxed, and after the disastrous famines of the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets had once again established stricter rules of morality and tightened the laws. At the same time, fantasies about the opposite sex fluctuated wildly between romantic ecstasy and downright aversion, as Gelfand noted in his diary.

In spite of his reservations, Gelfand slept with a German, apparently consensually. It was evidently his first time, and he was bitterly disappointed at the discrepancy between the fantasies he had read about and the reality. Irritated by his day-to-day life as a soldier, he increasingly abandoned his romantic hopes of a proper love life. When he was stationed outside Berlin as an occupying soldier, he sought increasing contact with women, German and Russian, and contracted gonorrhoea. He became less and less selective – and considerate. One acquaintance, whom he simply refers to as ‘the woman’, was an anti-Semite. The bed scene with her had at the least some indications of force: ‘She was not a one-night stand… I continued to persuade her and started using my hands.’ [66] Ibid. His sensitivity gave way to the pragmatism of the gradual brutalization, isolation, disillusionment and ultimately uncouthness of the occupier. In the end he was only a man, who could not bear the ‘imprisonment of the soul, the loneliness’. This is how he justified his indiscriminate sexual contacts, trivializing and ignoring the resistance shown by some of the women, including a 16-year-old girl. He contracted a venereal disease again, endured painful turpentine injections and catheterization, but this didn’t deter him from his next sexual conquest.