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

Altogether, Gelfand’s diary combines motives of revenge, resentment towards the Germans, frustration at his own situation in the military, loneliness and the conviction that as the conqueror he was entitled to treat women in a way that was at least very close to open violence and aggression.

The military letters of other young Russians and Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Balts, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Caucasians, who were not officers like Gelfand, reflect the conflicting feelings that the soldiers wrestled with during the war and occupation period. [67] For some years, attention has been paid in the Soviet Union as well to the situation in the last months of the war, and the treatment of the civilian population in the countries the advancing army battled through, although the subject of mass rape is still one that has not been studied to any great extent. All the same, there is now a good research basis on the Soviet view of the war and the German aggressor. The Department of Modern History in Munich, for example, compiles the research and publications of German and Soviet scholars and makes possible the publication of studies on the history of the mutual perceptions and attitudes of the Red Army and German civilians during the conquest and occupation of German territory. These studies help us to understand the thinking of the Red Army soldiers, who are still seen as primarily responsible for the mass rape of German women. Elke Scherstjanoi has compiled a selection of 161 letters by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, relating their attitudes and experiences in Germany. See Scherstjanoi, ‘Sowjetische Feldpostbriefe’, in: Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland , pp. 3–193. The first striking thing is the use of language. In their letters, the Red Army soldiers repeatedly refer to Stalin’s description of the German Reich as the ‘lair of the fascist predator’. The enemy is designated again and again as a ‘bandit’ or ‘accursed German’ or ‘hateful German creature’, blamed not only for atrocities committed against its own people but also for the fact that the soldiers have had to fight for three and a half years far away from their homes.

The letters by the Soviet soldiers are full of ill-concealed desire for revenge, which also has as much to do with the addressees – family and relatives – as it does with the letter-writers themselves. On 3 January 1945, Vladimir Ivanovic wrote:

Father, I am fighting on the soil of the enemy, the enemy who brought such misery and misfortune to you, my dear family, who caused the death of my brother and your son, who tore us apart. You lost your house and all your possessions acquired over the years. You have shed tears about everything the enemy did to our house, to our Vogorod. So now I am repaying it. In the enemy’s country every one of our soldiers is master and everyone exacts revenge as he can. And there is no mercy in any house. Not for furniture, for watches, for mirrors. Their houses were nicely furnished. They left things behind. Everything is smashed to fragments. May their wives, mothers and the rest shed tears for everything that you have shed them for. [68] Ibid., p. 31.

The desire for revenge was directed at the entire German people, not just representatives of the Nazi state. Michail Aronovic, born 1915, wrote on 23 January 1945: ‘They are all guilty and they are all condemned to death and that is why they are all trying to postpone the date of their execution. All the worse for their state and their generation.’ [69] Ibid., p. 36.

A frequent cause of rage was the material wealth of the Germans. For years the Soviets had been preached to that their own system was fairer and superior, and that the German bourgeoisie and capitalists squeezed their own people dry and lived in the lap of luxury themselves. Now the Red Army soldiers were discovering that apparently most Germans lived well, not just the upper classes. Even after six years of war, they still had full pantries and lived in inconceivable comfort. The German Nazis had got rich, so it was said, from their forays through Eastern Europe. And so the soldiers were naturally entitled to everything they found in the German houses. The German standard of living was depicted as paradise. Pavel Vasilevic, born 1924, wrote on 25 January 1945 in a similar tone to his parents:

As far as the trophies are concerned, I don’t know how to describe them to you. Basically, the vodka is flowing in streams, there is all the food you could wish for, not to mention the magnificent palaces, where the walls shine like marble, where the silk curtains are seamed with gold, and you sink into feather beds like the sea when you lay down to sleep. I am sitting in the estate of a rich German; everywhere there are divans, armchairs, silk, the floors gleaming like mirrors. Imagine, soldiers who have never seen the like now feel like lords. This is not surprising, because they have had a hard journey and through their honest work have earned the right to take possession of these treasures. Now we are recovering from the terrible and difficult days of the past. [70] Ibid., p. 39.

The more the soldiers witnessed the atrocities committed by the Germans and the more they saw the wealth for themselves, the greater were the hate and frustration boiling up in them. Vasiliy Ivanovic, a captain, wrote on 27 January 1945:

We are hitting them with all our might, dear Sura, to get our own back on the Huns and Fritzes, and their despicable women and their brood of vipers are running in all directions. I don’t think they will get very far. We will seek them out to the ends of the world, as comrade Stalin said, and we will exact our judgement over these dregs of humanity. [71] Ibid., p. 41.

The German fear of the Red Army appeared to increase the soldiers’ rage even further. Major Anna Vladimirovna wrote contemptuously at the end of January 1945 about what wretches the Germans were: ‘They all run and throw everything away. Like common vermin. They are afraid of their come-uppance. And you sense the power, the Russian pride and feel like singing.’ [72] Ibid., p. 42. Again and again, the correspondents wrote that they felt no sympathy for the German women. Michail Borisovic, a fitter from Kiev, wrote: ‘The men were the direct perpetrators of these crimes, and the women helped them, if not physically then morally, and the children were getting ready to commit the same crimes as their fathers, regarding themselves from birth as “superior to everyone”.’ [73] Ibid., p. 46.

The letters express not only personal feelings but also often official positions, which the soldiers were fed right until the closing phase of the war through training and propaganda. How else were the soldiers, who came from far away, to know that German women were rotten and worthless? Like the US Army, as we shall see later, they came equipped with an image of European – and particularly German – women as frivolous, lascivious and devoid of any moral values. Alexey S., a war correspondent, who was killed near Berlin, wrote home in February 1945: ‘Germany makes a bad impression. It’s not a country but a huge cattle yard. The mating and artificial insemination of women is systematic. The people are rotten to the core. The newspapers and particularly the magazines are full of pictures of naked men and women in all possible poses and positions. This is the most widespread literature.’ [74] Ibid., p. 52.

The evidently exaggerated view of Germany among these soldiers raises the question of the extent to which military propaganda contributed to the attacks on German civilians, and women in particular. So there is no misunderstanding, Soviet war propaganda had sufficient information about atrocities to work with: the conditions when concentration camps like Majdanek or Treblinka were liberated do not need exaggeration. Every Red Army soldier knew of mass executions of his own people, the starving comrades who had been taken prisoner, the reports about Soviet slave labourers and Jewish concentration camp inmates. The men and women needed no training to know the terrible havoc that the German Wehrmacht and SS had wreaked.