Rape during the occupation of Germany

The historian Norman Naimark writes that after mid-1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians were usually punished to some degree, which ranged from arrest to execution.[25] The rapes continued until the winter of 1947–48, when the Soviet Military Administration in Germany finally confined Soviet Army troops to guard posts and camps strictly[26] and to separate them from the residential population in the Soviet zone of Germany.[27]

In his analysis of the motives behind the extensive Soviet rapes, Norman Naimark singles out "hate propaganda, personal experiences of suffering at home, and an allegedly fully demeaning picture of German women in the press, not to mention among the soldiers themselves" as some reasons for the widespread rapes.[28] Naimark also noted the effect that tendency to binge-drink alcohol (of which much was available in Germany) had on the propensity of Soviet soldiers to commit rape, especially rape-murder.[29] Naimark also notes the allegedly-patriarchal nature of Russian culture and of the Asian societies constituting the Soviet Union, where dishonor had been repaid by raping the women of the enemy.[30] The fact that the Germans had a much higher standard of living visible even when in ruins "may well have contributed allegedly to a national inferiority complex among Russians". Combining "Russian feelings of inferiority", the resulting need to restore honor, and their desire for revenge may be reasons for why many women were raped in public as well as in front of husbands before both were killed.[30]

According to Antony Beevor, revenge was not the only reason for the frequent rapes, but the Soviet troops' feeling of entitlement to all types of spoils of war, including women, was an important factor as well. Beevor exemplifies that with his discovery that Soviet troops also raped Soviet and Polish girls and women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps as well as those who were held for forced labour at farms and factories.[31] The rapes were often perpetrated by rear echelon units.[7]

The description of the events by Beevor was challenged by Makhmut Gareev, who said the work by Beevor was worse than Joseph Goebbels's propaganda.[27] According to Russian Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, 4,148 Red Army officers and "a significant number" of soldiers were convicted of atrocities for crimes committed against German civilians.[8]

Richard Overy, a historian from King's College London, has criticised the viewpoint put forth by the Russians by asserting that they refuse to acknowledge Soviet war crimes committed during the war: "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."[32]

Geoffrey Roberts writes that the Red Army raped women in every country they passed through but mostly in Austria and Germany: 70,000–100,000 rapes in Vienna, and "hundreds of thousands" of rapes in Germany. He notes that the German Army probably committed tens of thousands of rapes on the Eastern Front but that murder was the more typical crime for them.[33]

In 2015, Beevor's books were banned and censored in some Russian schools and colleges.[34][35]

A documentary book, War's Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich, includes memories by Soviet veterans about their experience in Germany.[36] According to a former army officer, "We were young, strong, and four years without women. So we tried to catch German women and.... Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women; the entire population run from the Soviet Army. So we had to take young, twelve or thirteen year-old. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. Now I can not understand how I did it. A boy from a good family.... But that was me."[37] A woman telephone operator from the Soviet Army recalled: "When we occupied every town, we had first three days for looting and ... [rapes]. That was unofficial of course. But after three days one could be court-martialed for doing this.... I remember one raped German woman laying naked, with hand grenade between her legs. Now I feel shame, but I did not feel shame back then.... Do you think it was easy to forgive [the Germans]? We hated to see their clean undamaged white houses. With roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them."[38] While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge."[39]

Atina Grossman in her article in "October"[40] describes how until early 1945, the abortions in Germany were illegal except for medical and eugenic reasons and so doctors opened up and started performing abortions to rape victims for which only an affidavit was requested from a woman. It was also typical that women specified their reasons for abortions as being mostly socio-economic (inability to raise another child), rather than moral or ethical. Many women would claim they were raped but their accounts described the rapist as looking Asian or Mongolian. German women uniformly described the rapist in racialist terms by claiming they were never blond but consistently "of Mongolian or Asiatic type".[41][42][43] The false stereotype of the "hordes of Mongolian savages," eager to murder, pillage, destroy and rape, had been propagandated by the Nazi authorities to mobilize people for the fight against the Soviet offensive.[42]

Nevertheless, some evidence of Central Asian troops committing rape in Berlin was recorded. In April 1945, Magda Wieland took shelter in the cellar of her apartment house. She described that the first Soviet soldier to find her was a young 16 year-old Central Asian male, who raped her.[44] It was reported that a Soviet commander was greatly embarrassed by wholesale rape of German women by ethnic Kazakh soldiers who were by far the worse offenders and were described as being Mongol Hordes.[45][46] Another recorded case involves German director Schmidt, who burst into Villa Franka, and yelled at Russian commander Isayev "Your soldiers are raping German women!". The raped German victim pointed at a Kazakh soldier being the perpetrator, and was arrested at the spot. The Kazakh soldier in return claimed he wanted revenge against the Germans who killed his two brothers in battle.[47]

The first Soviet troops to fight in Berlin consisted mostly of Mongolians.[48] Even the young German-Jewish fugitive Inge Deutschkron, described her first "Russian" as small, with crooked legs and "a typical mongolian face with almond eyes and high cheekbones".

Accounts of rape of German women by the Mongolians were also recorded. For example, a letter from July 24, 1945 by a German female victim stated:

I hereby certify that at the end of April this year during the Russian march into Berlin I was raped in a loathsome way by two Red Army soldiers of Mongol/Asiatic type.[49]

Eyewitness testimony from females in the Battle of Berlin also described Soviet soldiers of Mongolian type:

The next morning, we women proceeded to make ourselves look as unattractive as possible to the Soviets by smearing our faces with coal dust and covering our heads with old rags, our make-up for the Ivan. We huddled together in the central part of the basement, shaking with fear, while some peeked through the low basement windows to see what was happening on the Soviet-controlled street. We felt paralyzed by the sight of these husky Mongolians, looking wild and frightening. At the ruin across the street from us the first Soviet orders were posted, including a curfew. Suddenly there was a shattering noise outside. Horrified, we watched the Soviets demolish the corner grocery store and throw its contents, shelving and furniture out into the street. Urgently needed bags of flour, sugar and rice were split open and spilled their contents on the bare pavement, while Soviet soldiers stood guard with their rifles so that no one would dare to pick up any of the urgently needed food. This was just unbelievable. At night, a few desperate people tried to salvage some of the spilled food from the gutter. Hunger now became a major concern because our ration cards were worthless with no hope of any supplies.[50]

A woman who lived in Berlin recalled:

The front-line Russian troops who did the fighting – as a woman, you didn't have to be afraid of them. They shot every man they saw, even old men and young boys, but they left the women alone. It was the ones who came afterwards, the second echelon, who were the worst. They did all the raping and plundering. They stripped homes of every single possession, right down to the toilets.[51]

The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but western historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands and possibly as many as two million.[52] The number of babies, who came to be known as "Russian Children", born as a result is unknown.[53] However, most rapes did not result in pregnancies, and many pregnancies did not result in the victims giving birth. Abortions were the preferred choice of rape victims, and many died as a consequence of internal injuries after being brutally violated, or due to untreated sexually transmitted diseases because of a lack of medicine or badly-performed abortions. Many women committed suicide after rape, mostly due to being unable to cope with their traumatic experience, although some were forced to by their fathers because of their "dishonor", while others were shot and killed by their husbands for "consenting to sexual relations with Allied soldiers". Many German women were verbally abused by German soldiers on the streets or in their homes for being "Allied whores", while a lot of them even received threatening letters from German men.[54] In addition, many children died in postwar Germany as a result of widespread starvation, scarce supplies and diseases such as typhus and diphtheria. The infant mortality in Berlin reached up to 90%.[55]

As for the social effects of the sexual violence, Norman Naimark noted:

In any case, just as each rape survivor carried the effects of the crime with her till the end of her life, so was the collective anguish nearly unbearable. The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until—one could argue—the present.[52]

West Berliners and women of the wartime generation refer to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin, as the "tomb of the unknown rapist" in response to the mass rapes by Red Army soldiers in 1945 during and after the Battle of Berlin.[56][57][58][59][60]

Hannelore Kohl, the wife of former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had been gang-raped at the age of 12 by Soviet soldiers in May 1945, according to her biographer. As a consequence, she sustained a serious lifelong back injury after she had been thrown out of a first-floor window. She suffered long and serious illnesses, which experts thought to be the consequences of childhood trauma. Hannelore Kohl took her own life in 2001.[61]

Initially, East German and Soviet propaganda suggested that most of the rapes were being conducted by Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers, including Werwolf battalions.[62] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took part in the invasion of Germany and wrote a poem about it, "Prussian Nights". Parts of the poem read, "Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It's not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother's wounded, half alive. The little daughter's on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse.... The mother begs, 'Soldier, kill me!'"[63] Records of sexual violence were found in works of other Soviet authors, mostly in the form of war memoirs mentioning particular incidents witnessed by the authors, such as Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Gelfand, Mikhail Koryakov, Eugenii Plimak, David Samoilow, Boris Slutskii, Nikolay Nikulin, Grigorii Pomerants, Leonid Ryabichev and Vassily Grossman. Vera Dubina and Oleg Budnitskii were among those few historians who investigated the subject more systematically.[64]

As most women recoiled from their experiences and had no desire to recount them, most biographies and depictions of the period, like the 2004 German film Downfall, alluded to mass rape by the Red Army but stopped shy of mentioning it explicitly. As time has progressed, more works have been produced that have directly addressed the issue, such as the books The 158-Pound Marriage and My Story (1961) by Gemma LaGuardia Gluck [reissued as Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust) (2007, Expanded Edition)],[65][66] or the 2006 films Joy Division and The Good German.

The topic is the subject of much feminist discourse.[67] The first autobiographical work depicting the events was the groundbreaking 1954 book A Woman in Berlin, which was made into a 2008 feature film. It was widely rejected in Germany after its initial publication but has seen a new acceptance, and many women have found inspiration to come forward with their own stories.[68][69][70]