Relations between Russia and Germany have not been good since Vladimir Putin's nationalist sabre-rattling this summer, but they are about to get a whole lot worse. A new film about to be released in Germany will force both countries to re-examine part of their recent history that each would much prefer to forget. Yet it is right that the ghastly truth should finally be acknowledged.
The movie,
A Woman In Berlin, is based on the diary of the German journalist Marta Hillers and depicts the horror of the Red Army's capture of the capital of the Third Reich in April and May 1945.
Marta was one of two million German women who were raped by soldiers of the Red Army - in her case, as in so many others, several times over. It was a feature of Russia's 'liberation' and occupation of eastern Germany at the end of World War II that is familiar enough to historians, but which neither country cares to acknowledge took place on anything like the scale it did.
"Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty.Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army."
- Jewish Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, in a leaflet distributed to Soviet soldiers upon entering Germany in 1945
In his fine new book, "World War Two: Behind Closed Doors", the historian Laurence Rees points out that although rape was officially a crime in the Red Army, in fact, Stalin explicitly condoned it as a method of rewarding the soldiers and terrorising German civilians.
Stalin said people should ' understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle'. On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he said: 'We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative.'
While Stalin condoned rape as an instrument of state military policy, his police chief Lavrenti Beria was a serial rapist. An American diplomat, Beria's bodyguard and the Russian actress Tatiana Okunevskaya all bore witness of his methods of grabbing women off the street and shoving them into his limousine and then his bed.
'You are a long way from anywhere, so whether you scream or not does not matter,' Beria would tell the women when he got them back to his dacha. 'You are in my power now. So think about that and behave accordingly.'
More than 100 school-aged girls and young women were drugged and raped by the man who ran the NKVD, the feared forerunner to the KGB. The Red Army's atrocities against women in Dresden in the spring of 1945, a city that had already suffered heavily from Allied bombing, were carried out in a sickeningly systematic manner. 'In the house next to ours, Soviet troops went in and pulled the women on to the street, had their mattresses pulled out and raped the women,' recalled one inhabitant, John Noble. 'The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Right at the end of the street, a woman was tied to a wagon wheel and terribly misused.
Of course, you had the feeling that you wanted to stop it, but there was no possibility to do that.' Women going to and from work past Red Army pickets were routinely raped.
The historian Chris Bellamy believes that although there are no surviving written records to prove it, 'the hideous spectre of multiple rape was not only condoned, but, we can be pretty sure, legally sanctioned by the political officers speaking for the Soviet government'. (
more)
German rape victims find a voice at last
from "After 50 years a UK author has enabled countless women to admit their ordeal at the hands of Soviet troops," Kate Connolly, The Guardian
A bestselling book has prompted victims of one of the twentieth century's most tragic dramas to break their silence. German women have come forward after 50 years to speak of their appalling treatment at the hands of Soviet soldiers, who raped their way across Germany for four years from 1945. Their ordeal has been revealed thanks to Antony Beevor, whose book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 came out in the UK to great acclaim last month.
In his book, Beevor, a Sandhurst recruit turned writer, uses previously
unpublished material from Russian archives in Moscow to describe vividly the horrific suffering of an estimated two million German women and girls who were gang-raped by drunken Soviet soldiers as they made their way across the country with the aim of forcing the Nazis to retreat.
Among the victims were women who became prominent figures, including Hannelore Kohl, wife of the former Chancellor, Helmut. Mrs Kohl, who committed suicide last year, was raped along with her mother at the age of 12 as they failed to escape on a train bound for Dresden.
Beevor's book has unleashed an emotional response from scores of victims, mainly living in Britain, and their relatives, who have contacted him to express their gratitude that the story of an entire generation is finally being told.
'I was carrying out orders to bury some dead Hitler Youth boys when they found me,' Martha Dowsey says gently and slowly with a heavy German accent. 'Six Red Army soldiers with blackened faces held me down on the ground close to the graves and raped me one by one.' She repeats over and over: 'I'm not lying, I'm not, you must believe me.'
Beevor details the horrific consequences of events that resonated for years, affecting women's attitude towards sex and causing huge social problems between men and women.
By the late 1940s - the rapes went on for three years or more - the Soviet troops had left behind them a broken people. According to some reports, 90 per cent of Berlin women were infected with venereal diseases, while Beevor cites one doctor who said that, of the 100,000 women estimated to have been raped in Berlin, a tenth of them died, mostly from suicide. The mortality figures for the approximately 1.4 million raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, he says, are believed to have been much higher. Beevor has shed considerable light on a chapter in German history, the extent of which has remained largely unknown outside Germany and which in the country continues to be a taboo subject.(
more)
Another overview of the great untold crime:
I claim no originality for the documentation or recounting of this ghastly crime perpetrated mainly by what Franklin Roosevelt called "our noble Soviet ally." We are indebted to Dr. Austin J. App, a professor and scholar of English literature at Catholic University, the University of Scranton, and LaSalle College, among others, who risked career and livelihood to bring these truths to light. In April, 1946, when he published the work upon which this article is based, entitled Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe, he was a lone voice crying out for justice in an America still high on war propaganda and on a "victory" that in the later Cold War years and after would be seen clearly as a defeat for America and the West as much as it was for Germany.
As the Red Army advanced toward her in 1945, the city of Berlin had become a city virtually without men. Out of a civilian population of 2,700,000, 2,000,000 were women. It is small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Doctors were besieged by patients seeking information on the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.
In Berlin stood a charity institution, the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital, and foundling home. Soviet soldiers entered the home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth. This was not an isolated incident. No one will ever know how many women were raped, but doctors' estimates run as high as 100,000 for the city of Berlin alone, their ages ranging from 10 to 70.
On March 24, 1945, our "noble Soviet allies" entered Danzig. A 50-year-old Danzig teacher reported that her niece, 15, was raped seven times, and her other niece, 22, was raped fifteen times. A Soviet officer told a group of women to seek safety in the Cathedral. Once they were securely locked inside, the beasts of Bolshevism entered, and ringing the bells and playing the organ, "celebrated" a foul orgy through the night, raping all the women, some more than thirty times. A Catholic pastor in Danzig declared, "They violated even eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers."
The Most Reverend Bernard Griffin, British Archbishop, made a tour of Europe to study conditions there, and reported, "In Vienna alone they raped 100,000 women, not once but many times, including girls not yet in their teens, and aged women."
A Lutheran pastor in Germany, in a letter of August 7, 1945, to the Bishop of Chichester, England, describes how a fellow pastor's "two daughters and a grandchild (ten years of age) suffer from gonorrhea, [as a] result of rape" and how "Mrs. N. was killed when she resisted an attempt to rape her," while her daughter was "raped and deported, allegedly to Omsk, Siberia, for indoctrination."
The day after our noble Soviet allies conquered Neisse, Silesia, 182 Catholic nuns were raped. In the diocese of Kattowitz 66 pregnant nuns were counted. In one convent when the Mother Superior and her assistant tried to protect the younger nuns with outstretched arms, they were shot down. A priest reported in Nord Amerika magazine for November 1, 1945, that he knew "several villages where all the women, even the aged and girls as young as twelve, were violated daily for weeks by the Russians."
Sylvester Michelfelder, a Lutheran pastor, wrote in the Christian Century: "Bands of irresponsible bandits in Russian or American uniforms pillage and rob the trains. Women and girls are violated in sight of everyone. They are stripped of their clothes."
On April 27, 1946 Vatican Radio charged that in the Russian occupation zone of Eastern Germany cries of help are going up "from girls and women who are being brutally raped and whose bodily and spiritual health is completely shaken."
The rapists did not all wear a red star. John Dos Passos, writing in Life magazine for January 7, 1946, quotes a "red-faced major" as saying that "Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier's pay." A serviceman wrote to Time magazine for November 12, 1945 "Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how 'Our Boys' conduct themselves, with such complete callousness in human relationships over here." An army sergeant wrote "Our own Army and the British Army ... have done their share of looting and raping ... This offensive attitude among our troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army of rapists."
An Italian survivor of American bombing states that Black American troops, stationed in Naples, were allowed by their superiors free access to poor, hungry, and humiliated Italian women. The result of this interracial rape and sexual slavery was the production of a generation of pitiable mixed-race children, a legacy of the brutal conqueror.
According to an AP dispatch of September 12, 1945, entitled "German- American Marriages Forbidden", the Franklin Roosevelt government instructed its soldiers that marriage with the inferior Germans was absolutely forbidden, but those having illegitimate children by German women, whose husbands and boyfriends were conveniently dead or held as prisoners or slave laborers, could count on allowance money. And, according to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, the government provided these soldiers with an estimated 50 million condoms per month, and graphically instructed them as to their use. For all practical purposes, our soldiers were being told: "Teach these Germans a lesson -- and have a wonderful time!" Such were the great crusaders who brought "democracy" to Europe.
For the Americans and British, open rape was not as common as among the Soviet troops. The Soviets simply raped any female from eight years up and if a German man or woman killed a Russian soldier for anything, including rape, 50 Germans were killed for each incident, as reported in Time magazine, June 11, 1945. But for most of our boys, having that "wonderful time" depended a great deal on the "cooperation" of the German and Austrian women. From the starving and the homeless, of course, sexual "cooperation" could be bought for a few pennies or a mouthful of food. I don't think we ought to dignify this arrangement with any other than its true name of sexual slavery.
The Christian Century for December 5, 1945 reported "the American provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Beane, said that rape presents no problem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make rape unnecessary. Think that over, if you want to understand the situation in Germany." The Weekly Review of London, for October 25, 1945, described it thus: "Young girls, unattached, wander about and freely offer themselves for food or bed ... very simply, they have one thing left to sell, and they sell it ... as a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months -- or even years."
Dr. George N. Shuster, president of Hunter College, wrote in the Catholic Digest of December 1945 after a visit to the American Zone of occupation, "You have said it all when you say that Europe is now a place where woman has lost her perennial fight for decency because the indecent alone live." By official policy, the Allies created conditions in which the only German mothers who could keep their young children alive were those who themselves or whose sisters became mistresses of the occupying troops. Our own officials admittedly brought the Germans down to a total daily food intake less than that of an American breakfast, a level which leads to slow but sure death unless relieved.
According to testimony given in the United States Senate on July 17, 1945, when the colonial French troops under Eisenhower's command, presumably mostly Africans, entered the German city of Stuttgart, they herded German women into the subways and raped some two thousand of them. In Stuttgart alone, troops under Eisenhower's command raped more women in one week than troops under German command raped in all of France for four entire years. In fact, of all the major belligerents in World War II, the German troops had by far the smallest record of rape and looting. The German army's incidence of rape in all of Germany's occupied territories was even lower than that of American troops stationed on American soil!
According to the International News Service in London, January 31, 1946, when American soldier's wives were brought to Germany, they were given special authorization to wear military uniforms because "the GIs did not want their wives mistaken for Fraeuleins by other occupation troops." A writer for the New York World Telegram January 21, 1945 stated "Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers." Dr. G. Stewart, in a health statement submitted to General Eisenhower, reported that in the first six months of American occupation, venereal disease jumped to twenty times its former level in Germany.
I want you imagine an orgy of rape like this happening in your country, in your neighborhood, to your family, to your wife, your sister, your daughter. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to be totally powerless to stop it from happening, completely unable to bring the criminals to justice. And I want to ask you, were there ever any "war crimes" or "hate crimes" trials of these butchers and rapists and inciters to butchery and rape? We in America are very good at raining "smart bombs" on our adversaries, and in violently enforcing the dictates of the United Nations on faraway peoples that our press have vilified. But we have really been very insulated from the horrors of mass warfare on our own territory.
Few today remember that in the 1940s, the Allies, who even then were calling their world-government-in-the-making the "United Nations," were pursuing a policy of unconditional surrender, which meant that the Germans would be obligated to accept an occupation government whose announced intentions, the infamous and genocidal Morgenthau Plan, would have reduced Germany to medieval conditions and cut her population by enforced starvation. Go to a large library and check out Secretary Morgenthau's book, Germany Is Our Problem, Harper and Brothers, 1945. You will note the use of the term "United Nations" on the front flyleaf and in the foreword by Franklin D. Roosevelt. A prominent Jewish writer in America, Theodore Kaufman, had in 1941 written a book entitled Germany Must Perish, which advocated the extermination of all Germans by sterilization. Kaufman's book received favorable reviews in major American magazines and newspapers. Other books, such as Louis Nizer's What To Do With Germany, also contributed to this atmosphere of strident anti-German hatred. War propaganda and official policy combined to create an image of the German as sub-human and deserving of almost infinite punishment if not annihilation.
Churchill said to the Germans in January, 1945, "We Allies are no monsters. This, at least, I can say, on behalf of the United Nations, to Germany ... Peace, though based on unconditional surrender, will bring to Germany and Japan immense and immediate alleviation of suffering and agony."
Against that false claim the late Dr. Austin App proclaimed the truth: Those Allies who were "no monsters" literally raped more European women than had ever before been raped in the history of the world. They put Germany on a starvation-level diet. Under direct orders from Dwight Eisenhower, they killed more than a million German POWs. They looted 12 million people of their homes, goods, food, and even clothes and drove them from their homelands. They took one-fourth of their farmland, they took their ships and their factories and their farm implements and then told them to live by farming. They abused and starved to death more German babies than there ever were Jews in Germany. They raped and debauched hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian, and Hungarian girls and women from eight to eighty. They brought to their death five times as many Germans in one year of peace as died during five years of war. Yes, yes, of course, these men of the United Nations, these men of the New World Order are no monsters. (
more)
