"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German
women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving
as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve
men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."
The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in
huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and
medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on
shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers
and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in
horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was
almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were
freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were
idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia
appalled by such behaviour.
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going
on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans
declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were
raped by Red Army soldiers". Numerous examples of gang rape were given -"girls under 18 and old women included".
Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct "the
feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield." It appears
to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to
exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men
before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But either officers
were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too
dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine
guns.
Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion,
had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many
young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to
disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly
German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from
Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it
amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched
and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by
what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the
scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945
as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every
German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an
army of rapists."
Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from
laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems
as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But
then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the
act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims
were mutilated obscenely.
The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so
repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what
really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are
totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the
bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast
that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.
The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of
the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that
it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in
Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major
told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women
of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise,
if not downright delight."
One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological
contradictions. When gang-raped women in K"onigsberg begged their
attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men
appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women,"
they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed
to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to
liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both
personally and politically.
Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers' treatment of
women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge
for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old
as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian
Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the "bodies of the defeated enemy's
women" to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January
1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army
reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German
women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination
certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of
the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of
their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.
A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom
had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles
during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that
Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to
do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in
with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and
emotions had to be suppressed. Freud's work was banned, divorce and
adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions
against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even
to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the
clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic.
They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted
any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all
for Comrade Stalin.
Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance
and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's
attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian
writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more
primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography". All
this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda
and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.
The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the
invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just
Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian
and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht
for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our
soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an
old man, older than my father'."
The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian
attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for
German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central
committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union)
informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian
Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the
first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a
course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in
the village of Grutenberg and raped them."
In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of
Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from
Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be
great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the
city in front of everybody.
In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother
superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers
and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned
Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their
prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women,
pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped
without pity.
Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing
torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their
victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate
violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage
Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of
war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.
Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of
violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from
the victim's perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see
things from the perpetrator's point of view, especially in the later
stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of
January and February.
Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the
hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a
24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just
off the Kurf"urstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled
her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde
that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to
him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian
soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier
raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When
other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and
had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau."
Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the
evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end.
Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning
when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night
before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away
the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own
daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was
impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.
Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged
from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately
100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly
from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among
the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and
Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to
have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear
to have suffered multiple rape.
If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it
was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to
protect his mother. "The 13-year old Dieter Sahl," neighbours wrote in a
letter shortly after the event, "threw himself with flailing fists at a
Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed
in anything except getting himself shot."
After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to
save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive
starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted "the murky line that divides wartime
rape from wartime prostitution". Soon after the surrender in Berlin,
Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for
food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German
film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of "the
grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection".
The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army
officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet
authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army
officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it
was time to return to the Motherland.
Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence
proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency.
If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of
civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also
suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to
admit.
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