The "Tomb of the Unknown Soviet soldier" in Berlin. To the victimised women of Berlin it was the "Tomb of the unknown rapist".

The "Tomb of the Unknown Soviet soldier" in Berlin. To the victimised women of Berlin it was the  "Tomb of the unknown rapist".

Outside she could hear the Russian soldiers, their voices slurred with drink, shouting for women. “Frau komm, frau komm,” (“come here woman, come here woman”) they bellowed in heavily Russian-accented German. It was a cry that thousands of women would learn to dread.

Suddenly some of the soldiers stumbled into the kitchen and a handful of old women refugees,  fearful they would be attacked, dragged Gabriele out, thrusting her towards the  Russians. She was immediately raped by every soldier. It was not the first time. The day before she had been caught by two Russians, hurled to the ground and violated.

So it went on for two weeks until she was taken to another farm and hidden from the sex-crazed soldiers. Now aged 80 Gabriele still remembers those terrible days and in particular how she was betrayed by the old women. “I despised those women, I still do,” she said. “I have no tears but I feel hatred rising up inside me.”

It is a boiling hatred that has lasted 65 years since the Allies, including fierce Soviet forces, smashed their way across Europe to victory over Nazism. But as they advanced the Russians unleashed an orgy of sickening self-gratification as soldiers of the Red Army embarked on a lengthy campaign of rape, looting, murder and depravity.

Now Gabriele Koepp has written a book of searing honesty called Why Did I Have To Be A Girl, about the rapes carried out by the Red Army as it advanced towards Berlin. The book is unprecedented, being the first time a German woman has broken the lengthy taboo by writing about being one of the estimated two million victims of rampaging Soviet soldiers.

What sickened many at the time was that the soldiers were actively encouraged to rape German women by Russian dictator Josef Stalin. When one of his commanders protested Stalin exploded: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier, who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death, has fun with some woman or takes a  trifle?” To Stalin German women were merely the “spoils of war”.

Gabriele was such a “spoil” for those 14 days when she was relentlessly and repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers, so much so that she cannot even to this day, say the very word. “My life has been some 29,200 days,” she said. “But really it was destroyed in those 14 days of the ... I cannot say the word. I was innocent when it happened.

“There is a debate going on in Germany at the moment about the so-called expellees from land that once belonged to Germany, the loss of the homeland, etc, but that is nothing to me. I live with what happened to me all the time. There are days I cannot eat because of it, even now all these years later.

“Writing of what happened hasn’t made anything easier for me but I had to do it. Who else would?” Gabriele studiously avoids detail and writes in the book of “the place of the terror”, the “gates of hell” and calls the  rapists “brutes and scoundrels”. She avoids the word “rape” and adds with some fear in her eyes: “I cannot even say that word.”

The book is a searing scrutiny of the agony that to this very day the Russian establishment continues to deny. Gabriele was one of an  estimated two million German girls and women, some as young as six and as old as 80, who were raped by Soviet soldiers.

Their justification was that Hitler’s invasion of Russia had left 26million dead and revenge would be sweet. Much of the rape and murder by the Russians took place as they approached Berlin. They fought with superhuman toughness to reach the Nazi capital, smashing their way to the city’s edges. Hitler, cowering in his bunker like a terrified rat, would soon take the coward’s exit, shooting himself through the temple.

Berliners had prayed that the Western Allies would reach their city before the Russians but General Eisenhower, the overall commander- in-chief, had decided the Russians should reach Berlin first on account of their own huge losses.

But as early as 1944 terrible reports were seeping through to Berlin from the moment the thrusting Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia.

By the time the Soviet troops entered Berlin there was terror on the streets. The rapes usually started in the evenings after the soldiers had drunk large amounts of vodka. That familiar cry of “frau komm” soon echoed around the rubble-strewn streets.

Any woman found, whatever her age, was savagely thrown to the ground and brutally attacked. Filthy drunken soldiers hunted in packs, some women were raped by as many as 20 men.

One of the worst mistakes of the defeated German authorities had been their failure to destroy Berlin’s considerable stocks of alcohol as the Red Army drew nearer. Erroneously, they thought a drunken enemy could not fight. But the Russians fought even harder, as well as having their desires inflamed.

Nor did the Soviet women soldiers do anything to stop their male comrades. One Berlin woman was being raped in succession by three men when three others arrived, one of them a woman. When the German woman appealed to her to intervene she merely laughed out loud. There were tragic attempts to resist the soldiers. A 13-year-old boy

started flailing at a soldier who was raping his mother in front of him.

When the Russian finished he turned to the boy and shot him. Although usually well-behaved, Soviet officers had little control over their men. When one girl was hauled out into the street and raped it was explained by a German neighbour that she was Jewish and had been persecuted by the Nazis. The officer’s reply was a shrug of the shoulders and the terse observation that “Frau ist frau” (“a woman is a woman”).

AS night closed in the screams of women being attacked could be heard all over the city. it is estimated that up to 10,000 of the women who were raped died, mostly from  suicide. Some could never talk about it and for the young such as Gabriele, it would prove a lifelong horror.

For many men returning home learning that their wives had been raped was traumatic. The historian Antony Beevor, in his book Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, recounts the reaction of one man on learning of the experiences which the inhabitants of one building had survived.

“You turned into shameless bitches, every one of you,” he yelled.

“I can’t bear to listen to these stories. You’ve lost all your standards!” Many marriages broke up as returning husbands considered their wives little more than damaged property.

Eventually communist leaders became deeply embarrassed by the reports of Soviet behaviour and made complaints to the Kremlin which admitted nothing and even claimed it was all Western propaganda designed to “damage the high reputation of the Red Army”. But discipline was suddenly tightened and some rapists were executed.

The Red Army war memorial in Berlin is dominated by a huge figure of a Russian soldier. There is an expression of heroic triumph on his sculptured face. in one hand he holds a child, while the other wields a sword that smashes a swastika.

But to German women of the wartime generation, including Gabriele Koepp, there is another name for that memorial: “The tomb of the unknown rapist.”



RAPE OF GERMAN WOMEN BY THE POLISH AT THE END AND AFTER THE WAR

The rape of German women by the Polish began as the Red Army began its move towards Berlin. Polish men targeted German women fleeing from East Prussia, Pomerania and territory which had began occupied by the Nazis and which the 'Big Three' had decided was to be given to Poland. Many German victims gave their stories of rape to the German Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and war Victims in the later 1940s and 1950s.

Many of the victims were women who were captured while they were fleeing and made to work in Polish farms and factories where the vulnerable women were raped by the Polish soldiers and foremen.

An eye witness account by a victim, Anna Kientoff, tells of fleeing German women accosted by hordes of Polish soldiers who selected young girls and raped them. Their mothers wailed in agony as their young daughters were dragged away for the hellish experience. The Red Army soldiers stood watching and shrugged their shoulders when the German women appealed to them to save them from the Polish soldiers and said the Polish were the masters here. They could do nothing.

Many German women were raped in Czechoslovakia during the expulsion of Germans after the war was over.

Freiwild: Das Schicksal deutscher Frauen 1945

Die Frauen in den deutschen Ostgebieten und in Berlin waren 1945, als die Rote Armee zum Endsieg über Hitlers Drittes Reich antrat, Freiwild der russischen Soldaten. Hunderttausende wurden in sowjetische Arbeitslager verschleppt. Mehr als hunderttausend Frauen und Mädchen wurden allein in Berlin vergewaltigt, insgesamt waren es annähernd zwei Millionen. Viele starben an den ihnen zugefügten Qualen, andere begingen Selbstmord. Die, die überlebten, gingen durch die Hölle, waren traumatisiert und stigmatisiert. Sie wurden gemieden, von ihren Männern verlassen, ihre Kinder galten als »Russenbälger«. Das Schicksal dieser Frauen wurde zu einem der großen Tabus der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft - in Ost und West. Erst der 2003 erschienene Bestseller »Eine Frau in Berlin«, der ergreifende Erlebnisbericht einer Berliner Journalistin aus dem Jahre 1945, brachte es an die Öffentlichkeit. Anlässlich der Verfilmung dieses Buches - mit Nina Hoss in der Hauptrolle – bereitet die TV-Journalistin Ingeborg Jacobs für das ZDF eine Dokumentation zum Thema vor. Das begleitende Buch stellt die Ergebnisse ihrer umfangreichen Recherchen vor. Es stützt sich maßgeblich auf die zahlreichen Interviews, die die Autorin mit betroffenen Frauen geführt hat und die sie mit Sensibilität und erzählerischer Kraft in das zeitgeschichtliche Umfeld einbettet. So entsteht erstmals ein Gesamtbild jenes schrecklichen Geschehens, das die Deutschen angesichts der Last ihrer Kriegsschuld tief verdrängt haben.

One of the worst crimes in the Second World War included the mass rape of German women and girls by Soviet soldiers in 1944/45. Many of these women and girls were not once but  sexually abused many times. Neither children nor old women were spared. Reliable estimates suggest that around two million women and girls were victims of those rapes. The enormity of these crimes and the human suffering caused by it and experienced for decades, has not received adequate public attention. Only in recent times, these events are mentioned frequently, but almost always as part of a description of flight, expulsion and forced labor. In contrast, the present book deals exclusively with the rape and, among other things, the questions of how and why it has come to these excesses, why resistance was futile, and what happened to the children who were victims or "only" witness of sexual violence were . 

Zu den schlimmsten Verbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg gehören die Massenvergewaltigungen deutscher Frauen und Mädchen durch sowjetische Soldaten 1944/45. Viele dieser Frauen und Mädchen wurden nicht ein Mal, sondern viele Male sexuell mißbraucht. Weder Kinder noch Greisinnen blieben verschont. Verläßlichen Schätzungen zufolge wurden rund zwei Millionen Frauen und Mädchen Opfer jener Vergewaltigungen. Das ungeheure Ausmaß dieser Verbrechen und der durch sie verursachten menschlichen Leiden hat jahrzehntelang keine angemessene öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Erst in neuerer Zeit werden diese Ereignisse häufiger erwähnt, allerdings fast immer nur als Teil einer Schilderung von Flucht, Vertreibung und Zwangsarbeit. Demgegenüber befasst sich das vorliegende Buch ausschließlich mit den Vergewaltigungen und hier unter anderem mit den Fragen, wie und warum es zu diesen Exzessen gekommen ist, warum Widerstand zwecklos war und was mit den Kindern geschah, die Opfer oder „nur“ Zeuge der sexuellen Gewalttaten waren. Erlebnisberichte von Opfern und Tätern sind eine wesentliche, weil authentische Grundlage dieser Darstellung.

"[Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones] makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between sexual violence and periods of conflict."

Tracing sexual violence in Europes twentieth century from the Armenian genocide to Auschwitz and Algeria to Bosnia, this pathbreaking volume expands military history to include the realm of sexuality. Examining both stories of consensual romance and of intimate brutality, it also contributes significant new insights to the history of sexuality.