Authors: Roger Moorhouse
The passion of Red Army soldiers for Berlin’s women would also
become legendary. Estimates of the number of Berlin women who
were raped by Soviet soldiers in 1945 vary widely, but the capital’s
hospitals put the total at between 95,000 and 130,000.85 The true figure
is undoubtedly much greater. Few were overlooked: pre-pubescent
girls, nuns, grandmothers, pregnant women and nursing mothers were
subjected to the campaign of rapes. Even fugitive Jews and liberated
forced labourers received the same treatment. As one Soviet war
reporter recalled, the Red Army was ‘an army of rapists’.86
The soldiers were generally straightforward in their methods.
Though a few employed a nominal ‘courtship’, crude flirting or the
promise of some sort of ‘quid pro quo’, in the vast majority of cases
the soldiers simply exercised their overwhelming power. The most
perilous time for Berlin women was after dark, by which time the
soldiers were often drunk and on the rampage. ‘Throughout the night’,
one woman wrote,
we huddled together in mortal fear . . . a horde of Soviet soldiers
returned and stormed into our apartment house. Then we heard what
sounded like a terrible orgy with women screaming for help, many
shrieking at the same time. The racket gave me goosebumps. Some of
the Soviets tramped through our garden and banged their rifle butts
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on our doors in an attempt to break in. Thank goodness our sturdy
doors withstood their efforts. Gripped in fear, we sat in stunned silence,
hoping to give the impression that this was a vacant house . . . Our
nerves were in shreds.87
When they managed to gain entry to a building, the soldiers would
select their victims. Younger women were favoured, especially those
with blond hair. Plumper women, too, were often chosen, as they were
seen as healthier than their slimmer counterparts. One eyewitness
recalled the scene when a Soviet soldier sneaked into her cellar:
Staggering from one support beam to the next he shines his torch on
the faces, some forty people all together; pausing each time he comes
to a woman, letting the pool of light flicker for several seconds on her
face.
The basement freezes. Everyone seems petrified. No one moves, no
one says a word. You can hear the forced breathing. The spotlight stops
on eighteen-year-old Stinchen resting in a reclining chair, her head in
a dazzlingly white bandage. ‘How many year?’ Ivan asks, in German,
his voice full of threat.
No one answers. The girl lies there as if made of stone. The Russian
repeats his question, now roaring with rage: ‘How many year?’88
Such an interrogation would be followed by the words ‘
Frau, komm
’
– ‘woman, come’ – with which the grim selection was finally made.
Occasionally, older women would step in to volunteer themselves,
thereby protecting the younger victims. However, given the sheer
numbers of Soviet soldiers roaming its streets, any reprieve thus gained
tended to be temporary at best.
In many instances, the selection of the victims resembled a wild
hunt for human prey. Often soldiers would return at night to search
buildings where they had seen women during the day. Some young
women would spend hours in hiding, while the building was ransacked
by soldiers looking for them; one cough or creaky floorboard would
have betrayed them.89 Gerda Peters was hidden by her mother beneath
a table in her apartment in Neukölln, while Soviet soldiers passed so
close that she ‘could have reached out and touched their boots’. Though
Gerda remained undiscovered, her friend was not so fortunate and
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berlin at war
was dragged into the next room. Paralysed by fear, Gerda listened as
the girl screamed out her name, over and over.90
Already injured by crossfire, Gisela Stange, a sixteen-year-old auxil-
iary nurse, found herself cornered by a Soviet soldier and thrown to
the ground in an abandoned building. Guessing her attacker’s inten-
tions, she fought back, kicking the soldier in the groin with all her
might:
he screamed, and another soldier came to help him and pinned me
down. I thought my last moments had come. I was kicked repeatedly
in the face and noticed teeth falling from my mouth along with the
blood. Luckily, an officer heard the tumult and brought it all to an end
. . . Numerous teeth were missing, and some were broken, but I just
thought: ‘I have at least preserved my honour.’91
Those who fell into the soldiers’ grasp were at risk not only of
losing their ‘honour’; those that dared to resist could be killed. In
one instance a Berlin lawyer was shot for trying to protect his Jewish
wife from Red Army soldiers. As he lay dying, he witnessed her
being gang-raped.92 Humiliation, abuse and physical violence were
also commonplace. After one young girl had been raped by three
Russian soldiers, they rummaged through the kitchen of her apart-
ment, and when they found marmalade and coffee substitute, they
smeared it into their victim’s hair.93
Not all rapes were accompanied by violence and humiliation,
however. As one eyewitness recalled, her assailants were sometimes
far from the heartless monsters that one might have imagined. Some
were young and shy, and liked to lie back afterwards and chat; others
promised to return with food, or apologised in advance as it had been
a long time since they had been with a woman.94
Occasionally, too, there was a crude
quid pro quo
. In one instance,
Soviet soldiers selected young women from a queue outside a bakery,
then disappeared with them inside the building. As an eyewitness
recalled: ‘After a while, the door would open again and the girl would
come out carrying several loaves of free bread, and everyone knew
why she had been so nicely rewarded.’95 This was an aspect that was
also identified by an Australian war correspondent, who arrived in the
city later that summer. His interviews with Berliners revealed a curious
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world in which Soviet soldiers would arrive in the evening as rapists,
but would often return the following morning to apologise, bring food
and ask their victims not to report them. As one woman said of them,
‘they were childish really’.96
Nonetheless, many Berliners devised methods to avoid unwanted
attention. Some deduced that Soviet soldiers – whether out of fear of
ambush or simple laziness – disliked climbing up to the higher floors
of apartment blocks in their search for human booty.97 Therefore, the
rumour soon spread in the capital that the best place to avoid them
was on the upper floors or attics. Those best equipped had a loft hiding
place with a ladder that could be pulled up out of sight of marauding
troops. Others went further: Rosa Hengst recalled clambering across
the roofs in a bid to avoid Soviet patrols.98
Those in Dorothea von Schwanenflügel’s cellar decided to decorate
their refuge so as to make it resemble a Red Cross nursing station,
‘complete with bandages, cotton wool in empty jam glasses, and face
cream jars labelled as salves and ointments’. In addition, the women
adopted the widespread practice of making themselves as unattractive
as possible, ‘smearing our faces with coal dust and covering our heads
with old rags, our make-up for the Ivan’.99 Some feigned illness – scarlet
fever was a favourite – while younger girls cut their hair, wore trousers
and pretended to be boys.100 Nineteen-year-old Margot Hähnemann was
even more cunning. After a couple of lucky escapes from Soviet soldiers,
she was left as the only young woman in her cellar. ‘In order to avoid
further attacks’, she wrote, ‘I would occasionally pretend I was an idiot.
I plaited my hair, rolled my eyes, pulled a face, dribbled and blathered
to myself. It really scared the soldiers off.’101
The majority were not so fortunate or inventive, however, and for
them the experience was both terrifying and humiliating. As one victim
wrote in the aftermath of her ordeal: ‘I feel so dirty, I don’t want to
touch anything, least of all my own skin. What I’d give for a bath or
at least some decent soap and plenty of water . . . Where will this end?
What will become of us?’102 Another described how a twenty-five-year-
old girl from her group who was raped ‘became a stranger to herself
and to us. In one afternoon she had turned into an old woman, with
grey skin, drab hair and an absent mind.’103
It is thought that around 10 per cent of those raped committed suicide.
Countless others would carry the consequences for the remainder of
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their lives: the shame, the failed marriages and the fear of intimacy.
For some, the stigma would be even harder to shake off. It has been
estimated that 5 per cent of children born in Berlin in 1946 were so-
called
Russenkinder
– the products of rape between German civilians
and Soviet soldiers.104 Already damaged by their experience of the war
and their complicity in the Nazi regime, many Berliners found these
additional humiliations difficult to take. ‘I must repress a lot’, one of
them recalled, ‘in order, to some extent, to be able to live.’105
In the end, what many Berliners best recalled was the sudden irrup-
tion of silence. After months of often cacophonous noise – from the
last Allied bombing raids to the arrival of the Soviets – the German
capital was suddenly and strangely quiet. ‘No shooting from the
“Stalinorgans”,’ Gisela Stange recalled, ‘no air raid sirens and bombs
falling, no machine gun fire and a calm that I had longed for for years.
It was so unusual that it was almost disturbing.’106
On the morning of 2 May 1945, this new-found silence was broken
by an announcement from General Weidling, the commander of the
Berlin garrison, who informed the city of the ceasefire:
On 30 April 1945 the Führer committed suicide and in so doing deserted
everybody who was loyal to him. You, German soldiers, were loyal to
the Führer and were prepared to continue the battle for Berlin, although
ammunition was in short supply and further resistance was pointless.
I hereby declare an immediate cease-fire. Each hour you continue
fighting prolongs the suffering of the people of Berlin and of our
wounded. In agreement with the supreme command of the Soviet
troops I order you to stop fighting immediately.107
The news spread slowly that morning. After the radio broadcasters
had all left the airwaves, it had to be transmitted by word of mouth
and by trucks mounted with loudspeakers. But gradually and
cautiously, Berliners emerged out of their cellars, blinking into the
light of a rain-sodden but peaceful day. Some were overcome with
emotion. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich was simply delighted to have survived
the war: ‘Laughing and crying . . . for a long time we can’t say anything
at all, and when we finally do, it’s just silly blubbering. They all appear,
Frank, Dagmar, Joe, Heike and Fabian. They beam and act as if they
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are drunk. “Why, you did it! Why, you’re alive!” Yes, we did it – life
and liberty are ours.’108
Others were rather more circumspect, relieved that the war had
ended, but still mindful that the perils that they faced were far from
over. ‘Things are quiet’, one witness wrote that morning, ‘we stand
there in the pouring rain, speaking quietly and saying little . . . we
wait.’109 Berliners asked themselves what would become of the city’s
menfolk, now surrendering in their droves, as ordered? What, too,
they wondered, would become of them, the city’s ordinary civilians?
A few were not minded to wait to find out. On the very morning
of the German ceasefire, Dieter Borkowski’s group, which had previ-
ously occupied the flak tower at Friedrichshain, was ordered to attempt
to break out towards the north. Emerging into the cool of a grey
dawn, he paused a moment: ‘I stood as though paralysed. “Is this
the end?” . . . It was completely quiet. Is that a good sign or a bad
sign? . . . It was a strange silence, hardly anyone dared to whisper.
An eerie tension hung over our march into the unknown.’110
What Berliners were waking up to that morning was not peace; it
was the absence of war. For all the relief that the fighting was finally
over, they were also profoundly uncertain, with little idea of what to
expect from their new overlords, and little concept of what new horrors
might await them. ‘Was it the end of one nightmare’, one diarist asked,
‘or just the beginning of another one?’111
Epilogue: Hope
With the signature of the unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, peace
finally returned to the German capital and, paradoxically, the precious
silence of previous days was abruptly shattered by the sounds of Soviet
soldiers celebrating. At the city’s landmarks, such as the Brandenburg
Gate or the Reichstag, crowds of Red Army men gathered to drink,
carouse and fire their weapons into the air. For Berlin’s hard-pressed