The Most Cruel Incident Against German Women After Second World War

 German women were raped by all armies at the end of the second world war From the archive, 17 June 1955: Berlin woman's memoir of mass rape reviewed

German women were raped by all armies at the end of the second world war

From the archive, 17 June 1955: Berlin woman's memoir of mass rape reviewed

Controversial book suggests many Berlin women were raped by drunken Red Army soldiers during the second world war

Observer, 19 June 2005: When rape was a spoil of war

Two years after the end of the war Berlin still smelled of death. Each street contained dozens of ruins and every ruin, especially after rain had fallen and there was still a dampness in the air, retained the same sickly smell. 

It may have been, as some Germans honestly believed, corpses buried beneath them, or it may have been the state of the drains. It may simply have been the projection of a short but stormy past into the greyness of that particularly uninviting present.

A Woman in Berlin (Secker and Warburg, pp. 284, 15s) tells the story of a single German woman of middle-class family, living in the Neu-Kölln district of Berlin. This district has nothing much in common - as the publishers suggest - with Bloomsbury or Bayswater. 

It is the Shepherd’s Bush of Berlin, an urban area lacking in all sense of individuality. Perhaps this makes the story of the anonymous author all the more horrifying. 

Her book is a fully documented account of incessant and revolting rape, perpetrated by drunken Soviet soldiers on many German women they came across.

German women were raped by all armies at the end of the Second World War

Could one of the reasons why so many Russians are offended by the way historians like Antony Beevor (Denial of mass rapes just a Soviet propaganda myth, 6 August) portray the crimes committed against women by Red Army soldiers in Germany at the end of the second world war be the failure of western historians to write about the similar crimes committed by the US, French and British armies of occupation? 

In her recent book When the Soldiers Came, the German historian Miriam Gebhardt takes a close look at the rape of German women by all four victorious powers at the end of the war.

She claims members of the US military alone raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany gained sovereignty in 1955, with most of these sexual assaults taking place in the months following the defeat of the Nazis. She also compares the rapes committed by US soldiers and the Red Army. 

She claims similar motives were at work. Soldiers were horrified by the scale of the crimes committed by the Nazis and failed to distinguish between the regime and ordinary Germans. Perhaps it’s not only Russia which is deluding itself about these crimes committed against women?