The film Eine Frau in Berlin "A woman in Berlin ", based on the bestselling book of the same name conjures up images of one of the most brutal pages from the past: sexual violence against German women at the end of World War II.

The book, supposedly written by the Berlin journalist Marta Hillers (1911-2001) - first appeared in English in 1954, and in 2003 became a surprise bestseller. It tells of the capture of the capital of the Reich by the Red Army and unprecedented sexual exploitation and repression of German girls and women.

A book by journalist Ingeborga Jacobs of the television station ZDF called "Game" in which she has collected interviews of sexually abused in 1945 women and their contemporaries corroborates the claims.

Insulting the honor of German women. Ordinary women who had nothing to do with the Nazi government. Was it fair? And the Americans looked away.

Many of these women, continues the author, spoke for the first time about the horrific events. Because the victims of sexual violence are often silent - out of shame and fear of the reactions of their relatives and friends of men, therefore, the exact number of women subjected to violence by the Soviet military, is unknown.

Soviet soldiers were guided by the call: "to crush by force the racial arrogance of the German women! Take them as deserved trophy! "


These mass rapes were one of the greatest crimes against women throughout history. Rapists were mainly Red Army soldiers, many of them - non-white soldiers from the Asian republics of the Soviet Union.. However, unfortunately, it must be said that many rapists, were American soldiers. They certainly behaved like animals, but they had official sanction. The European women of those nations that had been allies of Nazi Germany were targeted too.

Millions of women victims raped by Russian soldiers during the last months of World War II. Anthony Beevor's book "Berlin -- The Downfall 1945" documents rape by Russian soldiers. "Beevor's conclusions are that in response to the vast scale of casualties inflicted on them by the Germans the Soviets responded in kind, and that included rape on a vast scale. It started as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944, and in many towns and villages every female aged from 10 to 80 was raped." The author "was 'shaken to the core' to discover that even their own Russian and Polish women and girls liberated from German concentration camps were also violated." Until recent years, East German women from the World War II era referred to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist."


Dr. Austin J. App (, professor and specialist in English literature at the Catholic University Skrentonskom Lasallskom University and College, which, among others, risked his career and livelihood, brought out the truth. When, in April 1946, he published his work, which is based on the article, "The Rape of Women conquered Europe "(Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe), he was a lone voice calling for justice in America.

When the Red Army moved into Germany in 1945, Berlin war a city virtually without men. Of the civilian population 27,00,000 people 20,00,000 were women. It was not surprising that fear of rape resounded through the city. Women besieged doctors, looking for information about the fastest ways to commit suicide. Various poisons were in great demand.

In Berlin Soviet soldiers broke into the charitable institution Delem House, a maternity hospital and orphanage, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and also women who had just given birth. Nobody knows exactly how many women were raped, but doctors estimate, in Berlin alone no less than 100,000 women, aged from 10 to 70 years, were raped.

British prisoners of war, returning from the British-occupied zone of Germany, "In the area around our internment camps, in Schlawe, Lauenburg, Buckow, Soviet soldiers raped every woman and girl between 12 and 60 years. Fathers and husbands who tried to protect the women were shot, and girls who resisted, were murdered.

Red Army soldiers raped at the end of World War II and in the period after the war over two million German women. Approximately ten to twelve percent of the women died of injuries, were murdered or committed suicide.

The mentality was to 'dishonour' the women of the enemy.

March 24, 1945, the Soviet army entered Danzig. A 50-year-old Danzig teacher reported that her niece, aged 15, was raped seven times, and another niece, 22 years old, was raped fifteen times. A Soviet officer told a group of women to seek refuge in the cathedral. When they gathered there, the Soviet soldiers went in and accompanied with the sounds of bells and organ, "celebrated" foul orgy through the night raping the women, some more than thirty times. A Catholic pastor in Danzig, testified: "They raped even 8-year-old girls, and killed those boys who tried to shield their mothers." His Eminence Archbishop Bernard Griffin, British (Bernard Griffin) who toured Europe, reported: "In Vienna alone they raped 100 000 women, not once but many times, including 10 year old girls and old women."

A day after the capture of Neisse, Silesia, Soviet troops raped 182 Catholic nuns. In one of the convents the Mother Superior and her assistant were shot dead, when they they tried to protect young nuns. In the journal "North America" (Nord Amerika) from 1 November 1945, one priest reported that he knew "several villages where all the women, even elderly women and girls of twelve years, were raped by Soviet soldiers for several weeks."


When rape was a spoil of war 
(Guardian)

Simon Garfield is gripped by A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary that details chillingly and graphically the final, vengeful days of the Third Reich

Reading A Woman in Berlin in one afternoon is an unnerving sensory experience: the walls close in, the air thickens, shrieks from children playing nearby adopt a sinister air. This is an all-enveloping book, a lyrical personal journal composed as the Russians entered the author's city in the closing weeks of the Second World War; it leaves a deep scar. The anonymous author's dispassionate tone adds to its cumulative power; this terrible thing happened, and then this one, and just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... It is such an awful and compelling record and so perfect in its descriptive simplicity that it is easy to see why some people were keen to dismiss it as a hoax.

The diary begins on 20 April 1945, four days after the Red Army had begun its bombardment of the city. It is also Hitler's birthday, but this is the first year that it is overlooked. Before the war, the author used to sit down to a meal with the phrase: 'For all of this, we thank the Führer', but the words are now uttered with scorn and derision.

She spends her early entries scurrying around for food and safety, dividing her time between her attic, an apartment of an unnamed widow who befriends her and a basement shelter. Rumour has taken the place of all official news and stories of distant defeats are less significant than the whispers of local potato or bread shortages.

Initially, those in the food queues run for cover from an air raid, but, within a few weeks, they merely throw a bucket over their heads and keep their place. In every queue, the hum of planes is accompanied by the horror yet to arrive: the violent sexual appetites of the Russian forces. When it comes, invasion is absolute: the central weeks of the diary are concerned primarily with rape, the author a frequent victim.

She writes of physical abuse with the same stoical endurance she brings to the rest of the moral disintegration around her: everyone steals everything, so why not? She accepts the Red Army view of rape as the natural spoils of war, the frustrated display of brute force made worse by the large supplies of alcohol recovered from German barracks. Her initial resistance gives way to a strategy: 'I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack. An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage.'

The key passage in the book occurs early on, when she concludes that among the many defeats of the war is the defeat of the male sex. 'We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless ... deep down, we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment.' The Nazi world, ruled by men, elevating male purity, has crumbled. She claims that the 'privilege' men enjoyed, of killing and dying for the fatherland, is exclusive no more; now women share that role, and she feels transformed and emboldened by it.

She is unaware of Hitler's fate in a bunker close by. She writes that she was never a supporter, but feels complicit in breathing the Nazi air. In a slightly comic aside, she regrets losing two world wars in the same manner as a football fan might regret consecutive defeats in cup finals. She expresses no remorse when the extent of Nazi atrocities emerges, just a certain grim irony. As the war ends, she notes that people are saying that millions of Jews have been cremated in concentration camps. 'On top of that, everything was supposedly carefully recorded in thick ledgers - a scrupulous accounting of death. We really are an orderly nation.'

We learn very little of the author from the book itself. She is blonde, occasionally mistaken for a Scandinavian and she has worked in publishing and journalism, travelling to Paris and the Soviet Union, picking up a few phrases that would later mark her out among the invading troops. Her full identity was revealed following her death in 2001 (she was 34 when she kept the diary), but her true name is incidental. Her account was first translated and published in the United States in 1954, but it took another five years to appear in Germany. It received a stony response; some thought it was a fabrication, and those who believed it did their best to ignore it.

One critic so completely misjudged the period in which the author wrote that he accused her of 'shameless immorality'. Within a decade, the political climate had shifted and student radicals and the women's movement circulated photocopies. On its republication in Germany in 2003, it again caused controversy, and it became a bestseller.

It is almost certain that the diaries underwent revision soon after they were composed. The amended work bears none of the hallmarks of a traditional diary; there is very little repetition and there is nothing that does not advance the narrative. I don't think this detracts from its significance, but it adds to its artfulness. There is a determinedly poetic flavour to many descriptions, for which some credit must go to the translator, Philip Boehm.

The first reader of the raw diary was a man she calls Gerd, a former lover returning from the east. The reunion is not a success, for he is the first of many to disbelieve the account of her degradation. The declaration of peace provokes little jubilation in either of them, but it does at least signal the end of the rapes and the slow return of water, electricity and ordered food supplies. She has some inkling that Berlin will be divided by the Russians and Americans, but her own future is uncertain, and it is a shame we do not learn more of her fate in an epilogue.

She has achieved her sole aim - survival - and imagines herself drifting in a universe where the sum total of tears will always stay the same. Her outlook cannot be optimistic and her world view which once applied to Germany may now be transposed elsewhere: 'Well-fed nations wallow in neuroses and excesses, while people plagued with suffering, as we are now, may rely on numbness and apathy to help see them through.'

American and British soldiers too...

Not all rapists wore a red star. John Dos Passos in "Life" on January 7, 1946, stated that "lust, whiskey and plunder - was a reward for the soldier." One soldier wrote in Time magazine (Time) on November 12, 1945: "A lot of normal American families would be horrified if they knew how utterly insensitively our boys "behaved here." An army sergeant wrote: "And our army and British army ... had their share of looting and rape ... Although these crimes are not typical for our troops, but their percentage is high enough to give our army of sinister reputation, so that we too can be called an army of tyrants."


Sociologist and criminologist Professor Bob Lilly makes unprecedented use of military records and trial transcripts to throw light on one of the overlooked consequences of the US Army's presence in Western Europe between 1942 and 1945: the rape of an estimated 14,000 civilian women in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. 

An Italian survivor of American bombing, notes that black U.S. troops stationed in Naples, with the permission of his superiors had free access to the poor, hungry and humiliated Italian women. The result of these interracial rape and sexual slavery was the production of generations of pathetic children. The legacy of brutal conquest.

According to an Associated Press report on September 12, 1945, entitled "German-American marriages were prohibited"said that the government of Franklin Roosevelt has advised its soldiers that marriage with the inferior German girls were absolutely forbidden, but those who had children out of wedlock from German women, whose husbands or suitors had dead, captured or imprisoned in concentration camps, could count on allowance. According to Time magazine dated 17 September 1945, the Government supplied the soldiers some 50 million condoms a month with picturesque illustrations of their use. In fact, our soldiers said: "teach these Germans a lesson - and spend a nice time!"

Open rape were not so prevalent by American and British troops, as it was in the Soviet army. The Soviets just raped in a row all females from eight years and above, reported Time magazine on June 11, 1945 . As for American soldiers, their "pastime" depended largely on the "cooperation" of German and Austrian women. Sexual "cooperation" could be bought for a few cents or a piece of bread from German and Austrian women. This was nothing but sexual slavery.

December 5, 1945. The Christian Sencheri "reported: "The American military police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Bean said that rape is not a problem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate or a bar of soap made rape redundant. Think about it, if you want to understand the situation in Germany. London Weekly Review "(Weekly Review) dated 25 October 1945 described it thus:" Homeless young girls openly offer themselves for food or lodging .... all very easy to sell them the only thing left, and they sell it ... . as a way to live, it can be even worse than hunger, but it postpones death for months or even years."

Dr. George N. Shuster (George N. Shuster) president of Hunter College, wrote in December 1945, in "Catholic Digest" (Catholic Digest) after a visit to the American zone of occupation: "You said it all when you say that Europe is Now the place where the woman has lost a multi-year fight for decency because the only shameless stayed alive. "The official policy of the Allies created conditions in which a mother could save her children from starving to death, only by becoming the concubines of the occupation troops.


According to testimony given in the U.S. Senate July 17, 1945, when the colonial Free French troops under the command of Eisenhower - most of them Africans - were stationed in the German city of Stuttgart, they herded German women into the subway, and raped about two thousand of them. In Stuttgart alone, troops under Eisenhower's command raped more women in one week than the German troops raped in France for the entire four years. It is a fact that of all the major belligerents in World War II, rape and looting by German troops was the lowest. The fact is that the level of rape by the German army in the occupied territories was even lower than the level of rape by the American troops stationed on home soil!

According to the London International News Service "dated 31 January 1946, when the wives of American soldiers arrived in Germany, they received special permission to wear military uniforms, because the U.S. soldiers did not want the occupying troops to mistake their wives to be froylyan [it. girls]."