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A Soviet soldier wrote to a friend about German women. ‘They do not speak a word of Russian, but that makes it easier. You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan [pistol] and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.’ In one place, the bodies of a group of raped and mutilated women were found, each with a bottle stuffed up her vagina. Vasily Grossman was dismayed to see that the men of the Red Army made no distinction among their victims: ‘Horrifying things are happening to German women … Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now.’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, serving with Rokossovsky as a gunner officer, wrote an ironically indulgent poem about what he witnessed as his people sealed their victory:

The conquerors of Europe swarm,

Russians scurrying everywhere.

Vacuum cleaners, wine, and candles,

Skirts and picture frames, and pipes

Brooches and medallions, blouses, buckles

Typewriters (not of a Russian type)

Rings of sausages and cheeses.

A moment later the cry of a girl,

Somewhere from behind a wall,

‘I’m not a German. I’m not a German.

No! I’m – Polish. I’m a Pole.’

Grabbing what comes handy, those

Like-minded lads get in and start –

And lo, what heart

Could well oppose?

When the former Jewish hospital at Wedding was overrun on 24 April, Russian soldiers found eight hundred Jews, most in desperate physical condition, whom the Nazi killing-machine had miraculously overlooked. A disbelieving Soviet soldier said in broken German, ‘Nichts Juden. Juden kaput.’ The Russians raped the female inmates anyway: ‘Frau ist Frau.’ A further 1,400 Berlin Jews emerged from hiding after the liberation, last survivors of a once-great community. There were also Jews in the Red Army. One terrified German family found themselves confronted by a Soviet commissar who said, ‘I am a Russian, a communist and a Jew … My father and mother were murdered by the SS because they were Jews. My wife and two children are missing. My home is in ruins. And what has happened to me has happened to millions in Russia. Germany has murdered, raped, plundered and destroyed … What do you think we want to do, now that we have defeated German armies?’

He turned on the eldest son of the family, demanding, ‘Stand up. How old are you?’ The boy answered, ‘Twelve.’ The Russian said, ‘About as old as my son would be today. The SS criminals took him from me.’ He drew his pistol and aimed it at the boy, provoking frenzied consternation and pleas for mercy from the parents. Finally the Russian said, ‘No, no, no, ladies and gentlemen. I will not shoot. But you must admit, I have enough reasons to do so. There is so much that screams for revenge.’ This encounter ended without bloodshed, because the Russian protagonist was unusually enlightened. Many other such meetings climaxed in screams, horrors, sobbing women, wrecked homes, mutilated bodies.

Stalin was untroubled by the behaviour of his soldiers towards the Germans – or to their supposedly liberated slaves. The Soviets saw no shame, such as burdens Western societies, about the concept of revenge. The war had been fought chiefly on Russian soil. The Russian people had endured sufferings incomparably greater than those of the Americans and British. As conquerors, the Germans had behaved barbarously, their conduct rendered the more base because they spoke so much of honour, and professed adherence to civilised values. Now the Soviet Union exacted a terrible punishment. The German nation had brought misery on the world, and in 1945 it paid. The price of having started and lost a war against a tyranny as ruthless as Stalin’s was that vengeance was exacted on terms almost as merciless as those Hitler’s minions had imposed on Europe since 1939.

In those days there were tens of thousands of suicides throughout eastern Germany. Liselotte Grunauer, a sixteen-year-old, recorded in her diary: ‘The pastor shot himself and his wife and daughter … Mrs H. shot her two sons and herself and slit her daughter