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By Root 834 0

The Imperial Japanese Army had been behaving in similar fashion in China since 1937. Napoleon’s soldiers likewise shamed the name of France during their campaign in Spain a century and a half before. But nothing on the scale of the Soviet terror had been seen in Europe since the seventeenth century. “It was bitter to learn that Goebbels’s propaganda had been factual and accurate,” wrote the Danish journalist Paul von Stemann. “It was not that a sex-starved Russian soldier forced himself upon a girl who took his fancy. It was a destructive, hateful and wholesale act of vengeance. Age or looks were irrelevant. The grandmother was no safer than the granddaughter, the ugly and filthy no more than the fresh and attractive.” Von Stemann protested to a Soviet officer about the rapes he witnessed all around him. “Keep out of this,” the soldier told him sternly. “Just leave it alone. It has nothing to do with you.” Most Russians, then and later, excused what took place. Valentin Krulik shrugged: “People had so much hatred to work off.”

Ursula Siwik, wife of Hans who was once among Hitler’s bodyguard, was raped three times by Russian soldiers in Berlin. Siwik, outraged, said without any hint of irony: “No German soldier would have behaved as they did.” Waltraut Ptack, a thirteen-year-old who had escaped with her mother, brother and sister from East Prussia, was huddled with her family in an abandoned seaside villa in Pomerania when the Red Army came. They heard women screaming in nearby houses, then two Russians kicked open their own door. One spoke German. “Hitler kaputt!” he said. Then he began to harangue the cringing little group about Germany’s crimes in Russia. Waltraut said: “It was so awful having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t us who had done these things.” The Russians raped her mother.

The family lived in unbroken fear through the weeks that followed. They were conscripted to work as forced labourers on a farm. The women never undressed, nor went anywhere alone. Once, they were all herded into a barn, and assumed that they were going to be shot. Instead, as part of a clumsy programme of de-Nazification, they were compelled to watch a Soviet propaganda film with Hitler and his colleagues played by comic actors: “We were meant to laugh, to see how ridiculous they were, but we simply sat frozen with fear.”

Nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig sat in a cellar with her mother and some twenty other women in a village just outside Berlin through the long, terrifying days of the battle. When at last the shooting died, they emerged thankfully from their refuge, to find Russians outside, eagerly shaking hands and saying: “War finished!” Then soldiers began to set up their cry of “Uri! Uri!” The German women were bemused, and at first disbelieving. Then they bowed to the inevitable, and surrendered their watches and jewellery. The Russians’ mood became visibly less inhibited and more dangerous. The German woman retreated to their cellar. The older ones urged the younger to dirty their faces and even to smear them with egg yolk. Then a Russian officer entered, and pointed to several Germans in succession: “You! And you! And you!” Helga’s mother pleaded with the Russian: “Leave my daughter. Take me.” She was ignored. The girl was a virgin, for although she and her boyfriend Wolfgang had often passionately kissed they had never made love. Now, she unwillingly obeyed the Russian’s instructions to follow him upstairs, strip and get on the bed. “I thought I had no choice.”

The women in their hamlet had supposed that they would be safe if they stuck together. Discovering their mistake, one family killed themselves. By contrast, a committed Nazi among the women now sought favour by offering herself to the conquerors. Helga observed of those days: “What happened in the huge city of Berlin was somehow anonymous. But in our little community, everything seemed somehow so horribly personal.” After the first Russian incursion, Helga and her mother hid in the attic of a house for ten days. “Red