The rape of Berlin

An anonymous diary from 1945 reminds us of the horrific crimes Soviet liberators committed against millions of German women.

By Jonathan Shainin

Aug 18, 2005 | "The essence of a nation," the French historian Ernest Renan said in 1882, is that its citizens have much in common, but "that they have forgotten many things." The Germans, it could be said, have forgotten things that most nations never knew. No single country has struggled so openly to reckon with its history, and the process has not been a short one. Germany has spent decades coming to terms with the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazi regime, but the penumbra of shame around these crimes also obscured the suffering visited on German civilians, 600,000 of whom were killed by Allied firebombing of cities like Dresden and Hamburg.

The publication of "A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City," then, shines considerable light on a hidden history of the war. The writer, an anonymous 34-year-old journalist who recorded in her diary the events of the fall of Berlin in the spring of 1945, does not fashion herself a victim. But her diary, released by a German publisher for the first time 60 years after the war, meets the challenge that novelist W.G. Sebald put to Germans in his lectures on "Air War and Literature": "to try recording what [they] actually saw as plainly as possible." In unsparing prose that brooks no pity and assigns no blame, the diarist calmly describes the disintegration of the German capital. Her diary begins less than a week before the Soviets entered the city, hastily scrawled by candlelight in a basement shelter: "My fingers are shaking as I write this."

What makes the book an essential document is its frank and unself-conscious record of the physical and moral devastation that accompanied the war. Sebald extols the virtue of "authentic documents, before which all fiction pales," and what is most remarkable about "A Woman in Berlin" is what is most ordinary -- or rather, the desperate measures rendered ordinary in a city under occupation. The diarist spends her days scrounging for coal, picking nettles for food, and searching out what little clean water may still be had. Berliners queue for pathetic rations in the streets onto which the Russians fired almost 2 million shells in the last two weeks of the war; when a mortar explodes outside a local meat market, killing three, the women "use their sleeves to wipe the blood off their meat coupons" and line up all over again.

Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Berlin had the smallest proportion of National Socialist voters of any German city. By the time the Red Army arrived, most Berliners, with the exception of the deluded Nazi faithful, appeared all too eager to shed the enthusiasm they had since developed for Adolf Hitler, whom they had taken to calling "that man" -- a turn in public opinion that seems not to have begun in earnest until long after it was apparent the war would be lost. Many have repurposed Nazi literature into fuel; if people keep burning it, the diarist quips, "Mein Kampf will go back to being a rare book, a collector's item." The discarded mottos of Nazi propaganda are no more than grist for gallows humor: "For all this," people incant, turning around a wartime mantra, "we thank the Fuhrer."

What little strength the regime still possessed was devoted to upholding the Nazi commitment to senseless brutality: "If the war is lost, the people will also be lost," Hitler explained to Albert Speer in March 1945. "It is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival." In Berlin, the Nazis pressed prisoners of war into constructing useless barricades instead of building water pumps; 80,000 men were sent to their deaths on the western front in the failed Ardennes offensive while the eastern front crumbled. Concentration camps in the path of advancing troops were evacuated, with prisoners marched to their deaths or simply executed. The Nazi program of civil defense consisted of making the meaningless declaration that a city was a "Fortress," and then attempting to terrify its inhabitants with tales of "Asiatic" barbarity. The Nazis rushed newsreel cameras to East Prussia, the site of the earliest Soviet atrocities, solely to terrify the remaining Germans into holding their ground. "Are they supposed to spur the men of Berlin to protect and defend us women?" the diarist wonders skeptically; "their only effect is to send thousands more helpless women and children running out of town."

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