The rape of Berlin

The diarist and her neighbors sweat out waves of air raids, knowing all too well that the respite from American and British bombers will only come with the Soviet occupation: "Better a Russki on top," they joke nervously, "than a Yank overhead." "Our fate is rolling in from the east," the diarist laments, and early reports leave little room for optimism: "Let's be honest," one woman in the cellar ventures, "none of us is still a virgin, right?"

In a fateful gesture of incompetence and betrayal, German military authorities left oceans of alcohol in the path of the Russian army in the hope that drunkenness might impair their fighting prowess. (It is hard to say if this decision reflects a Nazi faith in Russian stereotypes or a rank ignorance of them.) "That's something only men could cook up for other men," the diarest laments archly. "If they just thought about it it for two minutes they'd realize that liquor greatly intensifies the sexual urge. If the Russians hadn't found so much alcohol all over, half as many rapes would have take place."

The first rapes in East Prussia were an eruption of pure rage, bloody revenge for Wehrmacht atrocities on Soviet soil in the march to Stalingrad; soldiers destroyed homes, raped women -- some as young as 12 -- and killed children. But revenge could not have been the sole motive, for even Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish survivors were not safe; some, as young as 16, were raped by the soldiers who set them free. By the time the first libidinous Soviet wandered into the diarist's cellar a few months later -- pointing menacingly to a teenage girl and asking "How many year?" -- German women appeared to the Red Army simply as rightful spoils of war.

Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than "concede" -- as some women put it -- to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.

The diarist, who worked before the war as a journalist and editor and traveled to "a dozen or so countries," speaks "very basic" Russian and is quickly drawn into mediating between the Germans and their unwelcome guests. After she helps to chase two would-be rapists out of the basement the first night after the Russians arrive, she peeks outside to ensure the coast is clear and the men, lying in wait, force her to the ground while those inside the shelter, ever the good Germans, bolt the door and abandon the diarist to her fate:

"He's simply torn off my garter, ripping it in two. When I struggle to come up, the second one throws himself on me as well, forcing me back on the ground with his fists and knees ... The door opens, two, three Russians come in, the last a woman in uniform. And they laugh."

Later that night she is raped again, with a kind of perverse consent: when four men set upon her in her apartment, she begs for only one to stay. Thus the chaos begins: having been raped once, sadly, is no guarantee against further assaults. "Every minute of life comes at a high price," the diarist observes. The next day she is raped again, by an older man "reeking of brandy and horses," who rips apart her underwear -- "the last untorn ones I had." She writes: "Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger's hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth."

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The proliferation of tales of individual atrocities often takes on the numb character of pornography: an endless litany of crimes against dignity, the same scenarios of cruelty replayed again and again; anyone who has pored over human rights reports soon finds that the accumulated evidence begins to dull as the brutalities mount. Yet here the opposite is true. The stories from those around her only multiply the disgust: a friend raped four times; a Jewish woman raped while her husband, shot by the Russians, bleeds to death; a woman whose three rapists smear marmalade and coffee grounds in her hair, just for kicks; the rape of "a twelve-year old girl ... who was tall for her age"; the soldiers who "took the sixteen-year-old on the chaise longue in the kitchen"; one woman raped by "at least twenty men," with "her breasts, all bruised and bitten."

The diarist's emotional register remains unfailingly calm. Her dispassionate chronicle of the disasters of war suggests a kind of stoic heroism, though she is quick to point out that her own travails have been minor by comparison: "It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything -- but it's not." The diarist resolves after her third rape to take refuge with a senior officer, "a single wolf to keep away the pack." But this gambit is not entirely successful; after her first benevolent rapist disappears, she is forced to take up with another one. Berlin's men can do little, it seems, to protect its women.

Next Page: The defeat of the male sex

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