Exorcising Hitler (12 page)

How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens and apple trees. And they invaded us . . . For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them.
³

Another Russian, an officer this time, described being billeted in April 1945 in a block of flats outside Berlin:

Each small flat is comfortably furnished. The larders are stocked with home-cured meat, preserved fruit, strawberry jam. The deeper we penetrate into Germany the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere . . . I’d just love to smash my fist into all those neat rows of tins and bottles.
⁴

Rape may or may not have been the Russian soldiers’ main intent at Nemmersdorf. By the time, three months later, that the Red Army moved into German territory finally and definitively, there could be no doubt that a hate-fuelled spoliation of German bodies as well as property had become an obsessive preoccupation of the invaders.

Perhaps Russian soldiers saw enemy women as a form of German property. These were the women who – so their own prejudices and their government’s propaganda told them – had sat safe at home while the men of the Wehrmacht ravaged Belarus, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the plains before Moscow; who had received those parcels of exotic good things from conquered Russia while the wives, sisters and daughters of the men who now entered Germany as victors were starved and massacred – and, yes, raped, too. Although rape by German soldiers was not nearly as systematic (the Nazi regime disapproved of sexual intercourse with Russian women on racial grounds), it – and its marginally more respectable cousin, sexual exploitation – was certainly not unknown.

In fact, millions of by no means pampered German women had already suffered bombing, bereavement and loss of their homes. However, this was not, perhaps understandably, how the bitter and infuriated men of the Red Army saw it.

Not that the Red Army’s record in other countries was spotless. In September 1944 the Bulgarian Communist Party was constrained to address a complaint to the Soviet General Staff (the
Stavka
), calling for it to ‘take measures to end occurrences of banditry, looting, and rape, strictly punishing guilty persons’.
⁵

Bulgaria had unwisely allied itself with the Axis early in the war. The same was true of Hungary, and in February 1945 the fall of Budapest to the Soviets was followed by ghastly scenes of mass rape and sexual violence on a scale unseen since the Thirty Years War. However, even though Czechoslovakia was considered a friendly country with close cultural and linguistic links to Russia, and had suffered grievously under German occupation for more than six years, even there, despite clear orders to avoid actions that could alienate the population, the advancing Soviet troops caused problems.

In March 1945, Stalin himself was forced to warn a Czechoslovak delegation, in his sinister, fake-jocular way:

The fact is that there are now 12 million people in the Red Army. They are far from being angels. They have been coarsened by war. Many of them have gone 2,000 kilometres from Stalingrad to the middle of Czechoslovakia. On their way they have seen much sorrow and many terrible things. So do not be surprised if some of our people do not behave as they should in your country. We know that some of our soldiers with a low level of political consciousness are pestering and abusing girls and women, are behaving badly. Let our Czechoslovakian friends know that now, so that the attraction of our Red Army does not turn into disappointment.
⁶

All the same, there can be no doubt that, once in Germany, it all got immeasurably worse. Subjected to crushing, brutalising discipline – initially aimed at stiffening defensive resolve during the calamitous months following the German invasion in June 1941 – the Red Army continued to suffer near-catastrophic losses even as the war turned around and its troops began to advance inexorably towards the heartland of the loathed and despised German empire. They had indeed, as their leader said, seen and undergone terrible things.

At the same time, the drumbeat of official Soviet propaganda became ever louder, more jarring and more menacing. No more ‘proletarian internationalism’. Increasingly, its message was one of visceral, xenophobic hatred for Germany and all things German. Soldiers were encouraged to keep a ‘book of revenge’ that would remind them of the need to repay the Germans for their crimes. Most notoriously, the brilliant journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, read by millions of soldiers and civilians, kept up a litany of highly literate hate-speak:

If you have not killed a German a day, you have wasted that day . . . If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing funnier for us than a pile of German corpses.
⁷

On the eve of the crossing into East Prussia, the army’s Main Political Administration told the troops: ‘On German soil there is only one master – the Soviet soldier . . . he is both the judge and the punisher for the torments of his fathers and mothers, for the destroyed cities and villages . . .’ Road signs put up by the advancing army instructed the following units: ‘Soldier: You are in Germany, take revenge on the Hitlerites!’
⁸

All these factors combined to turn the advance of the Red Army in early 1945 into a thing of ominous horror. The scale of the mass rape, murder and destruction in Germany’s eastern provinces during the first months of 1945 was truly appalling. It is quite clear that from the moment the Red Army reached German soil, everything, living or inanimate, was considered fair game. Many uneducated Russian soldiers saw not just improbably neat, prosperous villages and towns, but also insultingly cosseted women and girls, surrounded by items of finery that may well – as their propagandists encouraged them to believe – have been looted from Russian homes during the occupation, perhaps even torn from the quivering, half-starved backs of their own mothers and sisters.

The Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer with the Red Army in East Prussia in early 1945, chronicled that season of terror and destruction in his epic poem
Prussian Nights
:

Zweiundzwanzig, Höringstrasse

It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.

A moaning by the walls half muffled:

The mother’s wounded, still alive.

The little daughter’s on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman.

A woman turned into a corpse . . .
⁹

Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to a labour camp in early 1945 after critical remarks about Stalin’s leadership qualities were found in his mail home. Likewise, Captain Lev Kopelev, hitherto an enthusiastic communist and commander of a front-line propaganda unit, unwisely intervened to dissuade a group of soldiers intent on the rape of German women and the looting of their homes. He was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for crimes dubbed ‘bourgeois humanism’ and ‘compassion towards the enemy’.
¹⁰

So, all over the area that was rapidly falling to the Red Army, women were raped and murdered, houses looted and destroyed. Just as Wehrmacht officers had almost never intervened to prevent the brutalities exercised by the German forces in Russia, so it was fairly rare that fastidious men in positions of authority, such as Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev, became involved.

The accounts of the rapes, each an unspeakable horror for individual German women and families, blur into each other. In one small village in Pomerania, which fell in the first weeks of 1945, there was an added curse that would also repeat itself across the conquered lands. Alcohol. The area concerned made its main living from potato growing, with a sideline in distilling schnapps from the crop surplus. When the Soviets took the village, they ordered all the remaining civilian inhabitants from their homes and locked them in the church. Having discovered the local distillery, the Russian soldiers proceeded to drink heavily, after which they laid waste to the village. Finally, they came back to the church, for the women and girls.

The then fifteen-year-old Wanda Schultz, a local farmer’s daughter, described her experience many years later:

It was the worst night of my life, that one I spent then. In the church we were all raped, over and over. Then they dragged me into the main village, where the same thing happened. I thought, it is all over for me . . . Strangely, I had no fear. As a fifteen-year-old, I just thought: ‘Now they’ll shoot me, because they can’t let me go back to my parents in this condition.’ But they took me back to the church.
¹¹

Astonishingly, the following morning there was a savage domesticity to the scene. The Russians summoned their German prisoners and ordered chickens to be rounded up and cooked for them.

A little later, Wanda Schultz and her father ventured out to the family farm on the edge of the village. There they found more Russian soldiers, attacking the pigs with knives and stealing horses to hitch to their wagons full of loot. As dairy farmers will – indeed, must – father and daughter tried to milk the cows, but this was interrupted by new arrivals, who announced their intention to start violating Wanda all over again. She and her father were lucky that an appeal to the men’s officer for protection was successful this time, but they took no further chances and meekly made their way back to join the others in the doubtful sanctuary of the church. A few days later they were transferred to the larger village of Polnow.

All were eventually interrogated by the NKVD (Soviet Commissariat for State Security), and many forced to sign statements, often in Russian with no translation. Wanda was one of those deported to a Russian labour camp, a fate inflicted on almost three-quarters of a million Germans from the occupied areas and which she blamed on her membership of the BDM. Under NKVD Order Number 0016, ‘Measures for the purging of areas in the rear of the fighting Red Army of enemy elements’, membership not just of the National Socialist Party but also of any Nazi youth organisations could be grounds for deportation.

This was the first, most violent, chaotic and crude beginning in the grand scheme of cleansing the German population of Nazism. Russian-style.

Almost a half of those delivered into the clutches of the NKVD’s notorious GUPVI (Main Administration for Prisoners-of-War and Internees’ Affairs) were reckoned to have died of mistreatment, disease (most commonly typhus) or overwork. Fortunately Wanda was not among them, though she was transported for many hundreds of miles in appalling conditions and witnessed the deaths of many girls she had known all her life. After more than four years’ hard labour, first on a collective farm attached to a mining camp in the Urals, then down a coal mine, in winter working at temperatures as low as minus 40ºC, she was finally released.

Shortly before Christmas 1949, Wanda arrived in West Germany, where she was eventually reunited with her family. They had been expelled from Pomerania in 1946 and found a home, albeit a tiny one in a prefabricated barracks, in the town of Rendsburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, on the south bank of the Kiel Canal. When Wanda arrived at the station and saw her parents again for the first time in five years, she cried for two hours, uninterrupted, oblivious of her surroundings.

Altogether it is reckoned that around 1.9 million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers in the final months of the war and those immediately following the peace.
¹²
For a while, in the early summer of 1945, the instance of rape actually got worse again – a fact blamed on older, more educated men being released back to Russia early in order to assist with post-war reconstruction, leaving behind in Germany mainly younger men, many recruited late in the war from areas such as Belarus and the Ukraine, occupied for years by the Wehrmacht. Men from such regions had been brutalised by their experiences of occupation and imbued with a deep loathing of everything German.
¹³

Not all Soviet soldiers behaved in such a wild and undisciplined way, however. Repeatedly there are stories of Russians who behaved kindly, or at least correctly. It was said that the elite front-line troops were not so bad; worse were the second and third wave, who were under less strict discipline, had less fighting to do and thus more time for criminality.

Ruth Irmgard, thirteen years old, was hauled from the cellar of her family’s home and raped by a gang of Russian soldiers. When she wept inconsolably, her mother, who had herself been raped and had attempted suicide, told her sternly: ‘If you can’t take it, then go in the Alle’, a reference to the river that ran through the small East Prussian town where they lived.
¹⁴
A few hours later, Ruth was saved from further molestation by the appearance of an officer, who sent the would-be rapists away. He took her back to her mother, but warned the family that he could not protect them indefinitely. She should leave town, he said, with Ruth and her four other children, and stick to the countryside, where there was less chance of trouble.