Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (16 page)

Hannelore von Cmuda, seventeen years old, was raped by a mob of drunken soldiers. When they were finished they fired three shots into her body; she survived.

Margarete Promeist, warden of an air-raid shelter, watched for two days and nights as "wave af ter wave of Russians came into my

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shelter plundering and raping. Women were killed if they refused. Some were shot and killed anyway. . . . I found the bodies of six or seven women, all lying in the position in which they were raped, their heads battered in." Frau Promeist herself was assaulted de spite her appeals that "I am much too old for you."

Mother Superior Cunegundes of Haus Dahlem, an orphanage and maternity hospital run by the Mission Sisters of the Sacred Heart, was shot at by a soldier when she tried to interfere with the rape of the mission's Ukrainian cook, Lena. The mission was over run with soldiers who entered the maternity wards and raped pregnant women and those who had given birth.

Some women of Berlin committed suicide, either in fear of rape or in shame af ter the act. Some avoided assault by making themselves appear diseased or as unattractive as possible with the aid of coal dust, iodine and bandages. Others found ingenious places to hide and remained in cellars and holes until the danger had passed. And some, Ryan wrote, "saved themselves from rape simply by fighting back so fiercely that the Soviet soldiers stopped trying and looked elsewhere." Jolenta Koch was one such fighter. Tricked into entering an empty house by a soldier who had a buddy waiting inside, Frau Koch "put up such resistance that both men were glad to see her go."

Dora Janssen avoided assault by claiming she had tuberculosis. Her servant, Inge, was less lucky and was injured so badly she could not walk. Frau Janssen ran into the street and told a man who looked like an officer what had happened. He responded, "The Germans were worse than this in Russia."

Klaus Kuster, a member of the Hitler Youth, saw three Rus sians grab a woman on the street and take her into a hallway. He followed. One soldier trained his pistol on Klaus. The second held the screaming woman while the third raped her. Klaus watched the Russian who had done the raping emerge from the doorway. Tears were streaming down the soldier's face as he wailed, "Ya
bolshoi svinya"
-
"I am a big pig."

In
1951
a committee of anti-Communist German scholars directed by Dr. Theodor Schieder of the University of Cologne set about to document the flight and expulsion of German nationals from Eastern and Central Europe in. the wake of the Red Army victories of
1944-1945.
Volume I of the compendium they pro duced concerned itself with the fate of German refugees east of the

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Oder-Neisse Line, in what is now Poland. In the abridged selection of personal testimonies available in English there are close to thirty separate depositions from women regarding mass rape by Russian and Polish soldiers. The testaments have a certain sameness about them, a sameness not of fabrication but of the universality of a woman's experience in war.

E.L. was trapped in Posen ( now Poznan ) when the Russians entered the city. She attested:

When we were lying in bed at night we kept hearing steps coming up the stairs; these were always Russians, who were sent by the Poles into the dwellings of the Germans. They beat on the door with their rifle-butts until it was opened. Without any consideration for my mother and aunt, who had to get out of bed, we were raped· by the Russians, who always held a machine pistol in one hand. They Jay in bed with their dirty boots on, until the next lot came. As there was no light, everything was done by pocket torches and we did not even know what the beasts looked like. During the· day we had to work hard, and at night the Russians lef t us no peace. . . . One could hardly any longer ca1l it raping, for the women were passive instruments, for one could not protect one's self or refuse, and one therefore suffered it.

"Where could one lodge a complaint?" echoed
a
schoolteacher from Breslau ( now Wroclaw ) . "Everywhere one was chased away like a stray dog."

And so it went for German womn at the close of the war. At Nuremberg the Soviet prosecutors had tried to show that the rape of Russian women had been part of a systematic Nazi campaign of terror and genocide. At the Tokyo tribunal the Allies had made
a
similar case against the Japanese. Jewish pleas for help from the Warsaw ghetto had used the mass rape of Jewish women to demonstrate
their
systematic annihilation. Arnold Toynbee, among World War
I
propagandists, had sought to use rape as evidence of the bestial campaign of terror by the Hun, and the lairds of the Scottish Highlands, we may recall, used evidence of rape by En glish soldiers as proof of their enemy's efforts to destroy
them
as a national people. And so it was not surprising that when the anti Communist German professors compiled their documents, they, too, attempted to make nationalistic sense out of what they had found.

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The raping of German women and children by Soviet officers and men was systematic in the truest sense of the word [they wrote]. Apart from the physical and spiritual suffering inflicted upon the huge numbers of women raped, the brutality and shamelessness with which this was done increased the fear and terror of the Ger man population. It is clear that these rapings were the result of a manner of conduct and mentality which are inconceivable and repulsive to the European mind. One must partially attribute them to the traditions and notions in the Asiatic parts of Russia, accord ing to which women are just as much the booty of the victors as jewelry, valuables, and property in dwellings and shops. The pature and the huge numbers of rapings would be inconceivable if there had not been a fundamental motive of such a kind at the back of the minds of the Soviet troops.

The German professors went further. Ilya Ehrenburg, they said, had incited the Russian troops to rape by his front-line dis patches and patriotic leflets.

Ehrenburg's role as whipping boy for Russian rape crops up in such odd places that it is worth some study. The memoirs of Admiral Doenitz, published in English in 1959, quote a purported Ehrenburg leaflet as follows:

Kill! Kill!
In
the German race there is nothing but evil!

Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these Germanic women. Take them as your lawful booty . . . you gallant soldiers of the Red Army!

Karl Bednarik, the contemporary Viennese sociologist, takes the Ehrenburg leaflet at face value and writes, "The offer of the defeated enemy's women as a safety valve to the ravening troops here wears only the most transparent veil of ideology."

In fairness to Ehrenburg, I must admit that I could not find this particular exhortation to "break the racial pride of these Ger manic women" and "take them as your lawful booty'' among the hundreds of Ehrenburg war dispatches I examined. Neither could Cornelius Ryan, who quotes the Doenitz version in his book and remarks that many Germans he interviewed did claim to have seen it. Ryan pursued the matter to Moscow, where Soviet newspaper editors and historians, he found, were "defensive" about the entire

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'
matter of rape. Most Moscow historians he spoke with attributed the worst of the atrocities to vengeance-minded ex-prisoners of war

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l
who were released as the Russian troops advanced to the Oder. A

newspaper editor told him, "We were naturally not one hundred

percent gentlemen; we had seen too much."

Ryan discovered that Ehrenburg had once been publicly repri manded for propaganda excesses by the military newspaper Red Star. That clinched it for Ryan, I think, and he came away believ ing that the leaflet was not a fake. I am not as certain, imbued as I am with the history of faked propaganda leaflets. Bearing in mind that Ehrenburg was Jewish, the wicked exhortation makes too much of a neat package for the defeated Nazis and smacks of the scurrilous
Protocols
of
the Elders
of Zion.