Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  There were other surprises, some quite bizarre or surreal. Some women who had been hiding in a leafy apartment block near what is now the Stresemannstrasse, not far from the Potsdamer Platz in the city centre of Berlin, were concerned when the horse-drawn baggage train of a Soviet tank regiment set up its carts in the gardens surrounding the flats. Their horses could be hobbled and grazed among the lawns. Within a short time, the German women and the Russians – who included some female soldiers as well as men – came into conversation. The area was peaceful now, with the fighting finally over. One of the German women, who knew a little Russian, screwed up her courage and approached them. They had some food but nothing to cook it with. The German woman offered to help, and duly cooked the Soviet sergeant major and his band a meal, which the ‘enemy’ happily shared with her and her two female companions.

  Within a short time, ‘we few Germans were moving freely through the area. The Russians showed us pictures of their families, we laughed together. It was incredible, that something like this could happen, after all those terrible days.’ When the baggage train moved on, the sergeant major gave the woman a scribbled note in Russian, a kind of rough-and-ready letter of safe conduct, which declared: ‘This apartment is occupied by tank troops. Guard-Sergeant-Major Abdulguyzn, Boris N., field post nr. 39907.’

  During this same period, perhaps in some kind of recompense for the behaviour of Soviet troops during the fall of the city – or at least in awareness of the bad feeling this had caused – the new Russian commandant in Berlin, Colonel-General Berzarin, provided for Russian army rations to be diverted to feeding the German civilians eking out an existence among the ruins. He also quickly organised, a little more than a week after the capitulation, an exhibition of major possessions of Berlin’s bomb-shattered museums in temporary quarters and, on 26 May, facilitated the first post-war concert by the Berlin Philharmonic.44

  None of these expressions of basic decency did, or could, mitigate the results of the mass rape that had occurred throughout the Soviet area of advance and, most terribly, in Berlin at the time of the city’s downfall. The violation of the bodies of tens, even hundreds of thousands of German women would have both short- and long-term consequences. Short, in terms of a huge rise in venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies (the so-called Russenkinder, or ‘Russian-children’), and long in the sense of permanent damage to Russian–German relations. It effected the alienation of most Germans in the Soviet-occupied areas of the country from the occupying power, and reinforced their resistance to attempts on the part of the Russians and their German communist allies to install, by persuasion if possible, but if not by force, their chosen political system.

  During this interval – say, the twelve to eighteen months following the end of the war – the bizarre difference between the Germany policy of the Western Allies and that of the Soviets was, in effect, that the Russians were quite clear about what they wanted (that is, quite logically, to encourage socialist/communist developments in Germany), while for their part the Western powers seemed bent on radical post-war plans that were not in any way patterned on their own social and political systems.

  So, the Morgenthau Plan for Germany was much more radical than the strip-and-socialise Soviet proposals, involving as it did the putative dismantling of two hundred years of German history and the country’s forced transformation into some sort of harmless pre-industrial community of self-reliant yeoman farmers – totally unlike the modern United States, although arguably owing something to romantic notions of the American Midwest’s rural virtues.

  An article in Time magazine appraising the Anglo-American preparations to withdraw from their forward positions and back into their agreed zones, at the beginning of July 1945, showed a surprisingly critical point of view on this issue, and even more surprisingly was headlined with the title of a famous essay by Lenin (‘What Is to Be Done?’):

  With complicated move and counter-move, the four occupying powers settled down last week to the task of ruling conquered Germany . . .

  . . . the British and Americans were still united by a common lack of policy: long-range policies were still either undecided or secret. Ordinary soldiers of the occupation armies were beginning to ask: what’s going to be done with Germany? Will it be permanently divided into small states? With political activity banned, how can a democratic Germany develop?

  Beyond the movement of Russian prisoners from west to east, there was still no apparent coordination of policy between the western allies and Russia. While the Russians were winning friends and influencing Germans in the east, Germans in the west were beginning to show open hostility to the occupying armies.45

  The reference to the Russians’ ‘winning friends’ in the east was perhaps a little over-indulgent – maybe Western reporters were not yet fully aware of the savagery of the Soviet excesses there. However, there was an element of truth in it. For all the Red Army’s disastrous bad behaviour, and, in the microcosm, the touch-and-go nature of personal relations between Germans and their Russian occupiers, the defeated Germans quickly discerned the fairly brutal straightforwardness of Russian policy in the macrocosm. For some this was more attractive or at least more bearable than Western ambiguity and confusion.

  Nor was there, at the beginning, any anti-fraternisation policy in the Soviet Zone (another reason why, perhaps naively, the Time journalist thought that the Russians must be increasing their popularity among the locals). Soviet officers were routinely billeted with German families, and this not infrequently led to friendly personal relations with their hosts. One German observer wrote that ‘in many German families, single Russians have acclimatised well and act like sons in the house’.

  And of course this initial lack of restrictions facilitated relationships between Soviet troops and the local girls and women. Initially, during the ‘wild’ period following the fall of Berlin, many German women, desperate to avoid repeated rape, realised that their best chance lay in finding themselves a Red Army officer and embarking on an exclusive sexual relationship with him, in the often-fulfilled hope that this would protect them from the mass of the soldiery.

  Marta Hillers, a widely travelled journalist in her thirties, kept a diary between April and June 1945, coolly detailing her experiences and those of her friends as the Russians fought for and captured Berlin (it was later published, first in English and only later in German, when it caused a considerable scandal). She suffered the rapes stoically. ‘I laugh right in the middle of all this awfulness,’ she wrote. ‘What should I do? After all, I am alive, everything will pass!’ All the same, she saw no reason not to protect herself, and made the hard-headed decision to find a tolerable Russian, as senior in rank as possible, and make him the ‘special one’.

  Hillers was lucky enough to find, first a rather mercurial, bull-like lieutenant, succeeded when he was posted on by a cultured and intelligent army major, whom she actually found quite pleasant company. ‘I like the major,’ she wrote, ‘and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person’ –

  And he won’t be wanting much, I can tell. His face is pale. His knee wound is causing him trouble. He’s probably not so much after sexual contact as human companionship, female company – and I’m more than willing to give him that. For out of all the male beasts I’ve seen these past few days, he’s the most bearable, the best of the lot.46

  After a few more weeks had passed, more natural relationships developed – or at least as natural as was possible in the state of inequality that existed between conquerors and conquered, where considerations of access to food, fuel and cigarettes always lurked in the background of the simple man–woman attraction.

  Lieutenant Wladimir Gelfand was a Russian of Jewish extraction, commander of a mortar platoon that accompanied the infantry all the way from Stalingrad to Warsaw and then to Berlin. Born in 1923, he had been brought up in modest circumstances as the son of a factory foreman and a kindergarten teacher in the industrial eastern Ukraine. Fr
om childhood, he had been a studious boy, interested in literature, philosophy and poetry, and, despite his studies being interrupted by the outbreak of war and his conscription into the army, retained a certain intellectual bent. He would spend his life wanting, in vain, to make a career as a writer.

  So, Lieutenant Gelfand, though he had served courageously for three years at the front by the time he reached Berlin, was hardly the caricature of the crude, lustful peasant. He did, however, like young women very much, and – perhaps influenced by the fact that he had been blessed with dark, almost matinee idol-quality good looks – they liked him too. Even, or especially, the German ones.

  Gelfand kept a diary. It is a very frank one, in sexual matters as in others. He could be pushy, and not above using his position to gain favours, but there is, quite credibly, never any suggestion of compulsion, let alone force, in his relations with the girls he meets during his time in Germany (January 1945–autumn 1946). That does not mean he is unaware of what is going on. And he is appalled by the brutal attitude of some of his comrades. On the outskirts of Berlin towards the end of April, he too found himself subjected to pleas from an attractive young woman – supported by her mother – to take him as her exclusive sexual property in order to save her from worse. The girl had already been raped in the cellar of her family’s house by a gang of Red Army soldiers:

  . . . ‘Stay here!’ The girl pleaded suddenly. ‘You can sleep with me. You can do what you want with me, but only you, alone! I am prepared to do fuck-fuck, ready to do anything you want, just save me from all those men with their . . . you know . . .’

  She showed me everything, told me everything, and not because she was vulgar. Her fear and her suffering were stronger than her shame and her shyness, and now she was ready to strip in front of all the other people [in the cellar], just to stop her tormented body from being abused, a body that should have remained undefiled for some years still, but had been so suddenly and crudely –

  And then her mother pleaded with me too.

  ‘Don’t you want to sleep with my daughter? Your Russian comrades who were here wanted to, they all wanted to! They could come back, or there’ll be twenty new ones, and then my suffering will be limitless!’

  The girl embraced me, pleaded with me, smiled at me through her tears. It was hard for her to beg like this, but she brought to bear a woman’s entire repertoire of tricks, and she did it well. It was easy for her to win me over with her shining eyes – I am so vulnerable to female beauty – but in the end my duty as a soldier won out . . .47

  Gelfand was well aware of the horrors awaiting so many German women at the hands of his fellow soldiers. In one incident, he wrote of being attacked by a group of German soldiers, some of whom were female. Many were killed and some captured. The group also included two unexplained Russian women in German uniforms, who were interrogated and then shot out of hand. The younger girls, however, were considered ‘“booty”, to be distributed throughout the various billets and beds, where for some days experiments were conducted upon them that cannot be repeated in writing’.48 As if to rehabilitate the image of his comrades slightly, Gelfand adds that after raping at gunpoint one of these girls, who turned out to be a virgin, Sergeant Major Andropov then ‘gave her civilian clothes, a dress, to wear’ so that she might not be identified as an enemy combatant.

  Gelfand himself seems to have had several girlfriends in the months that followed. He was appointed to various administrative jobs and finally assisted in the management of German factories seized by the Soviet government, a job that meant a great deal of travel and many erotic opportunities. He seems to have been bothered neither by the marital status of his conquests nor by the appallingly anti-Semitic and racist opinions – typical of many young people educated in Nazi Germany – that at least one of them openly expressed.

  Nonetheless, and despite everything, Gelfand remained at heart a romantic: ‘This girl truly deserves love and respect . . .’ he wrote of one young German woman with whom he had a casual affair. ‘She is really a human being in the truest sense of the word, although she is a woman and a German, and although she works in the theatre, where it is hard for a person of her sex to retain her moral purity.’ The effect is slightly spoiled by the fact that, in the same diary entry, Gelfand records another intimate encounter, this time with another girl entirely, which seems to have taken place later the same night.49

  The last few months of Gelfand’s stay in Germany were also somewhat darkened by the necessity of treatment for gonorrhoea. Even romantics can’t avoid epidemics, and venereal disease reached epidemic proportions in occupied Germany as 1945 wore on.

  If Lieutenant Gelfand’s account is anything to go by, within a relatively short while after the fall of Berlin, he and other young Russians – especially officers – were enjoying a vigorous, even strenuous social life that included not just the available local women, but also their families, and occasionally involved tourist visits to cultural destinations such as Weimar. In this sense, despite the problems and tensions, the relations that developed, and the basic style of life, were not so different from those experienced by the Western occupiers.

  However, whereas in the Western zones anti-fraternisation policies were relaxed as the months passed, in the Soviet Zone they were gradually introduced over the same period. This was in part because, once the war was over, the Stalinist authorities were keen to re-establish tight controls over their troops, especially when it came to potentially subversive contact with foreigners. And then there was the continuing military-based crime wave even after the occupation regime had settled down.

  The police chief of Halle-Merseburg, an industrial area in Saxony-Anhalt, noted the crimes committed within his jurisdiction by ‘persons in Soviet uniform’ between 1 January and 31 May 1946 and counted: 34 murders, 345 robberies involving breaking and entering, 328 robberies on the street, 60 train robberies, 123 stolen cows, 212 assaults and injuries (10 ending in death) and 162 rapes. As usual with all occupation troops, but especially the Russians, rampant alcohol use made the situation a great deal worse. The situation was particularly bad on and around the 1 May celebrations, when among loyal supporters of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a great deal of drink was customarily taken.50

  The Soviet authorities’ attitude towards this kind of violent rowdyism on the part of their soldiers soon ceased to be as indulgent as it had been during the last months of the war. It remained inconsistent, but after the summer of 1945 there were quite frequent prosecutions, with punishments carried out in front of their comrades. Penalties could be light to non-existent, though crimes involving murder as well as rape, for instance, could be punished with death, and those involving insubordination could lead to substantial terms in a labour camp.

  The other category of malfeasance – crimes of property – was pursued on a genuinely massive scale, befitting the vast hoard of treasure that the Russians found almost everywhere they looked as they marched, wide-eyed, into rich, sophisticated Germany. This routine theft was, moreover, tolerated and even facilitated by the authorities. The demand for ‘Uri, Uri!’ (watches, watches!) became as well known to German civilians as the dreaded order, ‘Frau, komm!’ Bicycles, clocks, radios and alcohol of all kinds (this last responsible for much of the sexual crime wave) were also in great demand by the rank and file as well as the officers, and they were simply taken at will. Rare books, paintings, antique and hunting rifles, bedding, clothes and musical instruments were also popular among the officer classes. The monthly total of parcels passing through the railhead at Kursk, in southern Russia, increased from 300 in January 1945 to 50,000 in April. By mid-May, around 20,000 railway wagons were awaiting unloading or redirection.51

  As for the fourth occupying power, the French, they came closest to the Soviets in terms of bad behaviour during the final weeks of the war and the immediate aftermath of peace.

  Like the Soviets, the French ranks contained many who had suffered – or been forced to bear
their families’ suffering – under German occupation. Few French troops saw any need to be civil to the Germans, though their officers generally liked to think they were ‘correct’ within certain narrow military boundaries. And, as with the Russians, alcohol was in great part responsible for the worst excesses. That, and the presence of colonial troops who, brave as they undoubtedly were in combat, had a poor record when it came to the mistreatment of civilians.

  The small town of Magstadt, twenty kilometres west of Stuttgart, fell to the French army on 20 April 1945, and the troops, many of them so-called ‘Goumiers’ from North Africa, bivouacked there overnight, preparing for their advance on the industrial town of Sindelfingen. The village’s pastor reported later:

  No pen can do justice to what happened during that night. Our women and girls, especially, had much to endure and much to suffer. The Moroccans had previously got into a distillery . . . and some of them were worse than animals. Around 260 rapes – medically confirmed – starting with girls of confirmation age and extending to the oldest women – will always make this day the most terrible that the people of this parish have ever had to suffer, physically and spiritually. Even in the vicarage I was not able, despite interposing my body and using my every power, to prevent many of those who desperately sought protection and sought refuge in my cellar from having to endure that terrible experience.52

  When, a few days later, the French advanced on Sindelfingen (home of Daimler-Benz motors), they came under fire from some Luftwaffe flak units based in the Goldberg Housing Estate overlooking the town. Furious at this, the French unit commanders appear to have tolerated physical and sexual violence against the women auxiliaries serving in these units, who also included Russian forced labourers. Again, mass rapes occurred. No exception was made for the unfortunate Russian women, who had already suffered years of near-slavery and semi-starvation at German hands.