


Ingo von Münch “Frau, komm!”: The Mass Rapes of German Women and Girls, 1944/45
Summary: One of the most terrible crimes of the Second World War was the mass rape of German women and girls by Soviet soldiers in 1944–45. Many of these women and girls were subjected to violence not once but repeatedly. Neither children nor elderly women were spared. Estimates cited by the book put the number of victims at around two million women and girls. For decades, the scale of these crimes and the human suffering they caused received little public attention. Only more recently have these events been discussed, and then often in the context of population transfers, expulsions and forced labor. This book, by contrast, focuses specifically on rape: how and why these crimes occurred, what factors contributed to their scale, and what happened to children who became victims or witnesses of sexual violence. Personal accounts of victims and perpetrators form the basis of the book’s portrayal of events.
Press: “‘Woman, come!’ — this short phrase from 1945 must have remained in women’s ears, and today one can only imagine its horror. It is difficult for younger generations even to imagine what it meant to be raped, to be raped repeatedly — three, four, forty times — sometimes over days or weeks, or to watch one’s own teenage daughter being raped.
This was the fate of many German women and girls when the Soviet Army entered East Prussia in the autumn of 1944 and advanced onto German territory. Estimates of the number of raped women and girls range from one to two million victims. These mass crimes were therefore not isolated acts but, in the book’s interpretation, war crimes committed on the Soviet side during the war and part of Germany’s collective experience. For a long time very little was said about what had happened, chiefly because both victims and perpetrators remained silent and because of particular forms of self-reproach in postwar Germany.” Henry Bernhard, Deutschlandradio
About the author: Ingo von Münch, born in Berlin in 1932, is a German professor of constitutional and international law. He also became known as a leading legal commentator.
© Leopold Stocker Verlag