“The Myth of Millions of Raped German Women”
Daniil Ivanov | 20 October 2009

In recent years the claim that hundreds of thousands or millions of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers in 1945 has circulated widely in the Russian liberal press. The Russian translation of British historian Antony Beevor's book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 contributed greatly to this. The author estimates the number of rape victims at 95,000 to 135,000, but even that is not the upper limit of the figures cited. Some “researchers” speak of two million and even fifteen million victims; the latter figure is attributed here to the American author Johnson in an article titled “Red Army troops raped even Russian women...”

The author argues that the origins of this “myth” are clear: in his interpretation it helps transform Germans from aggressors into victims, equates the USSR with Nazi Germany, and ultimately promotes a revision of the results of the Second World War with geopolitical consequences.

It would of course be absurd, the article continues, to claim that no rapes took place at all in territory occupied by Soviet forces. The question is one of scale. If rape was as widespread as Beevor describes, one could speak, first, of the brutality and immorality of a majority of Soviet soldiers and, second, of such conduct being encouraged by Soviet command. If, on the other hand, rape was an exception rather than the rule, it should be regarded as one of the inevitable excesses that occur in wartime armies.

The article says that Joseph Goebbels helped lay the foundations of the idea of mass rape. It quotes his diary entry of 2 March 1945, in which he called Soviet soldiers “steppe scum” and cited reports of atrocities in the eastern territories, including claims that in some Upper Silesian villages and towns women from ten to seventy years old had been subjected to countless rapes. Goebbels claimed that the behavior appeared systematic and perhaps ordered from above.

The article then refers to another example of Nazi propaganda aimed at the inhabitants of Poland and notes that repeated propaganda statements had created among Germans an image of the Soviet Army as wild eastern hordes looting and raping everything in their path.

Were rapes in fact committed “on orders from above,” as Goebbels claimed? The author says the answer becomes obvious from two documents. The first is presented as Stalin's order of 19 January 1945: officers and Red Army men entering enemy territory were to maintain self-control and courage; the remaining population in occupied areas, whether German, Czech, or Polish, was not to be subjected to violence; offenders were to be punished under wartime law; sexual relations with women in occupied territory were forbidden; and those guilty of violence or rape were to be shot.

The second document is the directive of the Supreme High Command to the commanders and military councils of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts dated 20 April 1945. It ordered a change in the treatment of German prisoners of war and civilians, arguing that brutality created fear, encouraged stubborn resistance, and pushed civilians to form armed groups. More humane treatment, the directive stated, would facilitate military operations and reduce German resistance. In German areas west of the line from the mouth of the Oder through Fürstenberg and along the Neisse, German administrations and German mayors were to be established. Ordinary Nazi Party members who behaved loyally toward the Red Army were not to be touched, though leaders were to be detained if they had not escaped. At the same time, improved treatment was not to reduce vigilance or lead to fraternization.

The article says these orders require no comment, then asks whether they influenced ordinary soldiers. It quotes Isaak Kobylyansky, who commanded an artillery platoon during the war. Kobylyansky recalled that soon after entering East Prussia his men were informed of an order condemning violence against civilians, especially women, and looting, and warning of severe punishment. He did not remember tribunal sessions, arrests, or demotions in his division, but said the order itself had a powerful restraining effect. In his immediate surroundings of two or three hundred men it was not violated, although, he added, it would be naive to claim that no one anywhere broke the order. He emphasized that there were no open violations or mass violence against German women around him.

Was punishment actually applied? Citing Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the Department of the History of Wars and Geopolitics at the Center for the History of Twentieth-Century Wars, the article states that 4,148 officers were convicted by military tribunals for excesses against the local population. It presents this as evidence that misconduct was prosecuted rather than officially encouraged.

The article also reproduces testimony about a case described by tank officer V. P. Bryukhov. According to his recollection, an officer in his regiment and the mechanic of his tank attempted to rape a Romanian girl and shot her when she tried to flee. Her parents came to the brigade with local officials. SMERSH investigators identified and arrested the perpetrators. The officer, Lieutenant Ivanov, admitted firing the shot. A military tribunal was held in front of the assembled brigade. The mechanic received twenty-five years with substitution by service in a penal battalion. Ivanov asked for no leniency and was sentenced to death. The brigade was assembled, he apologized to his comrades, and the sentence was carried out in front of the formation. Bryukhov remembered the execution as horrifying and said that no further incidents involving the local population occurred in the brigade afterward.

The author then turns to demographic calculations. About 20–21 million people lived in eastern Germany occupied by Soviet forces in 1945. Assuming women made up 60–65 percent of the population, he arrives at 12–13.7 million women of all ages. On that basis he argues that a figure of fifteen million rape victims is impossible and that two million would imply that roughly one woman in six, regardless of age or physical condition, was raped. He maintains that violence on such a scale could not have escaped contemporary social researchers and criticizes supporters of very high estimates for not citing sociological studies from the period.

The article says that some researchers use abortion statistics from Berlin clinics and extrapolate them to all of Germany. Their reasoning is that some abortion applications from the Soviet occupation zone said the women had been raped by Soviet soldiers. The author rejects this method, arguing that on 28 March 1945 Martin Bormann issued a decree allowing abortion when a German woman stated that she had been raped by a foreign soldier. Since abortion had previously been tightly restricted in the Reich, the author contends that such declarations cannot automatically be treated as verified evidence of rape because doctors did not independently establish whether the statements were true or were being used to obtain a legal abortion.

The article also cites N. Mendkovich's discussion of A. Grossman's “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers.” It notes that some women who later said they had suffered sexual violence described the attackers with striking frequency as “Asians,” or, in western Germany, as Black soldiers. The author argues that this corresponds closely to stereotypes used in Nazi propaganda — “narrow-eyed barbarians” in the East and Black men threatening blond German women in the West — and therefore treats such descriptions with skepticism.

It notes that Black servicemen made up only a minority of the wartime U.S. Army, citing a figure of 8.7 percent, and attributes that in part to racial discrimination in the United States at the time.

What do official documents say? Citing the same article by Mendkovich, the author quotes a report by Front Military Prosecutor Major General Yasin. Yasin wrote that shootings of Germans had almost ceased and robberies were isolated, while violence against women still occurred. He intended to submit a detailed memorandum to the Front Military Council on 5 May analyzing all recorded cases of improper treatment of German civilians since the relevant orders had been issued. The article argues that the very possibility of such a detailed accounting suggests that the number of incidents was not in the hundreds in each locality. It says Yasin did not give an overall total but reported two or three such cases in each populated place.

For the postwar period the article cites an order reproduced on 9may.ru. According to the Commandant Service of Mecklenburg Province, in November 1945 there were fourteen recorded rapes and 104 cases of looting, with the additional qualification that police figures might be exaggerated and might include incidents not committed by Soviet servicemen. The author extrapolates from fourteen rape cases per month across a province and argues that even after multiplying by months and occupied provinces the result does not approach millions or even tens of thousands.

The article concludes that soldiers seeking sex did not necessarily need to use force. Postwar occupied territories suffered destruction, food shortages, and an acute shortage of men; the author says this contributed to a decline in social norms and a growth in prostitution. According to Hungarian authorities, the number of prostitutes in Budapest increased twentyfold after the occupation began.

It cites the German book Hungerwinter: Deutschlands humanitäre Katastrophe 1946/47 (“Hunger Winter — Surviving after the War”), published in 2009, which says that in Munich alone about 1,600 girls were arrested over three months on suspicion of prostitution and spreading venereal disease. In the British zone, arrests in 1946 were estimated at 15,000; most of those arrested were minors and, according to the cited account, 80 percent had venereal disease.

The article again quotes Isaak Kobylyansky: after lights-out, some bold and fortunate officers secretly left their units to visit a German “girlfriend,” usually carrying a small parcel of food; knowledge of German was not required. The author interprets this as evidence that the material “price” of consensual sex could be modest — merely “something edible.”

A diary entry by Red Army lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, also quoted in Hungerwinter, describes his desire for the affection of the beautiful Marianne. He wrote that kisses and embraces were not enough, that he hoped for more but did not force her, and that her mother was pleased with him. Food, sweets, butter, sausage, and German cigarettes were offered in the context of trust and goodwill; Gelfand reflected bitterly that in those conditions food could be valued more highly than life and that such scarcity affected intimate relationships.

From all of this, the author concludes that rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers did occur and that documents and statistics exist concerning convictions for such crimes. He nevertheless argues that these crimes were not mass or systematic. If the number convicted is compared with the total number of Soviet troops in occupied territories, he says, the percentage is extremely small.

The article adds that sexual violence was not committed only by Soviet troops. Citing Rzheshevsky, it says that sixty-nine people in the U.S. Army were executed for murder and rape. It also cites claims about French troops: in Stuttgart, according to some estimates, 1,198 people were raped, while in Villingen, with a population of 12,000, five hundred rapes were recorded.

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