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The Dark Side of the Allied Victory in the Second World War

The dark side of the Allied victory in the Second World War has only begun to receive wider attention relatively recently. The silence of the defeated, together with the familiar saying that history is always written by the victors, had much to do with this neglected part of the story. Germany, the aggressor state, also suffered enormously from the cruelty of those described as its saviors and liberators.

Bombings such as the destruction of Dresden, in which thousands of innocent people were killed at a time when the Allied victory was already more than assured, have generated intense controversy among generations born after the war. Moving beyond the revisionism of earlier years, researchers have focused on untangling the dense web of silence through which civilians tried to forget the immense tragedy they had endured.

The dark side of the Allied victory in the Second World War. Dresden after the bombing.

Americans and British troops from the west and Soviet troops from the east advanced week after week through the interior of a Germany that was by then already broken. As they moved relentlessly toward the heart of the Nazi empire, their armies vented their anger on the civilian population, which they held responsible for having brought the National Socialist Party to power.

Far from the image of liberators familiar from many films, countless violations of human rights, killings, acts of personal revenge and disproportionate violence against women — perhaps, together with children, the most defenseless victims — have been blurred or hidden in the historical record.

Especially harsh was the treatment of German women by the Soviet Army during its overwhelming entry into Berlin, the seventieth anniversary of which fell in the year this article was published. Historians have found many cases of sexual abuse that were not reported at the time, when silence prevailed over truth.

The dark side of the Allied victory in the Second World War. Vladimir Gelfand.

There are a number of historical documents, above all soldiers’ diaries, such as that of the Ukrainian Vladimir Gelfand, that record massacres of German women combatants and, later in the capital of the Reich, mass rape. Some confidential Soviet reports that gradually came to light over the years describe cases in which women killed their own daughters and then committed suicide rather than submit to Allied violence.

One significant fact is that between the end of the war and the following year, almost a thousand abortions were carried out in a single Berlin district, including numerous cases involving minors. Many other women and men were also killed in what amounted to a genuine policy of revenge tolerated by the Allied authorities. It is almost impossible to give even moderately precise figures because a great deal of information remains classified to this day.

Another exceptionally valuable source is the diary written by an anonymous woman and first published in 1954 under the title A Woman in Berlin. It describes not only her own individual experience but the real situation of thousands of women at the end of the war — violated yet silent in the face of nightmarish scenes in which the worst in human beings emerged as an act of revenge against an entire community.

Ultimately, it is clear that in war not everything is black or white. The Nazis, during their advance into Russia and Western Europe, committed vile crimes against humanity, burning towns and villages and executing and raping thousands of women and children. Yet the Allies, in their final counteroffensive, especially after crossing the Oder and entering Germany proper, also preyed upon the weakest members of the population. Civilians who had already endured the harsh journey of war were forced to suffer the disgrace of humiliation and, at times, a silence and oblivion they imposed upon themselves.