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The role of Soviet forces in defeating Nazi Germany during the Second World War is one of the most prominent and revered episodes in the history of that nation.

Seventy years later, however, renewed examination of the final days of the war has revealed another side of the story: the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers.

The testimony below may be distressing to some readers.

On the outskirts of Berlin, in Treptow Park, rises a statue about twelve meters high. It depicts a Soviet soldier with a sword in one hand and a German girl in the other, his foot resting on a broken swastika.

It marks the burial place of 5,000 of the 80,000 Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin between 16 April and 2 May 1945.

The enormous scale of the monument reflects the magnitude of that sacrifice. An inscription states that the Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.

Image caption: Ukrainian Vladimir Gelfand kept a diary of his experiences from 1941 onward.
Image caption: Gelfand riding a bicycle in Berlin.

For many Berliners, however, the memorial acquired another and much darker name: “the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist.”

There is extensive testimony concerning mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers in the German capital. For many years these events were largely silenced, and in present-day Russia the subject remains taboo.

Russian media have often dismissed accounts of mass rape as “Western myths,” even though a significant part of the evidence now available comes not from Western archives but from the diary of a young Soviet officer.

Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jewish lieutenant from central Ukraine, kept remarkably candid notes from 1941 onward despite the army’s strict prohibition on diaries, which were regarded as a security risk.

His widely published manuscript records in minute detail the chaotic reality in his battalion: meager rations, lice, antisemitism and looting, including soldiers stealing one another’s boots.

In February 1945 Gelfand was near a dam on the Oder while the Red Army prepared for its final advance on Berlin. In one entry he describes how his comrades surrounded and destroyed a battalion of German women fighters.

“The German she-cats we captured said they were taking revenge for their dead husbands,” the lieutenant wrote. “We should destroy them without mercy. Our soldiers suggest stabbing them through their genitals, but I would simply execute them.”

Image caption: Keeping diaries was forbidden because they were considered a security risk.

He recorded one of the most striking passages on 25 April, after Soviet troops had already reached Berlin. Gelfand says he was riding a bicycle along the River Spree when he encountered a group of German women carrying suitcases and bundles.

In his poor German he asked where they were going and why they had left their homes.

“With horror on their faces they told me what had happened to them on the first night after the Red Army entered the city,” he wrote.

“They raped me here,” one young woman said, lifting her skirt. “All night. Some were old and others had pockmarked faces. They all raped me one after another. No fewer than twenty men,” she said before bursting into tears.

The lieutenant says the young woman suddenly threw herself toward him and said: “You can sleep with me. Do whatever you want with me, but only you!”

By then, abuses and atrocities committed by German soldiers in the Soviet Union during the previous four years were well known, and Gelfand had seen their consequences first-hand as the Red Army advanced into Germany.

Gelfand’s son Vitaly says his father saw Nazi soldiers destroy entire villages and kill even small children. He also saw evidence of widespread rape.

The German army was supposedly a disciplined force made up of Aryans who were not expected to have sexual relations with people they considered subhuman.

Image caption: Gelfand’s son found the diary after his father’s death.

According to Oleg Budnitsky, a historian and researcher at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, that prohibition was openly disregarded.

Nazi officers were in fact so concerned about cases of venereal disease that they established a network of military brothels in occupied territories.

It is difficult to establish how German soldiers treated Russian women because so many victims did not survive the occupation. But the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, directed by Jörg Morré, displays a photograph taken in Crimea by a German soldier showing the body of a woman lying on the ground.

“It appears that she was killed during or after a rape. Her skirt is raised and her hands are over her face,” Morré says.

As the Red Army advanced toward Germany — described in the Soviet press as “the lair of the beast” — posters appeared urging soldiers to unleash their anger: “Soldier! You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has come!”

Image caption: Soviet soldiers distributing food to Berlin residents.

Historian Antony Beevor says that while conducting research in 2002 for his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945, he found documents concerning sexual violence in Russian Federation archives. The material had been gathered by secret-police organs and sent to their chief, Lavrentiy Beria, at the end of 1944.

“They were shown to Stalin. The documents report mass rapes in East Prussia and describe Germans choosing to kill their daughters and themselves rather than face that fate,” Beevor says.

Another source is the diary of a German woman who became involved with a Russian soldier. It describes how women adapted to horrific circumstances in order to survive.

Beginning on 20 April 1945, ten days before Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the anonymous diarist describes scenes from the lives of her neighbors while Berlin was under bombardment.

Image caption: Berliners confronting the soldiers who had liberated them from the Nazis.

She writes that people hurried into the basement shelter of her building and mentions “a young man in gray trousers and glasses who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a woman.”

She also describes three elderly sisters who stayed together and joked: “Better a Russian on top than a Yankee overhead.” In other words, they regarded rape as a lesser evil than American bombing.

When Soviet soldiers arrived, the women asked the diarist to use her knowledge of Russian to speak to an officer. She left the shelter and approached him, but he merely shrugged.

“What had to happen anyway happened,” she later wrote.

Soldiers took advantage of the fact that the women were trapped in the shelter and brutally raped her, nearly strangling her. When her neighbors finally opened the door, they saw her stockings pulled down to her shoes and the torn strap of her bra still clenched in her hand.

She shouted at them: “Pigs! You let them rape me twice in a row and left me lying here like garbage!” according to the diary.

Image caption: Berlin had been devastated by Allied bombing.

She then realized that to protect herself from repeated gang rape she needed to find a “wolf” — one soldier who could provide protection. She began a less violent and more pragmatic relationship with an officer from Leningrad.

“I cannot really say that he is raping me. I do it for tobacco, sugar, butter, candles and canned meat. To some extent I can rely on him. Besides, the less he wants from me as a woman, the more I like him as a person,” she wrote.

The diary was published under the title A Woman in Berlin, but provoked strong public anger because the book was accused of damaging the honor of German women.

The seventieth anniversary of the end of the war brought new investigations and testimony about sexual violence committed by soldiers of the Allied armies — American, British, French and Soviet.

Nevertheless, the experiences of women gained much greater public visibility in 2008 with the release of the film Anonyma, an adaptation of A Woman in Berlin. The film had a cathartic effect on many victims who had previously remained silent.

Image caption: Ingeborg says she ran to the basement of her building when Soviet soldiers arrived.
Image caption: She believed she was going to be killed.

One of those women was Ingeborg Bullert, then ninety years old. She recalled that when Soviet soldiers entered her Berlin neighborhood there were tanks in the streets. Like many others, she sheltered in the basement of her building.

One night, after another explosion, she left the shelter and went upstairs to find a piece of rope with which to hang a lamp. At that moment two Soviet soldiers saw her and pointed pistols at her.

“They both raped me. I thought they were going to kill me,” she recalled. Ingeborg never told anyone about the experience because it was too painful.

“My mother loved to boast that her daughter had not been raped at the end of the war,” she said.

Between June 1945 and 1946, one Berlin district alone recorded 995 requests for abortions. Archives preserve handwritten applications submitted by children who had been raped in their own apartments, sometimes in front of their parents.

Image caption: Soviet troops raising their flag over the German parliament building.

The final number of victims will probably never be established. Sources from military tribunals remain classified.

The Russian parliament adopted a law under which anyone who “denigrates” Russia’s actions during the Second World War may be fined or sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Vitaly Gelfand, son of diarist Vladimir Gelfand, does not deny that many Soviet soldiers showed courage and self-sacrifice during the war. But, he says, that is not the whole truth.

“If people do not want to know the truth, they are simply deceiving themselves. The world understands it, Russia understands it. Even the people who pass these laws to protect the past from criticism understand it. We will not be able to move forward until we look back,” Vitaly says.

The photograph shows a German handwritten diary/document page dated “Berlin, 27 April 1945.” The remaining cursive text in the supplied image is too small and indistinct to transcribe reliably in full; no wording has been invented for the unreadable passages.