In Treptower Park on the outskirts of Berlin, there is a statue of a Soviet soldier grasping a sword in one hand and a small German girl in the other while he stamps on a broken swastika.
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This is the final resting place for 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet troops who fell in the Battle of Berlin. The inscription inside the shrine-like pedestal says the Soviet people saved European civilisation from Fascism.
But some call this memorial the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist. Stalin’s troops assaulted an uncounted number of women as they fought their way into the Third Reich.
Many Russians find all mention of the wartime rapes offensive and they are regularly dismissed as a Western myth in the Russian media. Certainly the Soviet soldiers were not the only perpetrators of sexual violence. And nor can the Red Army rapes be seen in isolation. They were preceded by the pitiless Nazi invasion of Russia, or in Hitler’s words, the ‘war of annihilation’.
Two remarkably candid diaries from spring 1945 help to shed some light on what really happened.
The first is by Vladimir Gelfand who was a Jewish lieutenant from central Ukraine. His son, Vitaly, found the diary when he was clearing out his father’s papers after he died.
“Dad had seen such horrors on his way to Berlin”, he told me. “He went through so many villages in which the Nazis had killed everyone, even small children. And he saw evidence of rape.”
As the Red Army advanced into what the Soviet press called ‘the lair of the fascist beast’, posters drummed home the message: ‘Soldier: You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!’
One of the most revealing passages in Lieutenant Gelfand’s diary is when he came across a group of German women fleeing on the outskirts of Berlin.
“With horror on their faces”, he writes, “they told me what had happened on the first night of the Red Army’s arrival. ‘They poked here’, explained the German girl, lifting up her skirt. ‘No less than twenty men,’ she burst into tears.
‘Stay here,’ the girl suddenly threw herself at me, ‘sleep with me! You can do whatever you want with me, but only you!’”