Fleeing the Red Hordes

[Apocalypse_Now]

Article regarding Beevor's book.

The Europe pages - Observer special

Sunday June 23, 2002
The ObserverA best-selling book has prompted victims of one of the
twentieth century's most tragic dramas to break their
silence.

German women have come forward after 50 years to speak
of their appalling treatment at the hands of Soviet
soldiers, who raped their way across Germany for four
years from 1945. Their ordeal has been revealed thanks
to Antony Beevor, whose book Berlin: The Downfall 1945
came out in the UK to great acclaim last month.

In his book, Beevor, a Sandhurst recruit turned
writer, uses previously unpublished material from
Russian archives in Moscow to describe vividly the
horrific suffering of an estimated two million German
women and girls who were gang-raped by drunken Soviet
soldiers as they made their way across the country
with the aim of forcing the Nazis to retreat.

Among the victims were women who became prominent
figures, including Hannelore Kohl, wife of the former
Chancellor, Helmut. Mrs Kohl, who committed suicide
last year, was raped along with her mother at the age
of 12 as they failed to escape on a train bound for
Dresden.

Beevor's book has unleashed an emotional response from
scores of victims, mainly living in Britain, and their
relatives, who have contacted him to express their
gratitude that the story of an entire generation is
finally being told.

'I was carrying out orders to bury some dead Hitler
Youth boys when they found me,' Martha Dowsey says
gently and slowly with a heavy German accent. 'Six Red
Army soldiers with blackened faces held me down on the
ground close to the graves and raped me one by one.'
She repeats over and over: 'I'm not lying, I'm not,
you must believe me.'

The housebound 81-year-old is understandably nervous
about telling her story, not least because it has
taken decades for her to find anyone either in her
adopted home of Britain or Germany who would believe
her experiences of life in post-war Berlin as Stalin's
troops marched in. For years the Red Army soldiers
were seen as the heroes who freed Germany from the
shackles of the Nazis.

But for Martha, and hundreds of thousands of others,
they were anything but. 'They were destructive and
evil and almost ruined my life. I never told my
children — they would not have understood - and my
husband knew something terrible had happened to me,
but was kind enough never to ask,' she says from her
home in Clapham Common, south London.

Only now has Martha Dowsey née Schröder gathered the
courage to speak, thanks to Beevor's book. The victims
— considered by the Russians, Beevor says, to be
'casual rights of conquest' in return for crimes
committed by the Wehrmacht in Russia — were as young
as 12 and as old as 80 or more. Thanking him for his
book, one woman living in Little Hampton, West Sussex,
said: 'I have so many memories. I'd thought of writing
an autobiography, but people would not believe the
things I have survived... I think I was a little
insane afterwards.'

Beevor said he had been stunned by the response. 'A
lot of these women have obviously barely talked about
this maelstrom of horror they experienced, and
suddenly they've been plunged into discussing things
they haven't even been able to tell their closest
family members,' he said.

One German woman, Jutte from Preston, wrote to him:
'Often I was tempted to talk about it, but I realised
that no one would believe me or would interpret my
story as excessive self-pity. What you have written is
a way of showing how suffering can be endured.'

A woman whom Beevor visited in Berlin told him she had
garrotted a soldier with his gun as he had tried to
rape her mother. 'Only later,' said Beevor, 'did I
realise that she was the one who had been raped and
had invented the story because she was so traumatised
and was desperate for it to be true.'

In their letters the women confirmed the accounts in
Beevor's book of how, rather than befall the same fate
as their neighbours, many tried to kill themselves and
their children by cutting their wrists. Others hanged
themselves. Reports say classrooms of schoolgirls
committed suicide en masse.

Beevor details the horrific consequences of events
that resonated for years, affecting women's attitude
towards sex and causing huge social problems between
men and women.

By the late 1940s — the rapes went on for three years
or more — the Soviet troops had left behind them a
broken people. According to some reports, 90 per cent
of Berlin women were infected with venereal diseases,
while Beevor cites one doctor who said that, of the
100,000 women estimated to have been raped in Berlin,
a tenth of them died, mostly from suicide. The
mortality figures for the approximately 1.4 million
raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, he says,
are believed to have been much higher.

Of those who became pregnant, an estimated 90 per cent
had abortions. Those who did give birth often gave
their children up for adoption because of the shame.
In 1946, 3.7 per cent of children born in Berlin had
Russian fathers. Even now, says Helke Sander, a German
left-wing activist and author of The Liberator and the
Relieved, an extensive 1992 study of women who were
raped, the consequences are still felt.

'There are women who have never been able to talk
about it and whose husbands forbade it. There are
their children, who are finding out for the first time
that they are the product of rape, and there are those
who attempt to look in vain for their fathers.'

Beevor has shed considerable light on a chapter in
German history, the extent of which has remained
largely unknown outside Germany and which in the
country continues to be a taboo subject.

In Russia, Berlin: The Downfall has been thoroughly
denounced. Its ambassador to Britain called it 'an act
of blasphemy'. When it is published in Germany in the
autumn, Beevor has been warned it is likely to cause a
storm. The daily Die Welt has already described it as
'an epic shock' that reveals 'a previously unknown
chronicle of the rape atrocities which took place as
the Red Army made its way from East Prussia to
Berlin'.

Having already been denounced in Russia, Beevor is
prepared for the diplomatic row the book is capable of
unleashing between Berlin and Moscow. 'This is a
subject of huge delicacy, and there's tremendous
reluctance on the part of the German government to
bring this up and thus upset the new relationship with
Putin and the Kremlin,' he says.

But it will also hit the market as Germany finds
itself in the thick of a 'normalisation' debate in
which it attempts to take a broader approach to its
history. Die Welt says that after 'half a century of
inner chill', during which Germany has attempted to
reflect on and atone for its Nazi past but has paid
scant regard to the way ordinary citizens suffered,
Beevor's book is proof that to move forward Germans
need to reassess themselves not just as persecutors,
but also as victims.