by Heath, Tim
As they drew closer, I could hear the thud of their boots on the ground and they shouted commands to each other. I also heard the dogs and their growling noises grew louder. I kept my eyes shut as I thought that I was going to be killed. One of them grabbed hold of me and began to search my clothes. I think he was looking for hidden weapons, but I had no weapons on me at all. He then held my face in his hands and I slowly opened my eyes to see this big unshaven face staring at me. I remember the Red Star badge on his uniform and some medal ribbons. He said something in Russian to his comrades, and the soldiers with the dogs then went off with the others and the sound of gunfire resumed.
The Russian then said to me in broken German, ‘I will see to it that you are removed from here and away from danger.’
I told him that my mother and father are here somewhere and that I lost them a short time ago in the area.
The Russian replied, ‘Oh, no there are only dead Germans around here, and now I will see that you are removed, please do as I tell you to and you will be safe.’
I had no choice but to go with the Russian, and we frequently had to crawl along the floor as we left the area because of the rifle, grenade and machine-gun fire that was raging around us. Suddenly, he dragged me into one of the empty buildings, made me take off my underwear then forced himself on me, he raped me. The rape hurt and I screamed out and he put his fingers in my mouth so I couldn’t scream out anymore. In a few minutes, he had finished and then got off me like nothing had happened. He later handed me over to another group of Russians and I was taken to a civilian holding area, where we were given a white number on our clothing (mine was number five).
We received very little food and water for the next two weeks. I never saw my mother and father again and never learned what happened to them. Bodies just vanished in the rubble and shellfire and they were just two of many thousands who went missing during the fall of Berlin. It is believed that they had been killed either by shell or rifle-fire and may have been hastily buried in an unmarked grave somewhere.
I told the Russians holding us that I had been raped, and they laughed and told me, ‘Raped eh, you are lucky we did not kill you.’
While everyone else around them began to flee, Helene Rischer recalls how she, her father and mother prepared to defend themselves. Aged twenty-four at the time, she remembers the subsequent engagement with the enemy and the rape of herself and her mother.
The rumble of distant shells had been going for days. At night, the sky was alive with flashes as Russian guns came ever closer to our city. After the battle for Seelow, the bloody Russians were able to fire their guns directly onto the city. Shells fell all over the place and as they took more ground around the city, the shelling got much worse. In our home, Father had collected our furniture tables together and used them to try and make a barricade for our downstairs windows. A space was left so as my father could shoot his rifle. My father insisted that ‘No bloody Bolshevik will ever drive him or his family from their home’, and instructed me and my mother that if the Russians came down our street we were to go outside into the air-raid shelter in the tiny garden space and hide in there, and not to come out under any circumstances. He lastly instructed me to protect Mother with the small-calibre pistol that I had been issued with under the people’s mobilization. The pistol was an old Czech made design that seemed ironic under the circumstances.
When the Russians did come, they came like a whirlwind in the night. There was intense commotion outside and people were running and firing weapons, and we heard many people outside our house.
Father shouted to one of the people ‘What is happening? And what is going on?’
A voice simply replied, ‘They are coming; the Ivans are coming, hundreds of them.’
Father shouted for me and Mother to get out of the house and into the shelter. Mother and me questioned what good that would do and maybe we should run with the others.
Father told us to ‘Shut up and do as you are told or else!’
The sound of gunfire seemed to steadily die away over the next hour and it felt as if we were the only people left in our now deserted street. Nothing happened and we began to think that maybe the Russians were not coming after all, maybe they had retreated or something. Against Mother’s wishes, I crept out of the shelter, as I wanted to go and see what was happening with Father. I crept like a cat slowly into our yard. I was just turning the corner of the house to go around to the side door, when I was confronted by a man holding a rifle. We both froze like a cat and dog meeting one another. I reached for the pistol that I had placed inside my waistband and the soldier that resembled no more than a dark silhouette before me in an instant drew up his rifle to his shoulder. I was the quicker of the two of us and fired three shots into him from no more than ten feet away. He sank to the ground dead and his rifle clattered down by his side. Father came bursting out with his rifle at his shoulder and we almost collided with each other in the doorway of our house. He swung me around the door and slammed it shut.
‘Why the hell did you not do as I told you to, and stay in the shelter with your mother?’ he raged at me.
He could not get another sentence in as the door burst in and shots followed that almost hit both of us. We dropped our weapons and fell to the floor in terror and found ourselves staring down the muzzles of Russian Mosin–Nagant rifles with long, pointed bayonets on their ends. The Russians began to kick us and we huddled together, they then grabbed my father and dragged him outside where they continued to hit him. I shouted for them to stop and kept telling them ‘Nein, Nein’ [no] but they wouldn’t stop.
Mother had by this time run out of the shelter and she was also screaming at them to leave her husband alone. They then grabbed Mother and got her down on the ground. One of the Russians then muttered something in his own language, and grabbed my wrists and held me tightly from behind while the other unbuttoned my blouse and slid his hands inside. I tried to kick the soldier holding me with the heel of my shoe, but he bent me further backwards so as I could not kick. Mother struggled and shouted at them to leave me and take her instead, but this one man continued to rub his hands inside my clothing. The grip upon my wrists seemed to tighten even more and then my legs were kicked out from under me and I fell to the ground. One of the soldiers grabbed my wrists and pinned my arms down while the other tugged until my clothes were removed from me. This man then removed his belt from his trousers, unfastened them and they fell around his ankles. It was absolutely horrifying for me. I could not believe this was happening and I tried again to struggle, but could do nothing at all to stop this.
As I continued to struggle he got on top of me and I felt him nudging at me and then he put his penis inside me. I tried and tried to struggle free but it was hopeless, I began to scream out as loud as I could, then another one of them slapped his hands over my mouth, and I tried to bite his hand, so he took a belt or something and tried to put it into my mouth. He shouted something at me in Russian and hit me in the face. I was being raped by this man and had no way of stopping him. I tried to focus my thoughts on anything other than what was happening to me now. The worst thing of all is that they forced my parents to watch this. The man was rough and the ordeal hurt, the smell of his dirty body and breath and the feel of sharp facial hair were just horrible, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. His sweat was dripping from off his face and into my eyes and mouth. I turned my head to the side with my eyes shut and he started to bite and kiss at my neck.
When he had finished he lay down looking at me, panting heavily for a few seconds and then just got up off me, pulled his trousers up, put his belt back on, picked up his rifle and walked away. The man holding me down then leapt on top of me, entered me and began to rape me also. All I remember afterwards is my parents screaming hysterically for them to stop it. When they had finished some of those Russians who had stood by watching then raped my mother while my father and I were forced to watch.
We were then taken away
at gunpoint to a place where the Russians had started to gather all those captured during the fighting, mainly civilians, I was not the only one to be raped in the city; Russian soldiers had systematically raped many girls and looted their parent’s homes of jewellery and valuable household items. Those Russian soldiers who did the raping and could speak a little German often said to their victims, ‘Why do you struggle, we are liberators of German vaginas.’
I do not know how I was able to cope with what happened to me. We never ever talked about it after the war as Mother and Father strictly forbade it, and it was one of things you looked upon with great shame. I did report the rape to the German Red Cross [Deutscher Ritte Kreuz], though this was much later, and by which time the physical evidence of the rape had gone. It was only by a miracle that those who had raped us had not made either my mother or me pregnant. Both my parents are dead now, but I hope that they can find it in their hearts to forgive me for telling this to you all these years on. The Russians didn’t destroy us or ruin our lives as they had hoped to do by raping and beating us. We were lucky to have survived our ordeal, as many had not been that fortunate. I suppose that the rape was a small price to pay for being allowed to live after shooting and killing one of their comrades, but I was only young and they were grown men who should burn in hell for what they did to me. Maybe they are burning in hell at this very moment, though they tell you God forgives all those who do such terrible things.
The account of this rape was by no means easy for Helene to recall for this publication. This interview, recalling the rape, was the longest I had to conduct during my research. With the help of her husband Bernd, who was constantly at her side consoling her and holding her hand, she was, after some considerable time, able to present all of the terrible details.
Helene said afterwards, ‘Anyone with a daughter should read this, as this is what happens in war when one country conquers another and women and girls become the spoils of war.’
Anita Skorz and her close friends from the Hitler Youth were also caught up in the madness of war during the street fighting in the city.
We called Berlin the ‘Dying City’ because that is how it had become. It was in total ruin and we were being hailed to fight for what were no more than ruins. Our parents were going hysterical with worry and, as we left them to join the Berlin defenders, one of the local police rounded them together and told them to seek shelter along with the other families and women with small children and babies in the little chapel. I remember the calls of reason such as ‘What about our sons and our daughters?’ and ‘Why don’t you cowardly men do the fighting for them?’
Uproar amongst the parents began to break out and the policeman drew out his pistol and threatened them, ‘Don’t make me have to use this.’
We collected weapons from what had been our local NSDAP offices; there were not many left apart from some grenades and some rusted handguns of various types. I tied my hair up into a ponytail with a piece of shoelace to keep it from out of my eyes and picked up several grenades. We joined up with the reservists who had much better weapons than we did, and were told what we must do and to wait behind a barricade made from the remains of a tram and some sandbags. This was bisecting one of the narrow streets, and there was a Tiger tank and machine gun at the two other bisecting points. Our task was to try and to stop any assault from reaching the area of the Reich Chancellery, a very special task we were told. There were many very heavily armed Waffen SS soldiers occupying the ground to our rear in dug-in positions. They called out words of encouragement frequently to us, though a girl named Maria, who had been one of our BDM deputy or junior leaders, whispered under her breath, ‘Oh, shut up will you, your turn will come soon enough.’
She then turned to me, and with a concerned look on her face said, ‘Anita, if anything happens and we become separated, and if I should never see you again for whatever reason, I want you to remember that we were sisters in life, and we will be sisters again in death.’
She then kissed me softly on the cheek and began to stare into the big open space in front of our position. One of the young men warned us against allowing ourselves to be captured by the Russians. He said, ‘If you become captured you must not co-operate or smile at them and you should avoid any eye-to-eye contact with them, do you understand me?’ We replied, ‘Yes.’
He then walked away and we watched him pick up a field telephone and he began to talk to someone on the other end. He called across to one of the soldiers who was smoking a cigarette, and when the young soldier took the phone and began to talk into the phone, he became quite irritated and began to raise his voice. After a few minutes he slammed the phone down and walked away, cursing to his comrades. Maria asked me to find out about this telephone conversation, and I said to her, ‘How on earth am I going to do that, he will not tell me anything, who am I to know?’
Maria dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Go on, you are a pretty girl, you can charm him.’
I got up and walked over to the soldier who was sat down with his rifle looking at a photograph. ‘Is that your family?’ I asked him.
‘Yes’ he replied.
I then asked, ‘May I have a look at the picture?’ He passed it to me with a deep sigh.
‘Your wife and children are very pretty,’ I said as I passed him his photograph back, he then put it back into his wallet.
I then asked him, ‘Do you think we will ever get out of here alive? Was that what the telephone call was about, as I noticed you were upset.’ He looked up at me and replied,
‘I had phoned earlier to ask about our reinforcements. That phone goes to the Führer Bunker and I had spoken with Bormann [Martin Bormann] about our reinforcements.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘Well’, he said (putting on a grumpy voice), ‘Bormann said to me in his sarcastic voice, “My dear comrade, the people are your reinforcements now.” And that is what upset me so much. What does Bormann understand of this situation, he is no military man, and he will not let me speak to anyone, he just hangs up.’
He then asked me my name and said his was Peter.
He also said to me, ‘You should not have to be doing this, this is our war not yours.’
I replied, ‘Yes, but Berlin is my home and it is my city also.’
Incidentally, that field phone connected to the bunker building was never used again, and later during the brief fight with Russian forces, I picked it up and the line was completely dead. We did everything possible to hold the Russian assault, but we had no decent weapons. I threw several grenades as our position was stormed and one of them failed to explode. We were overrun in a well-coordinated and heavy attack; many of our defenders were killed including Maria. Maria was stabbed with a bayonet as she tried to fire a rifle. She went down and this brute jabbed his bayonet into her belly three times, even though she had shouted a surrender cry. Many were taken prisoner as combatants. We were kicked, punched, spat upon and roughed up before being bundled off with our hands in the air.
The SS had the best equipment and were able to continue to fight and fall back into the Chancellery building, where they continued to inflict heavy casualties on the Russians. At the end, some shot themselves with their last rounds of ammunition rather than be taken alive.
As we were moved away, we could see the extent of the Russian attack, they were everywhere, and T-34 tanks and artillery were pouring in from all directions. They were possibly heading for the Reich Chancellery. As we walked with our hands on our heads into captivity, the Russian soldiers were still pulling frightened people from basements and cellars and had mixed reactions to us. Some just looked, others smiled and swigged from bottles in a gesture of victory, and there were those who shouted things at us and spat. As we passed alongside one of their tanks one of the crew hung his penis out and urinated upon us as we walked by. My thoughts then suddenly turned to Mother and Father, are they alive? Did they remain safe? Where are they?
Suddenly, it was like the e
nd of the world, and I have to admit, as I trudged through the streets with the others in a long line I cried, more out of frustration and anger than anything – frustration at not being able to do anything about it and anger at perhaps letting my parents down, and the strong possibility that I may never see them again.
At this stage of the battle for Berlin, only the government sector around the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery, with its subterranean bunker system, remained under German control. Everything else was now in the hands of the jubilant Red Army.
By the evening of 29 April, the fighting was less than a quarter of a mile from Hitler’s bunker. The last days in the bunker were filled with an almost surreal air of madness as Hitler’s moods constantly changed. One minute he was euphoric and cheerful with much rejuvenated spirits, and the next he became a raging madman shouting at his staff. He blamed them and the generals for treachery and incompetence.
There were few things to console Hitler in the depressing air of the Führer Bunker but he found solace in his pet Alsatian dog, named Blondi, and her puppy, and the Goebbels children. Joseph and Magda Goebbels were among the few who had elected to stay with their beloved Führer and to die with him. Hitler had a particular affection for Heidi Goebbels. The little girl, with her blue eyes and long blonde locks of curling hair, could frequently be seen sat on Hitler’s lap, talking to him and putting her little arms around him in genuine shows of affection. She was one of the very few who had access to Hitler’s private apartments at all times. He adored the little girl who often helped him to overcome his many melancholy bouts.