by Heath, Tim
As the rumble of the incessant shelling crept ever deeper into the Führer Bunker fifty feet below the ground, one of the German army officers present during those last days remarked how he heard the muffled cries of some of the Goebbels younger children, who were obviously becoming alarmed by all of the noise above them. Their nightmare would, however, be a short-lived one, as Magda and Joseph Goebbels decided that they would kill their six children and then themselves, rather than be taken alive by the Russians. Magda Goebbels had commented earlier, ‘What terrible things do you think that the Russians would do to us and especially our girls if we allowed ourselves to be taken alive?’
On 30 April, Hitler and his bride of only a few hours, Eva Braun, killed themselves. Finally, after all those years, and now as the dream of ruling the world had come to its final logical, but equally insane conclusion, did Hitler feel he could give Eva Braun the commitment for which she had yearned all those years – the privilege of marriage.
The reality of the situation for both Hitler and Eva Braun dictated that death by suicide was the only remaining option available to them. What unimaginable horrors and tortures would Eva Braun have had to endure if she had been taken alive by the Russians? Rape, torture, interrogation and then inevitable execution may have been a certainty for Eva Braun. Hitler would, no doubt, have been dragged before the world stage, a crumbling wreck of his former self to be publicly ridiculed, humiliated and made to face trial for his Nazi-fuelled genocide. Hangmen would have jostled and vied for the honour of being the one to execute the most hated man on earth.
All that remained of Hitler now was the ghost, and the last will and political testament as dictated to his secretary Traudl Jung during the final hours. The resulting paperwork expresses, amongst other things, no remorse for the murder and persecution of the Jews, the overall conduct of the war, as well as encouraging the Nazi stance on the Jewish question. As it happened, the bodies were removed from the Führer bunker and placed in a shallow grave where the bodies were doused with fuel and set alight. There were also many unsubstantiated reports that Hitler had fled to Argentina. To this day, this is still subject of debate amongst historians, but the theory is wholly unlikely.
The last Soviet artillery assault came on 1 May 1945, when Russian patience with the stubborn defenders making their last stand from the Reich Chancellery building, ran out. At 6.30am that morning, virtually every Russian mortar and rocket launcher in Berlin opened fire on the Reich Chancellery and the surrounding streets. After a vicious ten-hour fight, troops of the 1st Battalion, 756th Rifle Regiment, hoisted the Russian flag upon the roof of the Reichstag on 2 May.
The following morning at 6.00am, General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the last commander of the Berlin Defence Area during the battle for Berlin, surrendered to the Russian forces, and at 3.00pm, 2 May 1945 the Russians had formally achieved their final objective and had captured Berlin.
The loss of life had been colossal due to Hitler’s persistent refusal to surrender. The Red Army had suffered 360,000 casualties, including 81,000 dead. At the time, Soviet estimates gave the number of German forces killed at just on 460,000, but extensive post-war research by the German authorities put the figure at a maximum of 100,000. German civilian casualty figures were put at an estimated 125,000 dead. Considerably more had been wounded, raped or driven to insanity by the hell surrounding them.
On 7 May, Chief of Operations Staff in the German High Command, Generaloberst (Lieutenant General) Alfred Jodl at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims, France, signed the instrument of surrender. SHAEF Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower signed on behalf of the Allies.
Moscow, however, declared the Allied-sponsored German Act of Surrender unacceptable, mainly for the unspoken reason that the Soviets, as self-proclaimed conquerors of Nazi Germany, wanted the ‘pleasure’ of accepting the German armed forces’ capitulation. A second surrender ceremony was therefore arranged by the Russians, to take place in Berlin itself. Presided over by Marshal Zhukov, Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Wilhelm Keitel signed the definitive German armed forces instrument of surrender just after midnight on 9 May. This redraft of the Reims document, however, was backdated to 8 May, to fall in line with the Reims surrender.
The Second World War in Europe ended officially at one minute past 11.00pm, Central European Time, 8 May 1945. For many German combatants and civilians alike, however, the war did not end on 2 May 1945.
Russian brutality was at fever pitch, particularly in Berlin the former capital of the vanquished Third Reich. The Russians, their hearts filled with hate and high on Vodka, continued to rape, murder and loot the now defenceless inhabitants of the city. In fact, the rape and murder began to spiral out of control, and it was only after Russian dictator Josef Stalin himself issued orders for the rape of German women and girls to stop, that the Red Army soldiers halted their barbarity in the city. Stalin only ordered the rape and murder to stop because he was anxious about later problems arising from the Soviet occupation. He realized that he could not afford to have thousands of German civilians grow to hate the Russian forces, and had to work quickly to capture the hearts and minds of the German people, before the Americans and British succeeded first.
Chapter Fourteen
The Soviet Rape of Berlin
The atrocities committed by the Soviet incursions into Berlin, particularly against German females, provide some shocking and disturbing reading, and is not for the fainthearted. It appears that, at the time, the world excused the Russian army for its grotesque behaviour in Berlin, as the Russians were always quick to mention Stalingrad whenever the issues of atrocities were raised. It is certainly true that the Russians, civilians in particular, did suffer terrible cruelty at the hands of certain units of the German army during its victorious early successful campaigns on the eastern front, especially the SS, who were responsible for the murder of thousands. However, there was nowhere near the number of sexual violations carried out against very young girls and women, as there were by the Red Army in Berlin and surrounding Soviet-occupied territories clawed back from the Germans in the Second World war.
During almost every campaign fought by the Germans in the east, each German soldier participating in the action were reminded of what would happen if he were found to have carried out any sexual assault or molestation of females in the occupied areas. During the French campaign two German soldiers had been found guilty of molesting (not raping) a French woman, both were quickly court martialed and shot by firing squad as a warning to the others.
Firstly, with the issue of war crimes, one has to examine what constitutes such an act. Certainly, the maltreatment, abuse, and/or shooting of civilians, unarmed or disarmed combatants, those who have expressed a clear wish to surrender whether military or civilian personnel, all constitute war crimes. The rape of young girls and women cannot be condoned under any circumstances whatsoever, regardless of the reason. Rape is a totally bestial and abhorrent crime, whether carried out against a man or a woman, and is sadly one frequently encountered in situations of war even to this day, as we have already learned from testimonies given in the previous chapter.
The abuse, torture, rape and murder of young girls and women in Berlin from April 1945, were carried out not only by the many hundreds of illiterate Russian peasant conscripts, who had joined the fight against the Germans, but also the regular Russian forces. Another little known fact is that, under Stalin’s direction, convicts were released from Russian jails on the condition that they volunteer for immediate military service within the Red Army. As a result of this rather unorthodox policy, many hundreds of dangerously psychopathic and unstable characters were unleashed upon the inhabitants of Berlin during the fall of the city. The only convicts excluded from this policy were those said to have been political prisoners. Stalin was well aware of the consequences of such an action, and it was to serve as yet another reflection of the evil that was to soon surface in all of its
obscene glory before a supposedly better post-war world.
German girls and women were viewed as just one of many of the spoils of war to be taken by the Red Army, along with the contents of German homes in the city. Under Stalin’s authorization, the Russian army high command was initially given a shameful three-day window where its soldiers, high on alcohol and hatred, could loot, rape and murder with an indiscriminate brutality. In fact, the rape and murder only stopped when Stalin and his army commanders became concerned about the possible effects these crimes would have on future Soviet-German relations after the fighting had stopped.
The mindset of many Red Army soldiers at the time was to make as many German girls and women pregnant, in revenge for the suffering of the Russian people, as well as to teach them a lesson, as it was bluntly stated, ‘for giving support to Hitler and the Nazi Party’. Nevertheless, many girls and women were gang raped by as many as five to ten men, and then shot dead afterwards. Even girls as young as eight years old were raped, without any regard whatsoever for the physical wounds caused by the ordeal and their psychological state of mind afterwards. Some suffered worse by having bayonets, knives, broken bottles and gun barrels inserted into their vaginas. However, the average Russian soldier considered the rape of German females as being the ultimate humiliation that could be meted out. Young boys and men also fell victim to the sexual brutality of the Red Army in Berlin, as Theresa Moelle can testify:
While held in internment, I heard many horror stories of what some of the Russians had done to people in Berlin. One woman told me of the fate of her 9-year-old son. The boy was hiding with his mother when the Russian soldiers discovered them. They were both ordered out of their hiding place at gunpoint and came out with their hands raised in the air. The Russians then attacked the boy and, after removing his underwear, they circumcised him with a sharp blade of some description, possibly one taken from a razor. The Russians laughed and told the boy’s mother, ‘Now your boy is a Jew.’
As in Germany, circumcision had been outlawed by the Nazis as it was seen as an exclusively Jewish practice for Jewish males only.
Thankfully, the boy mentioned above, who fell victim to this horrifying assault, survived the ordeal and was later given treatment by a Russian medic who disagreed with the conduct of his comrades.
Theresa also mentioned another incident while in Russian captivity:
The soldiers were constantly drinking alcohol, some of which had been homemade by distilling boot polish. They often fought and squabbled with one another, and it was during this time that they became especially violent towards us. They would threaten the girls by pointing at us and shouting ‘Fick’ which meant fuck in German language. They would often urinate and defecate in front of us. In fact, they took great pleasure in defecating upon a large portrait of Adolf Hitler that they had taken from one of the houses in the city.
One of them tried to kiss one of the German girls and she turned her head away from him. He tried again to kiss her and again she turned away. While this was going on the others, including officers, just walked away and let him carry on with what he was doing. He became angry and pulled his pistol out from his belt, and placed the barrel right against her forehead. He then unzipped himself and gestured for her to conduct a sexual act upon him. When he had finished with her, he walked a few feet away turned around and then shot her dead with the pistol. We thought that we were all going to go that way, one by one, even the German men with us. I had made up my mind that they would never rape me and they’d have to kill me first so they’d be raping a dead body.
The Russians also employed women into the ranks of their armed forces. Many had fought with great bravery in the battles alongside the men of the Red Army. The Russian male soldiers often abused their female counterparts, and seemed to have very little respect for them, and often enjoyed belittling them in public. Some of the women were employed to guard the captured German combatants and civilians.
Theresa Moelle remembers more than one encounter with a Russian female soldier who had recently joined the men. She recalls that the camp was situated somewhere near Mi-dzyrzecz, a town in Poland to the east of Berlin.
The women soldiers of the Red Army came and joined us after several days had passed. We thought that they might be better being women, but this was not the case. One of them was a bully and a big-built bitch that liked to hit us girls. She often entered the long hut, which was actually a cow shed, where we were kept during the hours of darkness, deliberately mumbling in Russian and German and stamping around to keep us awake; we were tied up and could not move.
She came to me one evening and grabbed hold of my hair and yanked my head back. She pushed her big face up against mine and whispered sarcastically, ‘I want to know, when you masturbate yourself, do you see your dead Führer’s face?’
She then brushed her lips against mine and I felt her tongue. I did the only thing I could and that was to spit hard into her fat face. She reacted by calling me a ‘Nazi scum’ and ‘German bitch’, and all these things as she wiped the spit away with her sleeve. She then gave me an almighty slap across the face with one of her hands that was like the paw of a bear. That slap hurt me more mentally than physically. If only I could free myself, I knew that I could hurt her just as much back. But I had to sit there and take it.
Even elderly German women were not spared the indignity of being raped when caught by the Red Army. During the research for this chapter, the author was able to access many previously unseen documents and photographs that graphically illustrate the sexual violence perpetrated by elements within the Red Army. Almost all of the photographs I viewed were just too distasteful to have been included in this work. One of the black-and-white photographs held in a German archive, shows the body of a 60-year-old German woman who had been raped to death somewhere near the Warsaw area in 1945. It is believed that at least twenty men had been involved in that attack, and that the woman’s only crime was that she was a German citizen. This particular scene was also filmed by German combat cameramen in the area, which was then used as proof of Russian atrocities taking place in the area at that time. It is small wonder that the population of Berlin fought so desperately when such films were shown to them in such graphic detail in cinemas around the city.
The Russians also used torture as a means of gleaning information from captured females, particularly those who had joined Werewolf and Volkssturm units around the city.
Dora Brunninghausen recalls:
When captured, the Russians wanted to know what military information we could tell them. The men and Hitler Youths who refused to co-operate with them were beaten with rifle butts and had their fingers crushed and fingernails wrenched out. Some were bound with rope and had gasoline poured over them, and if they continued to refuse to co-operate they were set alight. I myself was interrogated and told my captors that I knew nothing of any military planning or anything.
They said to me, ‘Are you sure about that, Fraulein? You were involved in the fighting, and you were armed, surely you must have some knowledge.’
I again told them that I knew nothing. They left me alone for a while and then came back and tied my hands behind my back with metal wire. I was held down on the ground and the clothing removed from the upper half of my body. I thought to myself ‘this is it, they are going to rape me and shoot me.’ After exposing my breasts, one of them reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter. He clicked the lighter with his thumb and a large yellow flame came out of the top. The one asked me again if I knew any information. I told him I did not know anything, and that I had been mobilized to fight under the Hitler Youth regulations, and that much time had been spent digging trenches and helping the Volkssturm to assemble defences.
The one with the cigarette lighter then moved the flame towards my breasts, particularly the nipples, and threatened to burn them with the lighter if I did not tell them anything. I began to cry and pleaded with them to leave me alone. One of the Volk
ssturm who sat tied up with the others screamed at them, ‘You are bastards, why don’t you leave her alone, she doesn’t know anything, she is just a child.’
The attention of the Russians then turned towards this Volkssturm recruit. They walked over to him and said to him, ‘You seem to have much to say for yourself, my friend.’
They then began to beat him. He could not protect himself with his hands bound behind his back and he suffered terrible facial injuries during the assault. When they left him, one of his eyes was hanging out of its socket and some of his teeth were lying broken on the ground around him; he was covered in blood – that man died shortly afterwards. Had it not been for him speaking up when he did, I probably might not have been here now to tell you this.
I began to suffer from nightmares during my sleep and we were often beaten for crying out in our sleep. The mentality of our captors was something we could not understand: why did they not just shoot us and get it over with, that might have been easier to take. I was so lucky, some young girls, particularly those who had been involved with the SS as auxiliaries, suffered terribly, and were always executed afterwards.
Burning the nipples of girls and women with cigarette lighters and lighted cigarettes seemed to be one of their favourite tortures, amongst other degrading things. Women with children also suffered, as the children were often threatened with knives at their throats and things. In fact, the Russians were often referred to by the German people as Ivans, after Ivan the Terrible, who ruled Russia in 1547.
Dana Henschelle was captured in central Berlin. After Templehof, she declined to fight again, and had decided that she was better employed in the service of giving medical aid to soldiers and civilians wounded in the fighting.
We had to move out of positions in danger of being overrun in the fighting, and had used the lulls in between the battle to move out to other safer areas of the city. We had to use the many dugouts and trenches to move around, as shells and bullets were flying everywhere in certain areas of the city. We ended our war on the Potsdamer Platz, and we were inside the Colombushaus. The Colombushaus was once the biggest department store in the world. I had never been inside this building before in my life, as my parents could never afford to go in there and shop. It was as good as any place to try to care for those who had been wounded in the fighting. I did my best to help the wounded, as our soldiers continued to shoot at the Russians all around the outsides of the building.