Exorcising Hitler (26 page)

. . . ‘Stay here!’ The girl pleaded suddenly. ‘You can sleep with me. You can do what you want with me, but only you, alone! I am prepared to do fuck-fuck, ready to do anything you want, just save me from all those men with their . . . you know . . .’

She showed me everything, told me everything, and not because she was vulgar. Her fear and her suffering were stronger than her shame and her shyness, and now she was ready to strip in front of all the other people [in the cellar], just to stop her tormented body from being abused, a body that should have remained undefiled for some years still, but had been so suddenly and crudely –

And then her mother pleaded with me too.

‘Don’t you want to sleep with my daughter? Your Russian comrades who were here wanted to, they all wanted to! They could come back, or there’ll be twenty new ones, and then my suffering will be limitless!’

The girl embraced me, pleaded with me, smiled at me through her tears. It was hard for her to beg like this, but she brought to bear a woman’s entire repertoire of tricks, and she did it well. It was easy for her to win me over with her shining eyes – I am so vulnerable to female beauty – but in the end my duty as a soldier won out . . .
⁴⁷

Gelfand was well aware of the horrors awaiting so many German women at the hands of his fellow soldiers. In one incident, he wrote of being attacked by a group of German soldiers, some of whom were female. Many were killed and some captured. The group also included two unexplained Russian women in German uniforms, who were interrogated and then shot out of hand.
The younger girls, however, were considered ‘“booty”, to be distributed throughout the various billets and beds, where for some days experiments were conducted upon them that cannot be repeated in writing’.
⁴⁸
As if to rehabilitate the image of his comrades slightly, Gelfand adds that after raping at gunpoint one of these girls, who turned out to be a virgin, Sergeant Major Andropov then ‘gave her civilian clothes, a dress, to wear’ so that she might not be identified as an enemy combatant.

Gelfand himself seems to have had several girlfriends in the months that followed. He was appointed to various administrative jobs and finally assisted in the management of German factories seized by the Soviet government, a job that meant a great deal of travel and many erotic opportunities. He seems to have been bothered neither by the marital status of his conquests nor by the appallingly anti-Semitic and racist opinions – typical of many young people educated in Nazi Germany – that at least one of them openly expressed.

Nonetheless, and despite everything, Gelfand remained at heart a romantic: ‘This girl truly deserves love and respect . . .’ he wrote of one young German woman with whom he had a casual affair. ‘She is really a human being in the truest sense of the word, although she is a woman and a German, and although she works in the theatre, where it is hard for a person of her sex to retain her moral purity.’ The effect is slightly spoiled by the fact that, in the same diary entry, Gelfand records another intimate encounter, this time with another girl entirely, which seems to have taken place later the same night.
⁴⁹

The last few months of Gelfand’s stay in Germany were also somewhat darkened by the necessity of treatment for gonorrhoea. Even romantics can’t avoid epidemics, and venereal disease reached epidemic proportions in occupied Germany as 1945 wore on.

If Lieutenant Gelfand’s account is anything to go by, within a relatively short while after the fall of Berlin, he and other young Russians – especially officers – were enjoying a vigorous, even strenuous social life that included not just the available local women, but also their families, and occasionally involved tourist visits to cultural destinations such as Weimar. In this sense, despite the problems and tensions, the relations that developed, and the basic style of life, were not so different from those experienced by the Western occupiers.

However, whereas in the Western zones anti-fraternisation policies were relaxed as the months passed, in the Soviet Zone they were gradually
introduced
over the same period. This was in part because, once the war was over, the Stalinist authorities were keen to re-establish tight controls over their troops, especially when it came to potentially subversive contact with foreigners. And then there was the continuing military-based crime wave even after the occupation regime had settled down.

The police chief of Halle-Merseburg, an industrial area in Saxony-Anhalt, noted the crimes committed within his jurisdiction by ‘persons in Soviet uniform’ between 1 January and 31 May 1946 and counted: 34 murders, 345 robberies involving breaking and entering, 328 robberies on the street, 60 train robberies, 123 stolen cows, 212 assaults and injuries (10 ending in death) and 162 rapes. As usual with all occupation troops, but especially the Russians, rampant alcohol use made the situation a great deal worse. The situation was particularly bad on and around the 1 May celebrations, when among loyal supporters of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a great deal of drink was customarily taken.
⁵⁰

The Soviet authorities’ attitude towards this kind of violent rowdyism on the part of their soldiers soon ceased to be as indulgent as it had been during the last months of the war. It remained inconsistent, but after the summer of 1945 there were quite frequent prosecutions, with punishments carried out in front of their comrades. Penalties could be light to non-existent, though crimes involving murder as well as rape, for instance, could be punished with death, and those involving insubordination could lead to substantial terms in a labour camp.

The other category of malfeasance – crimes of property – was pursued on a genuinely massive scale, befitting the vast hoard of treasure that the Russians found almost everywhere they looked as they marched, wide-eyed, into rich, sophisticated Germany. This routine theft was, moreover, tolerated and even facilitated by the authorities. The demand for ‘
Uri, Uri!
’ (watches, watches!) became as well known to German civilians as the dreaded order, ‘
Frau, komm!
’ Bicycles, clocks, radios and alcohol of all kinds (this last responsible for much of the sexual crime wave) were also in great demand by the rank and file as well as the officers, and they were simply taken at will. Rare books, paintings, antique and hunting rifles, bedding, clothes and musical instruments were also popular among the officer classes. The monthly total of parcels passing through the railhead at Kursk, in southern Russia, increased from 300 in January 1945 to 50,000 in April. By mid-May, around 20,000 railway wagons were awaiting unloading or redirection.
⁵¹

As for the fourth occupying power, the French, they came closest to the Soviets in terms of bad behaviour during the final weeks of the war and the immediate aftermath of peace.

Like the Soviets, the French ranks contained many who had suffered – or been forced to bear their families’ suffering – under German occupation. Few French troops saw any need to be civil to the Germans, though their officers generally liked to think they were ‘correct’ within certain narrow military boundaries. And, as with the Russians, alcohol was in great part responsible for the worst excesses. That, and the presence of colonial troops who, brave as they undoubtedly were in combat, had a poor record when it came to the mistreatment of civilians.

The small town of Magstadt, twenty kilometres west of Stuttgart, fell to the French army on 20 April 1945, and the troops, many of them so-called ‘Goumiers’ from North Africa, bivouacked there overnight, preparing for their advance on the industrial town of Sindelfingen. The village’s pastor reported later:

No pen can do justice to what happened during that night. Our women and girls, especially, had much to endure and much to suffer. The Moroccans had previously got into a distillery . . . and some of them were worse than animals. Around 260 rapes – medically confirmed – starting with girls of confirmation age and extending to the oldest women – will always make this day the most terrible that the people of this parish have ever had to suffer, physically and spiritually. Even in the vicarage I was not able, despite interposing my body and using my every power, to prevent many of those who desperately sought protection and sought refuge in my cellar from having to endure that terrible experience.
⁵²

When, a few days later, the French advanced on Sindelfingen (home of Daimler-Benz motors), they came under fire from some Luftwaffe flak units based in the Goldberg Housing Estate overlooking the town. Furious at this, the French unit commanders appear to have tolerated physical and sexual violence against the women auxiliaries serving in these units, who also included Russian forced labourers. Again, mass rapes occurred. No exception was made for the unfortunate Russian women, who had already suffered years of near-slavery and semi-starvation at German hands.

Similar excesses occurred elsewhere as the French either fought their way into districts of south-west Germany or took over the areas previously taken by the Americans before the reassignment of zones began. Looting and robbery was common. The colonial troops – particularly Moroccan troops – seem to have been closely involved, as were units made up from the Maquis, the French resistance fighters during the occupation, who after the liberation the previous summer had been turned into regular army units.

The Goumiers
had already distinguished themselves in the Italian campaign for their fierceness and bravery, but also, especially following the fall of Monte Cassino, become notorious for the rape of Italian women and the killing of any menfolk who tried to intervene – so much so that in post-war Italy the term ‘
marocchinate
’ was dubbed to describe such an orgy of violence. It was also the theme of Alberto Moravia’s novel
La Ciociara
(The Woman of Ciociara), based on his experiences while living in this area during 1943–4, later filmed by Vittorio de Sica with Sophia Loren and Jean-Paul Belmondo and distributed for English-speaking audiences under the title
Two Women
.

It was, however, also true that French officers could and did prevent such outrages. At the small ski resort of Hofsgrund Schauinsland, near Freiburg in the Black Forest, the pastor reported with some relief:

The first enemy troops who passed through the village (25 April) were Moroccans under the command of French officers. They descended the routes leading into Schauinsland in somewhat ragged order. Their bearing showed that they had expected resistance . . . the attitude of the men was in general correct, since the officers kept them under the strictest discipline. When, at several points during the evening, it was reported to the pastor that certain excesses were in danger of being committed, he was accompanied by the French to the houses concerned and in all these instances the worst was prevented.
⁵³

Once the fighting was past, the French authorities moved against their looters and rapists much more promptly than, say, their Russian equivalents. Individual officers and men protected German civilians. The total number of rapes seems impossible to judge, because so many German women were too frightened and ashamed to report the assaults. There are, however, clues to the true extent. The Koblenz Regional President (
Regierungspräsident
) later counted the instances of ‘injury to persons through occupation’ (
Besatzungspersonenschaden
) at some three thousand. In the small, picturesque town of Cochem on the Mosel, originally occupied by the Americans but then handed over to the French, the number of babies reported born as a result of rape by French troops was twenty-two.
⁵⁴

Unlike the Russians, the French began their time as occupiers with an anti-fraternisation regulation in place, but unlike the Americans and the British they hardly enforced it. Few sentences were passed or fines levied on French troops. In short, reflecting the usual French common sense in sexual matters, very little official attention was paid to liaisons between their soldiers and German women. These occurred, of course. Some even married. Paradoxically, in view of the harsh French attitudes towards the Germans during the early years of their occupation, it seems never to have been an important issue.
⁵⁵

Rape did occur in the British and American areas of control, despite strict bans on contact with Germans – although it should be noted that while around two hundred American troops were executed for this crime in Britain and the liberated countries, none were so punished in Germany, despite 284 convictions.
⁵⁶
All the same, the occupation forces with the most lax fraternisation regulations during the immediate post-war period – the Russians and the French – were clearly responsible for the most rapes of German women. Not that this proves cause and effect. A much more likely reason is to be found in the fact that the Russians and the French had suffered directly at the hands of the German occupiers and therefore felt both greater anger and greater entitlement to inflict such injury and humiliation in the enemy’s land.