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Chapter 8 The “Big Rape”: Sex and Sexual Violence, War, and Occupation in Post-World War II Memory and Imagination Atina Grossmann The defeated Reich that the victors encountered in the spring of 1945 wore a predominantly female face. German men had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, leaving women to clean the ruins, scrounge for material survival , and serve the occupiers, often as sexual partners and victims.1 After years of remarkable inattention since the 1950s, and provoked in part by the sexual violence associated with the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Red Army rapes became the subject of vigorous scholarly and feminist debates on German women’s role in the Third Reich. The sixtieth anniversary of war’s end, with its new emphasis on recognizing, publicly and legitimately, German suffering as well as a growing popular awareness of rape as a war crime in civil and ethnic conflicts, brought renewed public attention—albeit in a less carefully contextualized manner—to the story of German women’s victimization.2 The numbers reported for these rapes vary wildly, from as few as 20,000 to almost one million, or even two million altogether as the Red Army pounded westward. A conservative estimate might be about 110,000 women raped, many more than once, of whom as many as 10,000 died in the aftermath; others suggest that perhaps one out of every three of about 1.5 million women in Berlin fell victim to Soviet rapes.3 Whatever the figures, it is unquestionably the case that mass rapes of civilian German women signaled the end of the war and the defeat of Nazi Germany.4 Soviet rapes secured a particularly potent place in postwar memories of victimization, because they represented one instance in which Goebbels’s spectacular anti-Bolshevik propaganda turned out to be substantially correct. Millions of Germans were trekking westward in flight from 138 Atina Grossmann the Red Army, and millions of German soldiers were marched eastward as POWs, but as Berliners—primarily women, children, and elderly—emerged from their cellars during the piercingly beautiful spring of 1945, the Soviets did not kill everyone on sight, deport them to Siberia, or burn down the city. As the musician Karla Höcker reported with genuine surprise in one of the many diaries composed by women at war’s end, “the Russians, who must hate and fear us, leave the majority of the German civilian population entirely alone—that they don’t transport us off in droves!”5 In fact, the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) moved quickly and efficiently to organize municipal government, restore basic services, and nurture a lively political and cultural life. In regard to violence against women, however, the Nazi “horror stories” (Greuelgeschichten) were largely confirmed. Official Soviet policy, however, obstinately refused to acknowledge that soldiers who had sworn to be “honorable, brave, disciplined, and alert” and to defend the “motherland manfully, ably, with dignity and honor,” would engage in atrocities on a greater scale than one of “isolated excesses.”6 Ilya Ehrenburg, having quickly assimilated Stalin’s new more conciliatory line toward compliant Germans, insisted that “The Soviet soldier will not molest a German woman. . . . It is not for booty, not for loot, not for women that he has come to Germany.”7 “‘Russian soldiers not rape! German swine rape!’” a Soviet interrogator bellowed at the actress Hildegard Knef when she was captured after having disguised herself as a soldier in an effort to escape the fate of the female in defeated Germany.8 Clearly, however, that new message did not impress troops who had been engaged in a costly final battle and had been told that “every farm on the road to Berlin was the den of a fascist beast.”9 As exhausted, brutalized Red Army troops— “a raucous armada of men with their trousers down” as one officer described his men during their “hour of revenge”—finally crossed into the Reich, they entered not only the fascist lair but also a still-capitalist world of “butter, honey, jam, wine, and various kinds of brandy.”10 Shocked at the continuing affluence of the society they had so determinedly defeated, and the contrast to their own decimated country, Russian soldiers told their victims, “Russia my homeland, Germany my paradise.”11 For German women in 1945, especially in Berlin and to its East, these Soviet rapes were experienced as a collective event in a situation of general crisis, part of the apocalyptic days of...

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