December 1, 2002

Elderly women of Berlin have their own nomenclature for the granite Soviet war monument in the heart of their city: “The tomb of the unknown rapist”.

What makes Antony Beevor stand out is his penchant of telling the human story as opposed to mere war tales. He did it with relish two years ago with Stalingrad. While that book evoked sympathetic reviews from his Russian counterparts, the latest Beevor volume has triggered howls of protests from Russians, including a charge a ‘gross slander’ by Moscow’s ambassador in London.

Armed with incriminating memos, communiques, and records from recently opened Soviet archives, the author helps validate what millions of Eastern Europeans and Germans in their seventies already know but chose to be therapeutically amnesiac about: what followed the brutality of the Nazis in the aftermath of the Soviet ‘liberation’ was no better, often worse.

From the time that the vengeful Communist armies crossed the Vistula in the summer of 1944, they left nothing unbroken. Following closely on the heels of the already brutal Germans, the Russians fell on whatever property, livestock, and infrastructure was left in the Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and, in a grand finale, in Germany’s capital city.

More savagely, they went after the women. According to internal Soviet memos, by the time a sort of haunting peace had been established in 1945-46, two and a half million women had been raped, many multiple times, by the ‘liberating’ comrades of Marshal Stalin. The painful irony is that amongst these women were thousands of Jews, Russians, and Eastern European Communists who had suffered long under Hitler. Many a Berliner, where such mass rapes were the most ferocious, turned over the hiding places of his neighbour’s wife and daughters to save his own.

In the end, few women escaped the bestiality of the Reds. Soviet records indicate that the Moscow high command had given a three week free rein to its soldiery to go on rampage without check by officers or discipline. Those who survived the ordeal with a modicum of mental balance tried hard to blank out the individual pain in the sea of collective suffering or in dark humour. But it caught up even decades later.

One such victim of Russian liberation was former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s wife who recently took her own life for yet unexplained reasons. She was among the tens of thousands of women who ultimately committed suicide under the trauma of rape and helplessness.

The ‘liberation’ continued long after the war was over. Individual German homes and factories were stripped of their furnishings, plumbings and light fixtures and such booties of war shipped by the Russian military postal service to soldiers’ homes in Siberia and elsewhere.

Berliners, in their seventies and eighties now, gave personal accounts to Beevor about how the Russians broke into already pulverized homes and cellars to cart away what few possessions that were left to the German civillians. Even after the first rush of Russian savagery had halted, drunken bands of Red troops would roam around Berlin looking for more war booty, material and human, in the dead of the night.

For Berlin women, the imposition of some order on marauding comrades brought along existence in a primal gray area between rape and prostitution where, as interviwees told Beevor, thousands of fraulein depended on the protection and provisions of individual Russian officers for mere survival.

The book is iconoclastic in that it shatters the myth that German Nazis, brutal as they were, were any worse than some of the Allies in their treatment of civillians. While wars and plunder and rape are sadly synonymous, the sheer proportion of the population affected by the Russian victory in 1945 makes one wonder if humanity, for all its Geneva Conventions, has progressed beyond the Genghis Khan mentality of total war.

Richly detailed as it is in its human dimensions, the haunting book fails to ask a question that has remained unanswered for two generations: while Russians were carrying out their plunder and rapes on a massive scale, why was there a total silence from the champions of human rights and compassion in England, Switzerland, and the United States? Did the Anglo-Americans give their ally Comrade Stalin a blank check insofar as the defeated Germans were concerned?

Perhaps, Antony Beevor’s next book will answer those burning queries.

The fall of Berlin 1945
By Antony Beevor
Viking Press
ISBN 0670030414
490pp. $16.50

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