Rape in Occupied Germany

Hello everyone! Today, we’ll be looking at a new historical event — but this time, something different.

The topic we’ll be covering here is a crime against humanity — and a long-lasting one at that. It represents the very peak of immorality.

When the War Was Lost

When the Soviet Union entered Nazi Germany, numerous reports documented widespread violence committed by Soviet troops against German civilians, particularly women. These actions were systematic and often brutal, leading to severe physical and psychological suffering across occupied territories.

It is estimated that more than two million German women were victimized during the occupation. While soldiers from other Allied nations were also involved in similar misconduct, the majority of these incidents have been attributed to the Red Army — a force often portrayed as the pride of the working class and a champion of equality.

Although Soviet authorities claimed to have punished the perpetrators, historical evidence suggests otherwise. Citizens who protested these acts within the Soviet Union were imprisoned, accused of “bourgeois and enemy sympathies.”

For a time, Stalin ignored the situation, only later issuing a directive when fears of renewed German resistance arose — yet the abuses continued nonetheless (Mazower, ibid., p. 738).

Witness accounts describe victims ranging widely in age, from children to the elderly, including expectant mothers, nuns, and recently delivered women. Many victims later took their own lives out of despair.

Research indicates that not only Germans but also other Slavic peoples and Jewish communities suffered similar atrocities in the territories occupied by the Red Army.

One observer, Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, who accompanied the Red Army in 1945 and was a close friend of physicist Andrei Sakharov, later testified to the scope of these crimes, calling it “an army that violated every German woman, from the youngest to the oldest.”

(Görsel, I.)

After the War

In the aftermath of the war, the situation in Germany remained dire. The country, divided into several administrative zones, continued to experience violence and exploitation at the hands of occupying forces.

German women suffered greatly under the occupation, facing mistreatment by soldiers from the American, British, French, and Soviet armies. In some cases, women sought protection from officers, entering relationships in exchange for safety or basic necessities, as postwar poverty left them with few alternatives.

Witnesses recorded tragic incidents of families being torn apart and young girls and mothers suffering alike. Many women, driven by hunger and desperation, resorted to sex work in exchange for food or cigarettes during the economic collapse that followed the war.

When Soviet troops were ordered to withdraw from Germany, some reacted violently or deserted their posts. Despite the moral ideals that the Allied nations claimed to represent, many acts of cruelty contradicted their public rhetoric of liberation and equality.

The suffering of German women during and after the occupation remains one of the darkest chapters in postwar history. While there are no confirmed accounts of such systematic crimes committed by Nazi forces during their own occupations, similar research on the Japanese occupation and its victims will be explored in future writings.

REFERENCES:

(1) Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, p. 738.

(2) The Guardian, ‘Antony Beevor — The Russian soldiers raped every German female from eight to 80’, 1 May 2002.