Chapter 56: Jul 1945 Allies Move Into Berlin

At the end of World War Two, there were more than two million German females raped by the occupying allied forces, mostly by the Russians. The charges of rape in the Western allied zones were investigated and when necessary, military law was enforced. However in the Russian Zone of Berlin almost 100,000 German women were raped by the Russian soldiers with the full knowledge of their superior officer who not only condoned the criminal acts but actually participated in them quite often. Before the western allies moved into Berlin, the Russian troops roamed the streets and the damaged residential areas to find German females to rape in the entire city proper. One out of ten of the women raped committed suicide unable to continue after the shameful humiliation sometimes in front of their children or their parents. The loss of dignity was too much for those women to have any hope of survival. The Russian soldiers had marched all the way from Prussia to Berlin with the promise of complete freedom in raping the German women wherever and whenever they wanted to before the other allies moved into the city. The Russians were enthusiastic about using rape as a technique of interrogation and generally started with forced undressing of the females to a completely naked state and then verbally abusing them with the promise of what was to come.

A very moving film made after the war was an Italian production called “Two Women”. It was the story of a mother and a daughter trying to survive in the period after the Italian surrender and as the German forces was being pushed out of Italy by allied forces. Strangely, in this film the bad guys were not the Germans, but the allies with the rapists being members of the Free French forces and were from Morocco. They wore American uniforms and drove American jeeps with the insignia of the Free French movement. The mother submits to every demand in order to save the daughter from the indignity of being raped but to no avail as they take advantage of her as well. Some of these troops were the first units to move into Paris as part of General De Gaulle’s agenda to shape the post-war government in France. It was a very disturbing movie for American audiences at time of learning about the horrors of the concentration camps and the treatment of prisoners of war in Imperial Japan.

The scene in the movie with the mother and daughter as victims of the war was repeated a thousand fold in Berlin as the Russians moved into the city following the agreements made between Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt during the war.

The geographical division of the city of Berlin into four separate zones of occupation by the allies was quite similar to the way the entire country had been split up into four zones of occupation with Russia in the East and the other three allies to the west of the city. Right from the very beginning the vast differences between East and West became visible as the western allies employed the civilian populace into cleaning up the debris from the heavy shelling of the city by Russian artillery in 1945. The violence that occurred before the western allies took over their respective zones was done by the Russians allowed to run wild in the city like animals murdering and raping civilians wherever they found them.

On the other hand, the Eastern Zone was left in ruins and no effort was made to restore order to the streets of the Russian Zone. Garbage was dropped in the debris and the rats multiplied quickly making it dangerous to even sleep at night. The people in the Russian zone walked around like zombies afraid to make any noise because it would draw attention to them from the mostly drunken Russian soldiers.

In the American zone, the people were most hopeful because the Americans were paying them with a reliable currency and arranging tents for those left homeless by the shelling. The Americans through the Red Cross and other organizations arranged soup kitchens for the hungry and distributed clothing and bedding for the survivors as soon as they registered in the zone resident books as a permanent resident using their previous address even if the building was no longer standing.

The British zone was similar to the American Zone with the exception that the supplies were scarcer and they used the American logistical systems to distribute the necessary items for survival. It is important to remember that all of Britain was under strict rationing due to shortages and they still depended on the United States for most of their military equipment to arm and supply their armed forces.

The French zone was the least successful of the western allies because their hearts were still back in Paris and the difficulties at home in rooting out the Vichy collaborators and establishing a government that would meet the needs of their people without allowing a communist takeover at the same time. The French prisoners of war were expedited to return home to their country and the French that had been recruited for slave labor in Germany were also given transport back home mostly by the American trucks and jeeps that had plenty of petrol to do the job. It was also likely that the French military were not inclined to show the Germans any sympathy after two world wars that had reduced France to less than a major player in Europe and clinging to her former colonial empire as the route to restoring her greatness in world politics.

In the Russian zone, the army was slowly sending their men back to the east along with everything they could steal or strip from the Germans and their commercial interests. They took all the farming equipment, the industrial machinery and robbed and raped all of the stores of their assets and inventory. The populace was left basically with just the clothes on their backs and in some cases they didn’t even have shoes because they were stolen as well.

As time progressed the disparity between the East and the West was obvious just from the debris and garbage on the Russian side and the improvements in the western zones as the clean-up moved ahead with the hard work of the civilian populace.