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Raped by Red Army soldiers, they talk for the first time
Friday 10 April ...
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Raped by Red Army soldiers, they talk for the first time
Friday 10 April 2009
The women were in their 20s when they were raped by Red Army soldiers invading Germany at the end of World War II. Sixty years later, close to two million women are talking about their ordeal for the very first time.
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"The Americans retreated from the East German town of Halle and the Russians marched in. When that happened my female friends all fled, but I couldnt run because my leg was injured. So the Russians attacked me. And they raped me."
It was the end of July 1945, when 19-year-old Ruth Schumacher was raped by four Russian soldiers.
This was a fate shared by an estimated two million women in Germany who, at the end of the Second World War, suddenly found themselves confronted with the Soviet army. For decades many of these women didnt talk about what happened in the post-war years, faced with the crimes of the Nazis, nobody dared focus on German suffering.
"In West Germany the topic was taboo because the Germans were seen as guilty for the war," says Sibylle Dreher, a member of the Association of German Expellees. "And in Soviet-occupied East Germany, people werent allowed to talk about the abuse committed by the Soviet soldiers."
Over the years, women have gradually started talking about their trauma. But its only now that the first scientific study is being carried out, here at the university of Greifswald, in North East Germany. Psychiatrist Phillip Kuwert is gathering first-hand accounts from women who were raped by Soviet soldiers.
"What happened then is now being brought to light. I think it is only now, 60 years after the end of World War II, that it is possible to deal with this topic in a more nuanced way. We are really seeing a development of the German collective memory," he says. "One aim is to develop a new sort of therapy, suitable for elderly women who were raped in 1945. The events may have happened a long time ago: but the trauma can still be very much felt today."
The traumatic memories of recently-widowed Ruth Schumacher, who was not able to have children because of the rapes, are typical. "The fear always remains in your body, and you never get rid of it. The pain lessens over time, but the fear is always there."
To enable women to talk about their suffering is a big step forward. Especially since rape is still used as a weapon of war today. Last June, the UN officially categorized sexual violence as a crime against humanity.
Source:
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Further information:
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PREUSSISCHE ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
http://www.preuss...
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Expulsed German girl in despair, beaten (maybe raped...
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Expulsed German girl in despair, beaten (maybe raped), filmed on a country road near the Czech border.
The merciless revenge perpetrated on the entire German civilian population of Eastern Europe during the closing stages of the war, and for many months after, took the lives of over 2,100,000 ethnic German men, women and children. For generations these Germans had lived and toiled in areas that today are part of central and Eastern Europe. Around fifteen million of these Volksdeutsche were driven from their homes and ancestral lands in Poland, East Prussia, Silesia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia and forced back into the Allied occupied zones of Germany. This was the greatest forcible evacuation of people in European history. It is estimated that of the eight million Germans expelled from Poland around 1,600,000 died in the process. In Czechoslovakia, memories of the Lidice massacre inspired acts of revenge against German soldiers and civilians. Soldiers were disarmed, tied to stakes, doused with petrol and set alight. Wounded German soldiers in hospital were shot in their beds, others were hung up on lamposts in Wenzell Square and fires were lit beneath them so that they died the gruesome death of being roasted alive. These ethnic Germans lived in fear of the Russians but no one thought that the dreadful fate which awaited them would not even emanate from the Soviets at all but from their own neighbours, the Czechs!
Thousands of innocent German residents were murdered in their homes by the Czechs, others were forced into interment camps where they were beaten and maltreated before being expelled. Bishop Beranek of Prague declared: 'If a Czech comes to me and confesses to having killed a German, I absolve him immediately'. The Americans, utterly blind to the political consequences of allowing the Soviets to liberate Czechoslovakia, halted at the Karlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis line. The Sudeten Germans now had no protection from the torrent of bestiality vented on them by the Czechs. In Brno, 25,000 German civilians were forced marched at gun-point to the Austrian border. There, the Austrian guards refused them entry, the Czech guards refused to re-admit them. Herded into an open field they died by the hundreds from hunger and cold before being rescued by the US 16th Tank Division on May 8th 1945. In the Russian occupied zones of Eastern Europe and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of civilian men and women, Poles, Czechs, Romanians and Germans, were transported to the Urals in the Soviet Union and used as slave labourers until released in the late 40s. Mostly ignored by the world's press, the unimaginable suffering experienced by the expellees is largely unknown outside Germany, yet it was systematically carried out in a brutal fashion as official Allied policy in accordance with the decisions formulated at Yalta and Potsdam.
Around the small Bavarian village of Postberg (Postoloprty) in the province of Saazerland on the Bavarian-Czech border, hundreds of German men, women and children were shot to death during the Czech 'ethnic cleansing'. All German civilian residents in the province were rounded up by Czech soldiers and communist partisans and marched to a collection point in Postberg. There they were interned and beaten, many were executed. On September 17, 1947, a number of mass graves were discovered in and around Postberg. Thirty-four bodies were found in the village itself, another four nearby at Weinberg and twenty-six in an old sandpit at Schuladen. At Lewanitzer, 349 corpses were unearthed and another 103 bodies were exhumed from another mass grave. Ten corpses were found in a sand pit at Kreuz along with another 225 bodies in a mass grave at the local school.
At the military barracks five bodies were found and seven were buried under house No. 74. During investigations only one Czech, Vojtech Cerny, admitted to participating in the shooting and killing of four Germans. In all, a total of 763 Germans were murdered. A law, passed by the Czech authorities (The Benesch law: No115/1946) stated that all Czech crimes against Germans were not legible to penalty.
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