Raped by the Liberators — When 860,000 German Women Were Silenced and Four Governments Knew | WW2 DD

They bring what they can carry. They listen to the artillery getting closer. They pass around rumors about what the Russians did in East Prussia, about what happened in the villages they passed through on the way west, about what always happens when an army takes a city. The women discuss it openly, matterof factly. They have been discussing it for weeks.

Better a Russian on top than an American overhead, one neighbor says, referring to the Allied bombers. They laugh, then they stop laughing. April 27th, 1945. The Russians arrive in Martr’s neighborhood. What she writes in her diary that night is not what you expect from someone who has just survived what she survived.

There is no hysteria, no collapse, no self-pity. What she writes is a precise clinical account of exactly what happened because she is a journalist and she has decided that someone needs to write this down. I’m no victim, she writes. I refuse to be only a victim. The first Soviet soldiers come through the basement door on the evening of April 27th.

They are looking for watches, alcohol, and women in that order. Martyr notes dryly. The women in the basement have already developed a system. Hide the young girls behind the older women. Keep moving. Keep talking. If a soldier singles you out, go with him because the alternative is worse. Martr is singled out on a crumbling staircase just beside the basement door.

She is trying to get back inside. The door is slammed in her face by her neighbors. She writes about it the next morning, two sentences. Then she moves on to describing what the soldiers ate for breakfast because she is that kind of writer. What follows in the diary over the next 3 weeks is not a chronicle of victimhood.

It is something far more disturbing. A forensic account of how 100,000 women in one city adapted to the systematic violence of an occupying army. How they developed hierarchies of protection. How they traded access to higher ranking officers for relative safety from lower ranking ones. how they called it among themselves with black humor that has no English equivalent, sleeping for food.

Martr finds herself a major, then a left tenant colonel. She describes the calculation with the same precision she would apply to any professional problem. I have to have someone, she writes, it’s either this or that. And this is better than that. What the diary captures and what no official history written in the following 60 years would capture is that this was not random violence by individual soldiers acting alone.

It was systematic. It followed the army as it moved. It happened in every city, every village, every farm the Red Army passed through. Marshall Jukov issued explicit orders against sexual violence in late April 1945. The orders are in the Soviet military archives. Historians have found them. The orders were ignored.

And what makes the orders significant is not that they failed. It is that they exist. Because an order against something is proof that something was happening. The Soviet high command knew they issued the orders anyway and then they did nothing when the orders were violated thousands of times per day. June 22nd, 1945, 8 weeks after she started writing, Martr’s fiance G returns from the war.

She tells him what happened, what she had written down, what she had survived and documented with the precision of a working journalist. He reads the diary. He looks at her and he says the thing that German men said to women across the country when they came home and heard what had happened while they were gone.

He tells her she should have killed herself instead. She closes the diary that day, writes a final entry, and does not publish what she witnessed for 9 years. When she finally does publish in the United States in 1954 in English anonymously, the book is received as an important historical document. Anthony Beaver, the British historian who wrote the definitive account of the Battle of Berlin, calls it one of the great diaries of the entire war.

He writes the introduction to the English edition. He says every detail conforms to what he found in the Soviet military archives. When the book is published in Germany in 1959, the reaction is different. German critics say she has disarmed German women, that she should not have written what she wrote, that survival was shameful, that what she described as adaptation was collaboration, that a German woman should have chosen death.

Martr Hillers refuses to allow another edition to be published for the rest of her life. She moves to Switzerland. She marries. She leaves journalism. She never publishes another major work. She dies in 2001 at the age of 90. Two years later, her book is republished in Germany anonymously as she insisted. It stays on the bestseller list for 19 weeks.

In 2003, a German literary journalist identifies her as the author. The revelation causes controversy. Her publisher calls it a scandal. It takes 60 years for Germany to be ready to hear what Martyr Hillers wrote in that Berlin basement in the spring of 1945. What Martr documented was not an isolated incident. Historian Miriam Ghart of the University of Constance spent years in church archives across Bavaria.

Catholic priests had been filing official reports of sexual violence by occupying soldiers since 1945. Priests recorded what women told them in confession in parish offices in the margins of baptism records for the children born 9 months later. The records were there. They had always been there. No one had looked. Ghart’s estimate 860,000 women across Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania.

Not over years, in the first months of occupation alone. She published her findings in 2015. The book is called Crimes Unspoken. It is available in English from Polity Press. You can order it today. The governments of four countries, the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France, spent 60 years managing the public record of what their armies did in the spring and summer of 1945.

Not because the evidence didn’t exist. It existed in church archives, in military records, in the diary of a 34year-old Berlin journalist who wrote it all down in real time. It was buried because the victors write the history and the history the victors wanted to write did not include what happened to the women of the cities they liberated.

Martr Hillers knew this. She wrote it anyway. She wrote it so that someone 60 years later would be able to read exactly what happened on a crumbling staircase in Berlin on the evening of April 27th, 1945 and know that it was real and documented and that the woman who survived it refused until her last breath to call herself only a victim.

Her name was Martr Hillers. She was a journalist. She did her job and the world took 60 years to be ready to