One testimony reflects better than any what happened those weeks in 1945 when Soviet troops entered Berlin at the end of World War II; It is a story of survival and ignominy, but also of life. When someone questioned its authenticity, Antony Beevor wrote a letter to The New York Times in which he defended that it was not a forgery and claimed that it was "the most impressive personal testimony that has emerged from World War II."
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It is A Woman in Berlin (Anagrama) and the author of it is anonymous (although her name has circulated widely after her death, and she even has an entry on Wikipedia, I prefer to respect her will: never wanted to sign that book). Ian Buruma also considers it "the best and most heartbreaking testimony" of the suffering of German women in the final months of the conflict and of an aspect that was hidden for decades: the mass rapes perpetrated by the Red Army, to which Stalin gave the approval when he stated that, after such a tough campaign, "soldiers had the right to entertain themselves with women."
The history of the book's publication, furthermore, exposes in an exemplary way the difficulty of dealing with memory after Nazism. The book is based on diary entries made between April 20 and June 22, 1945, during the Battle of Berlin and the first weeks of the postwar period (the war in Europe ended on May 8).
The author, according to Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his prologue, was an experienced journalist who abandoned her profession when Goebbels' tentacles no longer left a single crack. He knew Kurt W. Marek, another journalist who ended up as a prisoner of the Allies and who after the war went to live in the United States with the money provided by the book Gods, Tombs and Wise Men, which he published under the pseudonym C.W. Ceram. He received the manuscript and managed to have it published in the United States in 1954, with his prologue. "This is how A Woman in Berlin first appeared in English, followed by translations into Norwegian, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Spanish, French and Finnish," writes Enzensberger. And he continues:
"It took five more years for the German original to see the light of day, and even then it was not by a German publisher, but by Kossodo, a small Swiss publisher based in Geneva. Obviously, the German public was not ready to confront certain unpleasant facts. One of the few critics who reviewed it lamented what he called 'the author's shameless immorality'. No one expected German women to mention the reality of rape, nor to present it. German men as helpless witnesses when the victorious Russians claimed their women as spoils of war.
Stalin stated that, after a tough campaign, “soldiers had the right to entertain themselves with women.”
The author refused to have her book republished during her lifetime, even though things began to change during the 1960s, but in 2001 Enzensberger received a call from Marek's widow, stating that she had died and, therefore, The book could be republished.
It immediately became a huge success. Soon after, Beevor's book on the Battle of Berlin was published, an international best-seller, which also described the mass rapes carried out by the Soviets in their advance towards Berlin and during their occupation of the city. The same thing had happened in Budapest and Vienna; but it was a matter that had not been studied in depth either.
The data provided by the British historian—100,000 women raped in the capital alone, of which 10% died as a result of the attacks—made headlines in the international press. Tony Judt writes in Postwar (Taurus), his masterpiece on the history of Europe after World War II: "The Germans had inflicted terrible damage on Russia; now it was their turn to suffer. Their possessions and their women were there at their disposal. "With the tacit consent of its commanders, the Red Army was free to roam among the civilian population of German lands."
It was by no means the first time that rape was used as a weapon of war; rather, it is a constant in all conflicts in history. Goya dedicates several of his Disasters of War (1810-1814) to violence against women: 'Bitter Presence', 'They Don't Want' or 'There's No Time', although the best known is 'Not for Those', in the one in which two soldiers are seen about to rape some women next to whom there is a crying baby. It was something that Franco's Army practiced in the Civil War, incited by appeals such as that of Queipo de Llano, who harangued his troops from Radio Seville: "It is totally justified, because these communists and anarchists