NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
He said it was German men who had suppressed the subject. For them the worst humiliation was that their wives had been raped and they simply could not talk about it, they forbade their wives from talking about it and it became a taboo. Beevor says the story of the rapes, while important, has attracted more attention than he would have hoped. Nearly 80, 000 Russian soldiers died and more than a quarter of a million were wounded in the fight for Berlin. He said it was vital to understand the suffering of Russian soldiers at the hands of both the Germans and their own commanders.
The last chapters are among the saddest - that those people who survived the war thinking they were going to go back and be treated as heroes then found life was very hard to fit into. German women have come forward after 50 years to speak of their appalling treatment at the hands of Soviet soldiers, who raped their way across Germany for four years from 1945. Their ordeal has been revealed thanks to Antony Beevor, whose book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 came out in the UK to great acclaim last month. In his book, Beevor, a Sandhurst recruit turned writer, uses previously unpublished material from Russian archives in Moscow to describe vividly the horrific suffering of an estimated two million German women and girls who were gang-raped by drunken Soviet soldiers as they made their way across the country with the aim of forcing the Nazis to retreat. web Among the victims were women who became prominent figures, including Hannelore Kohl, wife of the former Chancellor, Helmut. Mrs.
Kohl, who committed suicide last year, was raped along with her mother at the age of 12 as they failed to escape on a train bound for Dresden. Beevor's book has unleashed an emotional response from scores of victims, mainly living in Britain, and their relatives, who have contacted him to express their gratitude that the story of an entire generation is finally being told. I was carrying out orders to bury some dead Hitler Youth boys when they found me, Martha Dowsey says gently and slowly with a heavy German accent. Six Red Army soldiers with blackened faces held me down on the ground close to the graves and raped me one by one. She repeats over and over: I'm not lying, I'm not, you must believe me.
The housebound 81 -year-old is understandably nervous about telling her story, not least because it has taken decades for her to find anyone either in her adopted home of Britain or Germany who would believe her experiences of life in post-war Berlin as Stalin's troops marched in. For years the Red Army soldiers were seen as the heroes who freed Germany from the shackles of the Nazis. But for Martha, and hundreds of thousands of others, they were anything but. 'They were destructive and evil and almost ruined my life. I never told my children - they would not have understood - and my husband knew something terrible had happened to me, but was kind enough never to ask, 's he says from her home in Clapham Common, south London. Only now has Martha Dowsey ne Schrder gathered the courage to speak, thanks to Beevor's book. The victims - considered by the Russians, Beevor says, to be 'casual rights of conquest' in return for crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in Russia - were as young as 12 and as old as 80 or more.
Thanking him for his book, one woman living in Little Hampton, West Sussex said: 'I have so many memories. I'd thought of writing an autobiography, but people would not believe the things I have survived... I think I was a little insane afterwards. ' "Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding places of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night, " Beevor describes. Beevor estimates that rape victims from Berlin's two main hospitals ranged from 95, 000 to 130, 000, one doctor deducing that out of approximately 100, 000 women raped in the city, some 10, 000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. "The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1. 4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, " Beevor says, maintaining that at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appearing to have suffered multiple rape. In Berlin, says Beevor, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels.
Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody. Beevor said he had been stunned by the response. A lot of these women have obviously barely talked about this maelstrom of horror they experienced, and suddenly they " ve been plunged into discussing things they haven't even been able to tell their closest family members, he said. One German woman, Just from Preston, wrote to him: Often I was tempted to talk about it, but I realized that no one would believe me or would interpret my story as excessive self-pity. What you have written is a way of showing how suffering can be endured. A woman whom Beevor visited in Berlin told him she had garroted a soldier with his gun as he had tried to rape her mother.
Only later, said Beevor, did I realize that she was the one who had been raped and had invented the story because she was so traumatized and was desperate for it to be true. In their letters the women confirmed the accounts in Beevor's book of how, rather than befall the same fate as their neighbors, many tried to kill themselves and their children by cutting their wrists. Others hanged themselves. Reports say classrooms of schoolgirls committed suicide en masse.
web Beevor details the horrific consequences of events that resonated for years, affecting women's attitude towards sex and causing huge social problems between men and women. By the late 1940 s - the rapes went on for three years or more - the Soviet troops had left behind them a broken people. According to some reports, 90 per cent of Berlin women were infected with venereal diseases, while Beevor cites one doctor who said that, of the 100, 000 women estimated to have been raped in Berlin, a tenth of them died, mostly from suicide. The mortality figures for the approximately 1. 4 million raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, he says, are believed to have been much higher. Of those who became pregnant, an estimated 90 per cent had abortions.
Those who did give birth often gave their children up for adoption because of the shame. In 1946, 3. 7 per cent of children born in Berlin had Russian fathers. Even now, says Here Sander, a German left-wing activist and author of The Liberator and the Relieved, an extensive 1992 study of women who were raped, the consequences are still felt. While the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, the ordeal for German women in Soviet occupied areas continued. A "high proportion" of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled from Germany's eastern provinces were raped. About two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
There are women who have never been able to talk about it and whose husbands forbade it. There are their children, who are finding out for the first time that they are the product of rape, and there are those who attempt to look in vain for their fathers. Beevor has shed considerable light on a chapter in German history; the extent of which has remained largely unknown outside Germany and which in the country continues to be a taboo subject.
Free research essays on topics related to: red army, million women, east prussia, committed suicide, one doctor
Research essay sample on Committed Suicide East Prussia
