The Rape of Berlin
An anonymous diary from 1945 reminds us of the horrific crimes Soviet liberators committed against millions of German women.
By Jonathan Shainin
Downloadable from http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/08/18/berlin/index_np.html
or
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/08/rape-of-berlin.html

Aug. 18, 2005
"The essence of a nation," the French historian Ernest Renan said in 1882, is that its citizens have much in common, but "that they have forgotten many things." The Germans, it could be said, have forgotten things that most nations never knew. No single country has struggled so openly to reckon with its history, and the process has not been a short one. Germany has spent decades coming to terms with the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazi regime, but the penumbra of shame around these crimes also obscured the suffering visited on German civilians, 600,000 of whom were killed by Allied firebombing of cities like Dresden and Hamburg.

The publication of A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, then, shines considerable light on a hidden history of the war. The writer, an anonymous 34-year-old journalist who recorded in her diary the events of the fall of Berlin in May and June, 1945, does not fashion herself a victim. But her diary, released by a German publisher for the first time 60 years after the war, meets the challenge that novelist W.G. Sebald put to Germans in his lectures on "Air War and Literature": "to try recording what [they] actually saw as plainly as possible." In unsparing prose that brooks no pity and assigns no blame, the diarist calmly describes the disintegration of the German capital. Her diary begins less than a week before the Soviets entered the city, hastily scrawled by candlelight in a basement shelter: "my fingers are shaking as I write this."