German woman breaks silence about Red Army rapes

By Allan Hall in Berlin Published: 2:05PM GMT twenty-eight February 2010

Soviet Army soldiers with German flags at the Victory Parade on Moscow"s Red Square on Jun 24, 1945 Photo: Itar-Tass

"Why Did I Have To Be A Girl" by Gabriele Koepp is the initial book published about the rapes underneath a victim"s genuine name. Mrs Koepp was one of an estimated dual million German girls and women raped by Soviet soldiers, speedy by their personality Josef Stalin to courtesy the crime as a spoil of fight after Hitler"s advance had left twenty-six million Russians dead.

"Frau. Komm," was a word that women dreaded conference from Red Army soldiers. In the weeks after the city fell the rape widespread was so bad that even the Catholic church countenanced termination for a little victims.

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Even today, Mrs Koepp has difficulty sleeping. "I was frequency some-more than a child. Writing this has not been easy, but I had no choice: who else would do it?"

Mrs Koepp told Germany"s Der Spiegel repository at the week finish that it was on the dusk of Jan twenty-five 1945, when she was 15, that her mom told her to pack fast as she had to flee.

They lived in Schneidemuehl, in the former German segment of Pomerania that is right away a Polish locale called Pila. She and her sister left the subsequent day aboard a cattle sight that was ostensible to head towards Berlin. But it went in a opposite citation and the engine was shortly blown up by Russian artillery. "The burden car doorway was locked," she said. "I managed to stand up and yield out of a high window. My sister was left behind: I have never seen her again."

Her distress of mixed rape in a circuitously encampment went on for dual weeks until she was taken in at a plantation and hid from the Soviets.

She was reunited with her mom fifteen months after in Hamburg but says her mom was cold to her when she attempted to speak of her suffering and shame. British historian Antony Beevor chronicled the mass rapes in his 2002 book about the Soviet assault on Germany. Mrs Koepp"s book will be translated in to English at the finish of the summer.