The Rape of Berlin

Briefly summarized, “A Woman in Berlin” chronicles eight weeks of the Soviet army’s conquest of Berlin, which began in April 1945, and the ensuing mass rapes of more than 100,000 women by the victorious troops.

I first heard about the rapes in 1948 from a cousin, who had lived underground in Berlin during the entire war and the final battles for the city. The subject has been largely taboo in Russian history books and among Germans, who felt the events “besmirched” the honor of German womanhood.

The film is based on the diary kept by a 34-year-old German journalist, whose book was first published in English in the early 1950s, and only later in German. The author is listed as “Anonyma,” or Anonymous, and she is never addressed by her real name in the book or movie.

Anonyma (played by Nina Hoss) describes the chaos and suffering unsentimentally, without self-pity, and even with occasional humor.

She keeps her head, and to avoid the incessant gang rapes, decides to find a high-ranking Russian officer, become his mistress and put herself under his protection, or, as she puts it, “I had to find a wolf to keep the pack away.”

We meet Anonyma only briefly during the Nazi heydays, but apparently she was a good German and rejoiced in her country’s early victories. At one party, apparently right after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, she chortles, “Those Russians won’t know what hit them.”

In the film’s production notes, producer Gunter Rohrbach addresses that point by going back to Anonyma’s diary. “Was I myself for the [Nazi] system? Or against it?” she asked. “Either way, I was in the thick of it and breathed the air around us, that tainted us all, whether we wanted or not.”

Adds Rohrbach, “She was a journalist, which didn’t give her much opportunity to escape the demands of those who ruled. She wrote texts the way they were written in those days, even by journalists who later represented the democratic spirit of the Federal Republic.”

However, here is what the movie is not: It is not salacious, there are no graphic sex scenes, and there is only one fleeting shot of a topless woman.

It does not exculpate Germany or German crimes. In the midst of the carnage, a German veteran, returned from the Eastern front, remarks, “If the Russians do one-fourth to us what we did to them, there wouldn’t be one German left alive.”

It is not an anti-Soviet screed. There are loutish, brutal Russians and decent, sensitive Russians, but mostly there are men who have been fighting for four years and see the enemy’s women, as in every war, as justified spoils of war.

There is a fleeting mention of the Holocaust — though the word has not yet been coined — but no Jewish character. Yet the film is worth reviewing in any American publication because it teaches some universal lessons, which most Americans, who have been spared the devastation of war on their own soil since the Civil War, fortunately haven’t had to learn.

War is personal and primitive: If someone shoots at you, you don’t worry about motives and ideology. You shoot back and try to kill.

There is no noble army and no purity of arms. Paraphrasing French writer Andre Malraux in “Man’s Fate”: The real tragedy is that in any war the just side sinks to the lowest level of the aggressor.

There is no greater power than knowing you can do anything you want to another human without punishment or retribution. War confers that absolute power and therefore corrupts absolutely.

That applies especially to the enemy’s women, whether the power is used through brute force or by trading sex for a pack of cigarettes. When my infantry company got close to the border of Germany, orders came down strictly forbidding any “fraternization” with German women. The order was treated as a joke and never enforced.

Speaking of World War II, a reminder about the Red Army’s role: The Soviets lost 26 million people, about half soldiers and half women, elderly and children, and inflicted 85 percent of all German army casualties. The United States suffered 416,800 military and 1,700 civilian dead.

This comparison in no way diminishes the sacrifice and heartbreak of the American casualties and their families, but it might give pause to Fourth of July orators who boast that the United States won the war practically single-handedly.

“A Woman in Berlin,” in German and Russian with English subtitles, opens Aug. 7 at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and Town Center 5 in Encino, and at Edwards Westpark 8 in Irvine. For more information, visit