I’ve been reading lately on the involvement of women in the Soviet armed forces during WWII. Not only were they present in the workforce and as nurses, but they also participated heavily (compared to other armies) in the actual combat.
I remember from my WWII class there was a massive ransacking of Germany including a mass rape of German women following the Allies’ victory. IIRC all powers participated but none to the extent of the Soviet troops.
My question is what was the role of female Soviet troops while this was happening? I’d think there had to be some witnesses given they were everywhere from tench ware fare to sniper posts.
Were they complicit? Or were they participants? Were they not present at all? We can speculate all day but are there any resources that actually investigate the phenomenon?
From my reading on the subject, this seems impossible to answer with certainty because of the two fold source and historiography problem concerning rapes by the Red Army in Germany 1945 in general and the specific lack of interest in the perspective of the 800.000 female soldiers of the Red Army in general and specifically on this subject.
I have written about the general problem of rape and WWII in this answer and what needs to emphasized in this regard is that there are several major underlying problems in writing about this subject in general and this question specifically:
The first one is that the history of post-war rape has for the longest time been written by male historians in a way that took no interest in the perspective of the women raped beyond using their stories as illustration for their greater point and took even less interest in the perspective of female Red Army soldiers on these events.
Júlia Garraio has written about the specific way rapes committed by the Red Army have been written about in her article Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses stating that the image of the Red Army as a horde of rapists was not only a strategy of proliferating a narrative about Western values in Germany but became, together with stereotypes of the victimized women, a pillar of German post-war foreign policy by demonizing "Asian barbarism" and communism. Because of the raped women becoming a metaphorical stand-in for a victimized Germany, threatened by strange masculinities and barbaric hordes from the East, the actual perspective of the victims of these crimes, let alone other female perspectives were simply not considered in this sort of writing and scholarship that dominated the discourse on these subjects until not too long ago.
Count to that the heavy social stigma attached to sexual violence, which lead to victims being extremely reluctant to discuss the subject, we end up with an extremely difficult source situation concerning the issue. Atina Grossmann once addressed this in a review of the BeFreier und Befreite by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr , which was what set off renewed discourse and interest in the subject in the early 90s:
But hard - or even soft - facts are hard to come by and unreliable. It has been suggested that perhaps one out of every three of about one and a half million women in Berlin at the end of the war were raped - many but certainly not all during the notorious week of "mass rapes," from April 24 to May 5, 1945, as the Soviets finally secured Berlin. The numbers cited for Berlin vary wildly; from 20,000 to 100,000,to almost one million,with the actual number of rapes higher because many women were attacked repeatedly. Sander and her collaborator, Barbara Johr speak, perhaps conservatively, of about 110,000 women raped,many more than once,of whom up to 10,000 died in the aftermath. At the same time- and despite their virtual fetishization of statistical clarity - they announce on the basis of Hochrechnungen (projections or estimations) that 1.9 million German women altogether were raped at the end of the war by Red Army soldiers.
Similarly, little interest was extended to perspectives of the female soldiers of the Red Army for a very long time. Reina Pennington famously started her article on the women of the Red Army with a telling quote from John Keegan, who wrote in his 1994 book A history of warfare that
“Warfare is . . . the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart . . . Women . . . do not fight . . . and they never, in any military sense, fight men.
With this sort of sexism prevalent in Western academia of the 1990s, it is hardly surprising to also find it present in Stalinist Soviet attitudes to its own fighting women after WWII. /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 's answers here on the mobilization of women and here on sexual violence against female Red Army soldiers give a lasting impression of how recent the idea of researching their persepctives is and how instituionalized sexism existed in the Soviet Union. Samantha Vajskop has also written about the subject in Elena's War: Russian Women in Combat, stating
Only recently have the women of the former Soviet Union been receiving positive attention for their efforts during World War II. This is largely due to the suppression of important documents and records pertaining to the women by the Soviet Union. The postwar rush to return women to what were considered their proper gender roles was a catalyst in allowing their stories to fade into the background of history.
There is only one extensive source collection available in English pertaining to the perspectives of women in the Red Army: Svetlana Alexievich's 1988 The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (recently republished). The book consists of interviews with women who had fought in the Red Army re-counting their perspective, from witnessing the horrible violence exacted on them by the Germans, to the horrors of the battlefield and how they experienced it, to their hatred of the Germans and how it was for them to kill.
What is however notably absent is their perspective on rapes committed by their fellow soldiers, which is most likely related to the book having been written and the interviews collected while the USSR still existed by a Soviet writer. Few sources on this subject exist and if they are cited, they are mostly cited by male historians and writers who, again, do not use them as sources worth investigating on their own but to illustrate larger points they want to make, often influenced by still prevailing Adenauer era narratives.
Ingo von Münch in his book Frau, komm!: Die Massenvergewaltigungen deutscher Frauen und Mädchen 1944/45 mentions an account of a female Red Soldier who stated that the Germans had it coming. Who that woman was, even her name, what she had experienced and in what role she observed these deeds, he does not mention. Like the perspective of the German women who were raped – to say nothing of non-Germans raped in Germany post WWII – this only illustration for him about how badly the Germans were treated at the end of WWII. The actual people behind the sources are not his concern.
And because of that attitude exactly, we can not with any sense of generalization and certainty say, what the women of the Red Army thought about their comrades-in-arms committing rapes in Germany.