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German victim is first to break silence
on Red Army rapists after 65 years
 
Gabriele
Koepp, as a girl and today
A German woman
has become the first of an estimated 2million victims of rape by Soviet
soldiers in the Second World War to break the taboo on talking publicly
about the crimes.
Gabriele Koepp's book Why Did I Have To Be A Girl, about the rapes
carried out by the Red Army as they marched on Berlin, is the first to
be published under a victim's real name.
The soldiers were encouraged by their leader Josef Stalin to regard the
crime as a spoil of war after Hitler's invasion had left 26million
Russians dead.
The Russian establishment continues to deny the events.
'Frau, komm' - 'Woman, come' - was a phrase that females dreaded
hearing from Red Army soldiers.
In the weeks after Berlin fell, the rape epidemic was so bad the Roman
Catholic Church considered abortion for some victims.
Even today, Miss Koepp, 80, has trouble sleeping. She never had a
romance after her ordeal.
'I wouldn't have been able to feel anything anyway,' she said.
'For me, sexuality was just violence.'
Only one other account of the mass rapes, A Woman In Berlin, was
published after the war. Its author remained anonymous but its veracity
is now doubted.
'But that woman was 30,' said Miss Koepp. 'I was hardly more than a
child. Writing this has not been easy, but I had no choice: who else
would do it?'
Miss Koepp's book speaks for all of the victims.
Experts, who interviewed some of them, say they were raped an average
of 12 times as the 5million soldiers of the Red Army advanced on the
Nazi capital in 1945.
The victims ranged from eight to 90, with many raped to death.
Miss Koepp told Der Spiegel magazine it was on the evening of January
25, 1945, aged 15, that her mother told her to pack quickly as she had
to flee from the Russians.
They lived Schneidemuhl, in the former German region of Pomerania which
is now a Polish town called Pila.
'In a sense, she allowed me to run headlong on to a knife,' Miss Koepp
said. She and her sister left the next day aboard a cattle train that
was supposed to head towards Berlin.
For some reason, it went in a different direction and the engine was
soon blown up by Russian artillery.
'The freight car door was locked,' she said. 'I managed to climb up and
crawl out of a window.
My sister was left behind: I have never seen her again.'
The next day, in a small village, Soviet troops scoured houses for
prey.
She was raped twice that day and twice again the next morning.
She said she hid under a table in a room filled with refugees.
When the soldiers came to the building, asking for girls, the older
women called out: 'Where's little Gabi?' and pulled her out from
underneath the table.
'I feel hatred rising up inside of me,' she wrote.
She was dragged off to a ransacked house. 'I have no tears,' she
remembered.
'The next morning, it was the women, once again, who pushed me into the
arms of a greedy officer. I despise these women.'
Her ordeal went on for two weeks until she was taken in at a farm and
hid from the Soviets.
She was reunited with her mother 15 months later in Hamburg but says
her mother was cold to her when she tried to talk of her pain and
shame.
Miss Koepp thinks she felt guilty for letting her and her sister leave
home alone.
The book will be translated into English later this year.
DAILY MAIL
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