A soldier, by way of explanation, says that the Germans did it to their women, including his sister. Stalin had issued a decree, uzak Stalina, that the Red Army were not to engage in rapine, but within hours Hillers is raped twice. People come out of hiding and go back to the wreckage of their apartments. When the Russian soldiers arrive, they don’t seem as bad as Goebbels had made out in his propaganda. It is an attitude of stoicism which eventually sees the author emerge at the other end of this horror. One woman jokes about Hitler’s mother: “‘Just think how much better off we’d be if his old lady’d had a miscarriage.’” ‘What’s that compared to an air raid?’ No question about it we’re spoiled, all right.” When they do venture out for food they are often blown to pieces by artillery fire: “Three dead and ten wounded, but they’re already queueing up again… ‘Anyway, only three dead people,’ she said. The horizon has shrunk to three hundred paces.” “There’s only this group of us huddled in the cave, a clan, just like in prehistoric times.

Having travelled in the USSR in the 1930s she had picked up a smattering of Russian and was subsequently to put it too good use.Īs the city is being bombarded, thousands of civilians take refuge and survive in fetid basements or bomb-shelters. After her death in 2001 her identity was revealed as Marta Hillers who had been a journalist and worked in publishing. When the book was first published such was the hostility, anger and disgust that the author decided it was never to be published again in her lifetime. When Soviet troops invaded Germany and overthrew Hitler in 1945, Germans, particularly those in Berlin, knew there would be a reckoning for the death, suffering and pillage their army had inflicted on Russia and the people of the east.Įxultant in victory, and usually intoxicated, many Red Army soldiers engaged in mass rape as they made their way through Berlin.Ī Woman In Berlin is a contemporaneous account in diary form of the last few weeks of war (20th April to 22nd June, 1945) written with a pencil stub, often by candlelight, by a 32-year-old woman who wished to remain anonymous.

A Woman in Berlin by Marta Hillers