ForgottenVolumes@ForgottenV1918
German Woman in Soviet Hands: The Journal of a Young German Wife Under Bolshevik Occupation from January 29 to May 31, 1945
Translated from the German by Miss Mary P. Campion, B.A., M.A.
Edited by Prof. Austin J. App, Ph.D.
Published 1962 (Sons of Liberty / Boniface Press edition)
It’s January 29, 1945. Nazi Germany is collapsing. The Red Army storms in after unconditional surrender. For one young German wife and millions of others “liberation” turns into a living hell that lasts months.
This is not a history book. It’s her raw, day-by-day journal. For 123 straight days she scribbled the truth: the screams, the broken doors, the endless nights of terror. No politics. No hindsight. Just a terrified wife writing what she saw and endured under Bolshevik occupation.
Prof. Austin J. App met her again in Bavaria in 1949. He had known her as a bright, happy girl back in 1931. Now she poured out the story the terror, the abuse, the shame inflicted on her and countless German girls and women when surrender handed them over to the “power and lust” of the Soviet forces. App, stunned by her honesty, begged to see her manuscript. She gave him a 60-page typed record pieced together from her memory, diary, and notes.
What those pages contain is unbearable:
Night after night Soviet soldiers kicked in doors shouting “Frau komm!” the dreaded call that meant one thing. Women and girls from 8 to 80 were dragged out, often at gunpoint. Gang rapes by groups of 9, 10, 12 or more soldiers were routine. They didn’t care if you were pregnant, a new mother, a child, or an old woman. Many were raped repeatedly some dozens of times in a single night while families were forced to watch or listen from hiding spots. Women who resisted were beaten, shot, or run over. Screams echoed through streets and cellars. Homes became hunting grounds. Churches and shelters offered no safety soldiers turned them into orgy sites, ringing bells and playing organs while they assaulted everyone inside.
The journal records the constant fear, the hiding in attics and ruins, the venereal diseases that ravaged victims, the pregnancies forced upon them, the suicides, the shattered families. It captures the moment “peace” arrived and the horror that followed.
This is one ordinary woman’s unfiltered eyewitness account of one of the most savage, yet deliberately buried, chapters at the end of World War II. Historians now acknowledge up to two million German women and girls suffered this fate. Her diary puts human faces, names, dates, and daily agony on the statistics.
History like this gets erased, sanitized, or dismissed. But it happened. Real women lived it. Real lives were destroyed in those months of 1945.
If you want the unvarnished truth straight from the ground zero of Soviet occupation not filtered through decades of propaganda find this rare little volume. Read her words. Feel the fear on every page.
