Page 459 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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cultural circumstances under which the memories were produced and to analysis that
provide us with broader information on how memories are shaped while telling them
we will argue in behalf of calling these changes in the narrative trends “cumulative vic-
timization” – a term that refers to the results by the German memory researchers Harald
Welzer, Sabine Moller and Caroline Tschuggnall. 8
The second set of sources is called by me “displaced women’s sources”. It covers
testimonies from two oral-history online-archives. The first one is the Visual History
Archive by the US Shoah Foundation, the second one is the Online Archive for Forced
Work, a joint venture of the German fond “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future”,
the Free University Berlin and the German Historical Museum Berlin, whose coordina-
tion was executed by the Institut for History and Biography at the University of Hagen.
Both oral-history online-archives survey interviews with people who survived the rac-
ist politics of National Socialism. In general, the interviews focus on the respondents’
experiences with Nazi-Germany and their persecution by German institutions. But nev-
ertheless, some of the respondents also talk about their encounters with the Red Army
during liberation, about sexualized violence by Red Army soldiers towards survivors
and just freed camp inmates, that is toward now displaced women. In regard to the
testimonies,by these women, produced in interviews, I will present a narrative strategy
of alienation or of obscuration - a term borrowed from the German historian Susanne
Greiter – catching a way how traumatic experiences can be blurred or transferred away
9
from oneself when re-calling and re-telling them.
The last set of documents is the mass of testimonies by former Red Army soldiers
that were published since the 1990s and tell about the authors’ experiences during the
Great Patriotic War. When searching for the perpetrators’ reasons and motivations, these
sources and documents are of special interest. Here, I will present only three examples
of them in order to give some ideas on how the perpetrators and their comrades talked
about atrocities against female civilians. By highlighting them I want to make sure that
there was a self-initiated grass-root discussion on crimes committed by Red Army sol-
diers in Russia during the last 20 years; and I will argue that the narrative intention of
these sources was oftentimes twofold: To admit that atrocities were committed by the
Red Army and simultaneously to distract oneself from what has happened.

* * * *

When addressing acts of sexual violence by Red Army soldiers it seems to be obvi-
ous to take the first look onto diaries as they to be are the most prompt record of what
has happened. And as it were women who were objectified by the soldiers we should let
them first describe what happened. The most prominent diaries were written by German

8 Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, Karoline Tschuggnall, „Opa war kein Nazi“. Nationalsozialismus und
Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis [Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi. National Socialism in the family memory],
Frankfurt am Main, 2002.
9 I am very thankful to Susanne Greiter for letting me read her unpublished dissertation. It will be published as

following: Flucht und Vertreibung im Familiengedächtnis. Geschichte und Narrativ [Flight and expulsion in
the family memory. History and narrative], München 2013.