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more emphasis. Sometimes the women talk more in general terms, which makes it hard to
decide if the women experienced it by themselves or just heard about it. So, for examples
Sophie Charlotte Müller from Eastern Prussia remembers:
“At night, we sat gathered in a small room. […] Nobody dared to show his face, every
minute a Russian showed up and wanted to drag young girls and women outside; he
dragged her at her clothes to the doors. Because we screamed and clung together it was
not possible. In the neighboring house they tore the women’s and the girls’ clothes off and
raped them. Our fear was indescribable.” 14
Or they are very detailed, especially in order to show their helplessness as Marga Gunia,
also from Eastern Prussia: „I think, it was around midnight, when the first Russians came
into the motel where about 60 persons gathered. The Russian soldiers were highly drunk.
First they claimed watches, weapons and jewelry. Then, two Russians came to me and
dragged me from my place. When my father-in-law wanted to help me, he was punched to
his chest so that he broke down […] They dragged me outside using fists and the butts of
their guns. I ended up in a barn. There, the Russians became violent. When I resisted, I got
a punch to my chest so that I broke down. Then it became night around me.“ 15
Oftentimes the description of rape in these testimonies is accompanied with descrip-
tions of other violence, against things, for example.
Regina Mühlhäuser explains this shift in the narratives by referring to the public dis-
course after the war. Here, rape by Soviet soldiers had become associated with personal
shame and national victimhood; the humiliated female body had turned into the ultimate
symbol of the defeated German state and being raped had become the German women’s
narrative share of being part of the imagined German nation. Therefore the women had
to come up with a narrative that fosters the ultimate destruction of Germany through
the(ir) female bodies and simultaneously proves their efforts to protect their ‘honour’,
the fact they are not guilty of having lost it. 16
As a source for this narrative Mühlhäuser points to the “Documentation of expulsion
of Germans from Middle-East Europe” which I also can would consider a role-model for
other German archives on the end of World War II (and from which the two quotations
are taken):
The Documentation was due to an initiative, worked out by German expellees’ organi-
zations under the auspices of the ministry for the expellees in the 1950s. Germans, who
had fled their Eastern hometowns due to the advancing Red Army in 1944/45 or who were
expelled in different ways by the new, non-German governments, gathered in working
groups in order to talk about their experiences, they filled out questionnaires and wrote
eye-witness reports. In all these proceedings a special focus was put on rape. The aim of
these proceedings was to collect material for an international tribunal against the Soviet

14 Sophie Charlotte Müller in: Silke Spieler (Ed.).: Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen. 1945 - 1948;
Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. Mai 1974; Archivalien und ausgewählte Erlebnisberichte [Expuslion and
crimes of expulsion. 1945-1948; Report of the Federal Archive from 28 May, 1974, Archival materials and
th
selected testimonies], Bonn 1989, 235.
15 Marga Gunia in: Spieler (Ed.), 1989, 203.
16 Mühlhäuser, Vergewaltigungen.