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The Reichstag, 3 June 1945, a month after Berlin capitulated.Sgt Hewitt, No. 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, 1945. Imperial War Museum BU 8573, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The rapes in Berlin · 1945

Historians estimate that around 100,000 women were raped in Berlin in 1945. No exact figure has ever been pinpointed

In 1992 the film-maker Helke Sander and Barbara Johr estimated that between 94,450 and 131,100 women and girls had been raped in Berlin, about 110,000. They started from the city’s births and two clinics’ files, and multiplied. This is how the estimate was made, what it rests on, and what historians have said since.

94,450–131,100
women and girls raped in Berlin in 1945: Sander and Johr’s estimate (1992)
at least 100,000
in Berlin: Gerhard Reichling’s estimate, in the same book
1,900,000
German women and girls raped by Red Army soldiers on the advance to Berlin: Reichling’s estimate
at least 860,000
raped by soldiers of all four Allied armies, 1944–1955: Miriam Gebhardt’s estimate (2015)

All four are estimates. None is a count: no count exists.

01April – May 1945

What is known, and what no one counted

The battle for Berlin began on 16 April 1945; the city capitulated on 2 May 1945, and on 8 May 1945 the Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender was signed at Karlshorst. In those weeks and the months of occupation that followed, women and girls became victims of sexual violence in great numbers, most of it by soldiers of the Red Army.

How many is not known and cannot be. Every figure in print is an estimate: a number that was recorded, such as births, hospital cases or children, multiplied by assumptions. Historians still disagree by a factor of four on the total for Germany.

“No unambiguous answer to this question is possible, because there is hardly any relevant statistical material.”Research service of the German Bundestag, 2021

The bomb-damaged Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in July 1945, with an abandoned field gun in front of it.
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Charlottenburg, 7 July 1945.Hewitt C H (Sergeant), No 5 Army Film Photographic Unit, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A grey two-storey building with a columned porch and flags in front, behind a lawn and flower beds.
Karlshorst: the building where the Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender was signed on 8 May 1945, now the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. Photographed 2013.Anagoria, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

02Sander and Johr, 1992

How the most cited estimate was built

The first estimate for Berlin was published in BeFreier und Befreite (“Liberators and Liberated”), the book by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr published in 1992, the year of Sander’s film of the same name. Later works repeat its figures without new calculations of their own, among them Antony Beevor’s Berlin.

It runs in five steps. Each is drawn below at its true value, on one linear scale.

The 1992 Berlin estimate, step by step

The steps of the 1992 Berlin estimate, drawn as bars on one linear scale: the births registered in Berlin in a year, the children estimated to have Russian fathers, the pregnancies those children are assumed to stand for, the raped women those pregnancies are assumed to stand for, and the final range for all ages.
Step that rests on an assumptionOne linear scale

Sep 1945 – Aug 1946

Start with the births

Berlin registered 23,124 births in the twelve months from September 1945. The calculation starts there: births were recorded, rapes were not.

A long two-storey pavilion with a red tiled roof among bare trees and lawns.
The former Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Haus, Charlottenburg, 2014.Bodo Kubrak, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Haus

5% of the children, from one clinic’s files

In the files of the children’s clinic at the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Haus, 5% of the children born between late 1945 and summer 1946 had “Russian” fathers. Applied to every birth in Berlin, that gives 1,156 children.

Assumption

If 90% of the pregnancies were ended

Sander and Johr assumed, from the literature and women’s own accounts, that 90% of these pregnancies were terminated. The 1,156 children then stand for 10% of them: 11,560 pregnancies. Abortion was still a crime under Paragraph 218, but doctors applied the law more leniently in those years.

A sepia postcard of a street between brick hospital buildings, captioned Berlin, Königl. Charité.
The Charité on a postcard of 1909.J. Goldiner, Berlin, 1909 (postcard). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Charité

If 20% of the women became pregnant

The Charité’s files recorded 514 women treated after rape, 23% of them pregnant. Sander and Johr took 20%: the 11,560 pregnancies then stand for 57,800 women of child-bearing age, 9.5% of all Berlin women that age.

All ages

Between 94,450 and 131,100

Berlin also had about 800,000 girls of 14 to 18 and women over 45. Counting them at the same rate adds 73,300; at half the rate, 36,650. The result: between 94,450 and 131,100 women and girls, about 110,000.

Gebhardt, 2015

Two assumptions carry the result

From the 1,156 children to the 57,800 women, the figure is multiplied 50 times. Miriam Gebhardt judged the 20% pregnancy assumption too high, and the hospital files samples of unknown representativeness. Because it long stood alone, she wrote, the figure “has taken on a life of its own”.

03Other estimates

Other estimates count other places, other years, other armies

In the same book Gerhard Reichling put Berlin at at least 100,000, from documents and statistics but without the clinic files, and the whole advance of the Red Army at 1,900,000 women and girls: 1,400,000 in the former eastern territories and on the flight west, 500,000 in what became the Soviet zone. How he reached those totals is not set out.

Published estimates, on one linear scale

These are not comparable counts. They cover different places, periods and armies, and each rests on its own assumptions. A bar from zero is a single figure; a bar that floats is a range; an open arrow means “at least”.

Gebhardt’s estimate, 2015, step by step

In Als die Soldaten kamen (“When the soldiers came”, 2015), the historian Miriam Gebhardt started not from Berlin but from the children of the occupation in West Germany, and counted the crimes of all four Allied armies from autumn 1944 to the end of the occupation statute in 1955.

68,000
illegitimate occupation children in West Germany and West Berlin, counted in 1956

3,200
of them conceived in rape, by the mothers’ account

+ 1,100

4,300
with 1,100 added for married women

× 2

8,600
doubled for East Germany, for which no count exists

× 100

at least 860,000
if one rape in ten led to pregnancy and one pregnancy in ten was carried to term

Gebhardt calls her estimate conservative and says the number of victims cannot be determined even approximately. It leaves out girls before puberty and women after menopause. Her split by army she calls “speculation”; on it, about 190,000 women living in West Germany were raped by American soldiers.

Gebhardt says herself that both of her approaches have many sources of error: the share of children conceived in rape, the factor of a hundred and the doubling for the East are all assumptions. Like Sander and Johr’s, her estimate shows an order of magnitude, not a number. What the two have in common is the starting point: the pregnancies that left a record, and an assumption about all the rapes that did not.

“Because Sander’s and Reichling’s figures long remained the first and only estimate, the assumption has taken on a life of its own. It is cited again and again, usually with the remark that nothing exact is known.”Miriam Gebhardt on the 1992 figures, 2015

The Charité's tower block rising behind older hospital buildings and a street.
The Charité’s Campus Mitte, 2008. Its 1945 files are one of the two samples the Berlin estimate rests on.Werneuchen, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

041945 – 2021

A diary, a film, a book: who told it, and when

For decades the best-known account was a diary. The first estimate came only in 1992, nearly half a century after the events.

Who told it, and when

  1. 1945A Berlin woman keeps a diary from 20 April to 22 June 1945.
  2. 1959The diary appears in German, anonymously, with a small Swiss publisher. It flops.
  3. 1992Helke Sander’s film BeFreier und Befreite, and the book with Barbara Johr: the first estimate.
  4. 1995Norman Naimark’s history of the Soviet zone of occupation gives a chapter to rape.
  5. 2002Antony Beevor’s Berlin repeats the 1992 figures; Russia’s ambassador calls it “lies, slander, and blasphemy against the Red Army”.
  6. 2003The diary is reissued after its author’s death. A critic calls for a critical edition.
  7. 2008The diary is filmed.
  8. 2015Miriam Gebhardt’s new estimate covers all four armies. A Russian region orders Beevor’s books out of school libraries.
  9. 2021The Bundestag’s research service: no unambiguous answer is possible.

Eine Frau in Berlin (“A Woman in Berlin”), kept by an anonymous Berlin woman from 20 April to 22 June 1945, is the best-known testimony. It is a testimony, not a statistic: it tells what happened to its author and to women around her, and this story takes no number from it. When it was reissued in 2003, after its author’s death, a critic noted that names and details had been changed and asked for a critical edition.

The historian Norman Naimark gave a chapter of his history of the Soviet zone to rape in 1995. Antony Beevor’s Berlin followed in 2002; its figures are the 1992 estimates, not a new calculation.

The historian Antony Beevor speaking on a stage, gesturing, with books on a table beside him.
Antony Beevor, Oslo, 2009.Bjørn Erik Pedersen, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5.
A stone wreath with a flag sculpture in the foreground; behind, on a mound, the statue of a Soviet soldier.
The Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin, 2005: how the Soviet Union remembered its soldiers in the city.Matthias Trautsch, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Official Russia has treated the subject as an attack on the Red Army. Russia’s ambassador in London called Beevor’s book “lies, slander, and blasphemy against the Red Army”; in 2015 the education ministry of the Sverdlovsk region ordered his books out of school libraries as “propagandistic nazi stereotypes”. The estimates themselves count victims. They say nothing about how many soldiers committed the crimes, and they are not a verdict on a people.

05After 1945

After the war, silence on both sides of the border

In the East, the GDR swept the crimes of the Soviet “big brother” under the carpet; in the West, Gebhardt argues, the rapes became a Cold War charge against the Soviets while the victims of American, British and French soldiers went unheard. Women met doctors who approved or refused an abortion at will, welfare officers who sent pregnant victims to reformatories, and judges who refused compensation because they did not believe them.

Remembering became, in Gebhardt’s words, “a question of right and left”: some on the right used the women’s suffering for their own politics, some on the left played the rapes down to protect the image of the liberators. Because the diary and the 1992 film were both set in Berlin with Red Army perpetrators, she adds, most Germans came to see wartime rape as a Soviet problem alone.

“They have no memorial sites worth the name, no rituals of remembrance, no public recognition, let alone an apology.”Miriam Gebhardt on the women raped in 1944–55, writing in 2015

Sexual violence was not only done to Germans. For the crimes of German soldiers in the occupied Soviet Union no estimate has been calculated at all; the historian Regina Mühlhäuser concluded in 2010 that such crimes “were no exception”.

None of this makes the Berlin figure firmer or the crime smaller. It explains why, more than eighty years on, the most quoted number still rests on two clinics’ files and two assumptions.

A colonnade of stone with a bronze soldier on a central pillar, under a blue sky.
The Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten, 2015.Ansgar Koreng, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

No register will ever give the number.

Every figure for Berlin is an estimate, with an author, a method and a range. Each one stands for women who were never officially recognised as victims of the war.

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Berlinfographics (2026). “The rapes in Berlin, 1945”. Berlin Experiences. https://berlinfographics.com/soviet-rapes-berlin/

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{{cite web |title=The rapes in Berlin, 1945 |url=https://berlinfographics.com/soviet-rapes-berlin/ |website=Berlinfographics |publisher=Berlin Experiences |date=2026-11-09 |access-date=2026-11-09}}