Monday, March 1, 2010

Gabriele Koepp: Why Did I Have To Be A Girl

From the Telegraph:
An 80-year-old German woman has broken an old taboo of silence over the rapes she endured at the hands of Soviet soldiers in the second world war with a searing book about the crimes of the Red Army as it marched towards Berlin.

"Why Did I Have To Be A Girl" by Gabriele Koepp is the first book published about the rapes under a victim's real name. Mrs Koepp was one of an estimated two million German girls and women raped by Soviet soldiers, encouraged by their leader Josef Stalin to regard the crime as a spoil of war after Hitler's invasion had left 26 million Russians dead.

"Frau. Komm," was a phrase that women dreaded hearing from Red Army soldiers. In the weeks after the city fell the rape epidemic was so bad that even the Catholic church countenanced abortion for some victims.


See also: A Woman In Berlin from 2009 and A Woman In Berlin from 2008



2 comments:

Hannah Morgen said...

Do you know if Koepp's book is published in English yet please?

Anonymous said...

I would like to know that 2??