I knew that in the first days of the occupation my aunt had been raped. She was in her apartment with her children and the [Red Army] soldiers asked the children, “Where’s your mother?” They then raped her several times. My other aunt, they just ripped the jewelry right off her. They didn’t just take it off, they ripped it off.

— Heinz Jorgen Schmidtchen, a German teenager living in East Berlin when the Soviet forces took control of the area as the war ended.

April 21, 2011, 5:33pm / 14