The Big Rape

James Wakefield Burke

• Publisher: Eumenes Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839741227
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Big Rape, was first published in 1952 by Esquire's war correspondent James Wakefield Burke (1904-1989). The book, historically accurate in terms of place and events, is a fictional account of a German woman – Lilo Markgraf – in Nazi Germany, and traces the fall of Berlin to the Russians, and the subsequent widespread rape and debauchery the Red Army soldiers inflicted on the populace. At first, Lilo is an ardent nationalist and in love with a German soldier, but following the rape of her mother and her younger sister by Russian soldiers, Lilo returns from a small town to Berlin to attempt her revenge. She later becomes the mistress of a Soviet NKVD officer, taking advantage of the protection and benefits he can provide her. Finally, with the coming of the Americans in their occupied portion of Berlin, she attempts to plan her future.

Chapter One

It was at the American Press Center in Berlin that I first saw Lilo. The time was July; the year was 1945. And in case you’ve forgotten, hardly two months had gone by since Generaloberst Alfred Jodl surrendered the body of Germany to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The door softly opened and she came in. She was a tall girl with large, wide-set eyes and a nice figure. But it was the blonde streak in her hair that caught my eye. She was the first real pinto I had ever seen. The streak was genuine all right, and it was striking. From the top of her head, where it blended with the light brown of her hair, it grew gradually brighter as it followed the natural waves over her wide forehead and fell to the left side of her face like a flash of sunlight. I must have been staring; for she smiled at me, a one-sided, crooked smile. It was not a derisive smile, but friendly, almost affectionate.

“Guten Tag,” she said pleasantly. Then in good English, “Please, sir,”—war correspondents were still in uniform in those hectic days—“may I see the Director?”

I stepped into Colonel Oldfield’s office. He was out. A deputy, Lieutenant Woodson, said he would see her. I stuck around. You never could tell when a story would pop up. But the girl only wanted a job. She could handle English, she said, and could run the teletype machines.

She told the deputy she had had related experience. To his question where, she coolly replied, “Reichssender Berlin. I used to be a news compiler there. I prepared scripts and sent them out over the teletype.”

Lieutenant Woodson made a wry face. Everybody knew that the Reichssender Berlin was the Nazis’ most powerful and notorious radio station. It was at this time, however, being used by the Russians.

“What’s your name, Fräulein?”

“Liselotte Markgraf.”

Woodson grunted out a laugh. “Liselotte! Good God! Do they call you that?”

“Just Lilo.”

“That’s better.” He jotted it down. “Come back tomorrow around two o’clock, Fräulein. Something may turn up.”

When the girl was gone Woodson stormed. “Goddammit! I ought to have hired her anyway. We can’t wait around all summer for Military Government to set up a Denazification Branch”

“Well, why didn’t you hire this one?” I asked. “She looks sharp enough to me.”

He gave me a sly smile. “I know what you mean. When Oldfield comes in I’ll put it up to him. If he doesn’t raise too much hell I’ll hire some Germans. They can denazify ‘em later!”

A few days later when I went into the teletype room to file some copy, Lilo was working. She was wearing a white turtleneck sweater, a dark wool skirt, and white knee-length stockings with little tassels that jiggled against her legs as she walked. She raised her eyes to me and I saw that they were deep blue, with purple shadows. They reminded me of purple slate I used to see in the rocky beds of rippling, clear brooks in my native Tennessee. She gave me a little smile of recognition but didn’t try to get friendly, like most Germans in those first days of contact with the Americans. I filed my copy, offered her a cigarette. She refused, I stared, slightly surprised. Returning my stare she wheeled easily, and quietly went about her work. I couldn’t help but be interested.

Lieutenant Woodson motioned me over to his desk. He was going out to requisition some houses for the correspondents. Would I like to come along and pick one out for myself? Lilo, in the teletype booth at the other end of the room, heard what he said. She turned the machine over to another girl and came to the deputy’s desk.

In her rich clear voice and with none of the German post-war humility and hesitance, she said, “I couldn’t help but hear what you said about requisitioning houses. Why don’t you look at our house? It’s close by, on Goethe Strasse.”

“That’s a new one,” Woodson grinned. “A German asking for his house to be requisitioned. Why, Fräulein Markgraf?”

“Frankly, Lieutenant, if the Americans take it they will be responsible for its repair and upkeep. I’ve read the regulations. It seems the best thing as far as we are concerned.”

The Lieutenant laughed. “OK. We’ll take a look. Maybe we can use it. You’d better come along with us, Fräulein.”

Woodson, Lilo and I walked down Argentinische Allee toward the stilled S-Bahn. This was Zehlendorf, a residential section of Berlin where artists and actors, upper middle-class merchants and bankers and a great many Nazis lived. The streets were lined with poplars and lindens, and the houses stood behind iron fences with heavy iron gates. Most were Hindenburg era dwellings done in a sort of modern baroque, with heavy colonnades and porticos. They were bullet and shell pocked, windows were glassless and covered with wooden slats. There were half houses and quarter houses and naked walls. There were gutted skeletons, spewed-up bricks and earth. There were shell craters and rubble heaps. There were scarred chimneys standing amid ruins like ghostly sentinels.

We turned up Lima Strasse, then into Goethe. “Here it is,” Lilo said, opening an iron gate.

Except for broken windows the Markgraf house was undamaged. It was well furnished. A large reception room opened on the back verandah. The dining room, as in most German houses of this era, was large with a somewhat gaudy chandelier. The library had heavy hand-carved oaken cases containing works of Goethe, Hauptmann, Schiller, Poe; there was a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Der Gärtner, a set of Henry Ford, Mein Leben und Werk; books by Louis Bromfield and Thomas Mann, plays by Shaw and O’Neill; English editions of Gone With The Wind and Of Human Bondage. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a large sitting room overlooking the expansive back yard where there were tea-rose bushes, apple and cherry trees. And beyond, down a sloping willow-covered bank, was tiny Waldsee, a little expanse of water about five hundred meters long and fifty meters wide. The bathroom was huge and well appointed. I noticed it had a bidet with an excellent system of hot and cold chrome taps.

Woodson and I were going from room to room, taking mental stock of the place, and I hadn’t missed Lilo until he asked, “Where’d the girl go?”

I said I’d go downstairs and look.

I came out of the side door of the library and saw her standing on the back verandah, tall and statuesque, in a patch of summer sunlight. She was looking toward the northeast. Her face was slightly lifted as if she were listening to something I could not hear. She did not know I was there, and if her eyes had been full upon me I do not believe she would have seen me. For she seemed transported, out of this world—and not to a better one. I saw her, really for the first time, clearly, sharply. Her prominent nose, her high cheek bones made me think of a Greek statue I had seen in the Louvre, carved in white marble. I could not see her eyes from where I stood but I knew—felt—that they were cold and blazing.

She stared at the sky, and narrowed her eyes against the light. She could see nothing in the sky. She hadn’t heard me come out on the verandah; or if she had, she was defiantly not turning around. Then I knew she didn’t know I was there. For I was seeing her unguarded, unaware. For the first time, really, I was seeing Lilo Markgraf.

There was no longer any doubt about it. I had to know this girl. There was something burning and living inside her, something I had to get at.

Standing on this same spot a few months before, in the jaundiced April sunlight, Lilo Markgraf heard the distant flash-thunder of the Russian siege cannons and the overhead whine of shells as they described their trajectory, crashing with devastating blasts in the heart of the city. She saw the Red Army planes circling overhead, diving northeastward, and she heard and felt the apocalyptic explosions of their bombs dropped in the vicinity of the Reichskanzlei. They were hampered little by flak and only rarely did ME 110’s or Focke-Wulfs go up to contest them.

A white mist of dust, raised by the shell and bomb destruction, hung over the city.

Would Berlin fall? Certainly not! It would be relieved. The radio reported that General Wenck’s Twelfth Army was already nearing Potsdam. Hitler was still in Berlin directing its defense from the Reichskanzlei. Hadn’t Goebbels said only a few nights ago over Reichssender Berlin—he was piped in from his headquarters in the Ministry of Propaganda—that as long as the Führer remained in Berlin the city would not fall. And Hitler was here, not a dozen kilometers from her house on Goethe Strasse!

Yet faithless thousands who could manage it had left the city. They fled daily. And now she—Lilo Markgraf, Hitler Youth leader—was leaving. What would her group of Hitler Youth girls think when they heard that their leader had run away from Berlin? Lilo was vexed. She did not want to go away. It was all her father’s doing.

With his usual thoroughness he had taken care of everything. He had papers for everyone, including Hans the chauffeur and Erika the maid, to proceed from Berlin to Erkner, for the purpose of working in the Markgraf bakery there. What could sound better to the SS officials, since Papa’s main plant in Köpenicker Strasse, which covered an entire block, had been bombed out and the two branch bakeries, in Spandau and Weissensee, were but smoking hulks, victims of incendiaries? Oh, Papa had influence all right! Wasn’t Markgraf bread practically a byword with the Wehrmacht? It was little trouble for him to get releases from the radio station for Lilo and her sister Marlene. The Markgrafs had a hunting lodge in Volkholz, a little village but a few kilometers from Erkner. They would be quite comfortable there, and safe from the siege of Berlin. And they could go into Erkner every day to produce bread for the fighting men. The whole thing was a neat plan.

Lilo walked through the back lawn. Spring had come early this year. The apple and cherry trees were already radiant with fragrant white blossoms, and small, delicate, pink roses spangled the big tea-rose bushes.

Overhead two medium bombers were coming in low and fast. Civilians didn’t have to run to the cellars from the Russians bombers. They always had a target, and besides the Russians were using but few planes in the battle for Berlin. It was the Americans and British, Lilo reflected with suppressed rage, who sent hordes of planes to drench the land indiscriminately with death and destruction, slaughtering Germans wholesale.

The two bombers, now in tandem formation, pointed their noses steeper. Hitler’s Reichskanzlei was their target. Diving low they disappeared from sight, but the roar of their motors thundered in her head. Then came the ONE!—TWO!—THREE!—FOUR! series of explosions. They were heavy bombs. The artillery fire in the north was only a weak coughing compared to these kettle-drum detonations. The dust shroud over the city thickened.

Marlene came out on the verandah. “Lilo!” she called. “We’re ready to go!”

Lilo walked back swinging her long legs resolutely. Smiling her slanting smile, she stopped at the foot of the steps. Her father sometimes smiled like that. She often wondered if she had inherited it from him or merely picked it up because of their closeness.

Looking up at Marlene, still smiling, she said, “You look like an afternoon at the Adlon Bar.”

The first thing you noticed about Marlene was her hair. It made you think of a profusion of gold mark pieces.

Then you became aware, startlingly aware, of her. You saw that her lips were red and smooth, and her skin like Lilo’s only there was a touch of pure peach blossoms. Her eyes were a light blue that sometimes changed to a curious green, and sometimes shone with a dreamy, unaware negligence. When she was excited or angry they could dance with laughter or hard brilliance. Her nose broke high, and it flared when her eyes were animated. The rest of her was as it should be. Her breasts were full and firm and high. Her hips were round, and her legs had a soft, exciting line to them.

“I’m happy we’re going away,” she said to Lilo. “HI be relieved to get away from all these people.”

By “all these people” Marlene meant the bombed-out refugees the local magistrate had assigned to their big house. There were the Lehrs, an elderly couple whose home on Roon Strasse had been destroyed; Frau Spiegel, a war widow with a two-year-old daughter, whose apartment on Wilski Strasse had been burned out; and there was old Frau Benz.

They had given Frau Benz the big room on the second floor. She ought to be in a hospital but the hospitals were full. When the sirens sounded she would run from room to room stamping her cane and crying: “Hermann Mayer! Hermann Mayer!” Someone had to lead her to the cellar, where she would sit bent double in a corner clutching her cane and mumbling. Above the thunder of the raid you could hear her spitting and cursing Hermann Mayer. Old Frau Benz, a scion of one of the oldest Prussian families from East Prussia, regarded Hitler, Göring and company as “young upstarts.” When Göring made his famous statement early in the war that if ever an enemy bomb should fall on Berlin the German people could call him Hermann Mayer, a Jewish name, Frau Bentz had ruminated with a malicious gleam in her eye, “Indeed I will! Indeed I will!” And the old woman never forgot.

Sergeant Heinrich Ladwig was not really a refugee. He was a neighbor who had practically grown up with Lilo and Marlene. He had come home, horribly wounded, a week ago, to find neighbors and rescue squads still digging in the ruins of his home on nearby Klopstock Strasse for the bodies of his parents and his two young sisters. Herr Markgraf insisted he come and live with them until his wounds healed. He now declared his intention of going to Volkholz with the Markgrafs. “If they don’t arrest me getting out of Berlin,” he added ruefully.

Lilo, taking the stairs by twos, ran into her mother and Erika on the landing. Pillows, blankets, bed clothing bulged out around their arms. Erika, the broad-faced, broad-hipped maid, had been with the Markgraf family ever since Lilo could remember. Frau Markgraf was still an attractive woman in a plump sort of way. Filling out evenly, she had retained much of her youthful good looks.

Frau Markgraf was the daughter of a Braumeister. Herr Markgraf met her at a Bavarian folkdance in her hometown, Tegernsee, south of München. H...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Author’s Note
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven