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This statement submitted to the Health Office of Berlin's working-class Neuk6lln district on December 16, 1945, by a woman requesting a medical abortion on grounds of rape by a Soviet soldier, encapsulates the extraordinarily convoluted nature of my topic. I came to it unintentionally, quite unwillingly but irresistibly, through my research on the politics of abortion and birth control in postwar Germany. Finding this affidavit among the 995 cases approved for abortion on the grounds of rape recorded in the Neuk6lln district office (Bezirksamt) files on Termination of pregnancy between June 7, 1945, and June 17, 1946,2 I was both moved (despite myself) by the poignancy and desperation of a woman's and mother's statement, and horrified (despite all I know) at the notion that anyone could describe herself as having lived happily--and normally--in Germany until the defeat of the Third Reich and the arrival of the Red Army. The question of rape of German women by occupation, mostly Red Army,
Atina Grossmann (Sun,) studied this question.