HOWZAT

Instead Hoss, who acts as an off-screen narrator, lets slip that she was a beneficiary of the Nazi propaganda machine, a well-travelled journalist, before she became the prey of occupying Russians. Minutes after being raped she broods about why the Russians have so much anger, apparently her first reflections on the rights and wrongs of Hitler’s war.

The most emotionally raw part of the narrative is the heroine’s decision to seek the protection of a Russian officer; in effect, she sells herself to him to fend off further rapes by ordinary soldiers. Her decision echoes the behaviour of many German women at the time who, desperate to survive and to keep their children fed when the economy had collapsed, had casual sex in return for goods in short supply.

“Many ended up taking their own lives,” says Ms Meinhof. “Many were hit by sexually transmitted diseases, gave birth to children – the so-called Russenbabies – or they aborted.”

The film shines a spotlight on women’s behaviour and on the returning German veterans who were unable to defend their wives and girlfriends or earn a living.

It seems to fudge the relationship between the heroine and the major, making it into a kind of love affair. The diary tells it otherwise: as a purely functional relationship, with moments of tenderness, rather than love.

“Of course you can understand it if a woman hates the Russians because she has been raped by one,” says Hoss. “But this woman doesn’t. Rather she observes very precisely what is happening around and to her. That’s her way of dealing with the situation.”

It may also help Germany towards a cathartic moment. German attitudes to Russia are complex, sometimes determined by an uneasy respect for the sheer power and will of Russia, sometimes by fear and sometimes by a kind of admiration for the resilience of the people. Facing up to this episode, one of the last unresolved issues between the two countries, could clear the air – or add more tension to the relationship.

DARK DAYS

— Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Operation Barbarossa, predicted to take months, became a four-year conflict. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died

— The Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945

— The Red Army reached Berlin in April 1945. In the ensuing battle alone more than one million German soldiers were killed or died later in captivity, along with another 100,000 civilians

— Many civilians fled Berlin as news of the Red Army’s brutality spread. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then a young officer, described the violence in his poem Prussian Nights: “The little daughter’s on the mattress,/ Dead. How many have been on it/ A platoon, a company perhaps?”

—Two million German women a year had illegal abortions between 1945 and 1948

— In 1947 the Soviet authorities were forced by the spread of disease to impose serious penalties on their forces in East Germany for fraternising with the enemy

Source: Times archives

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010