The unknown holocaust

'They raped every German female from eight to 80'

Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed new book about the fall of Berlin, on a massive war crime committed by the victorious Red Army.

Wednesday May 1, 2002
The Guardian

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour.

Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers". Numerous examples of gang rape were given - "girls under 18 and old women included".

Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield." It appears to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight."

One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.

Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers' treatment of women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the "bodies of the defeated enemy's women" to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January 1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.

A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed. Freud's work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.

Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography". All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.

The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an old man, older than my father'."

The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them."

In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim's perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see things from the perpetrator's point of view, especially in the later stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February.

Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau."

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. "The 13-year old Dieter Sahl," neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, "threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot."

After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted "the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution". Soon after the surrender in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of "the grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection".

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.

Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit.



1945 Germany. This photo shows a woman raped and tortured to death. Note the deep bayonet-inflicted incisions on the upper right thigh and the horrendous bruises on the left thigh. Note the blood-soaked vaginal area, were she had apparently been raped with a bayonet. Note that her left leg had been severed below the knee.

....Imagine how this woman feel, what she thought, what she hoped, guess how soldiers hold her arms, so a russian soldier could rape her with the bajonet, guess what happend to other female childs and old grandma´s, they were raped in their houses, in thier gardens, in the street, in their beds, their childs had to see it.....

"They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

Hahahahaa, so funny this hero of the sovietunion hahaha !!! :kill:




1945 - 1946 Soviet Red Army lead by communist have reaped nearly 70% of German woman. Girls who resisted where killed. No one was sentenced or suited for this crimes.



During the period of 1944/1945 - 1950, more than 14 million Germans were forced to flee or were expelled as a result of actions of the Red Army, civilian militia and/or organised efforts of governments of the reconstituted states of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were detained in internment camps or sentenced to forced labor, some of them for years. The number of expellees and refugees, whose fate could not be ascertained, was estimated to be around 2.1 million, according to two major studies conducted in 1958 and 1965, which were commissioned by the German Bundestag. Millions of German women were raped (the process of escape and expulsion includes the actions taken by the Red Army against German civilians). Private property of the expelled Germans was confiscated. More 4 million Germans resettled in Germany from the end of 1950s, joining the 14 million expellees and refugees.


.....and nobody cares, not in germany, not in poland, not in russia, it´s forgotten :cry: :cry: :cry:
I don´t wanna say that german soldiers didn´t comitt any crimes, I´m aware of that, but I´m quite pissed that nobody take care about these facts, there is not a single monument for those expelled, for those raped women, no one cares and poland collaps, if they hear that the BDV consider to build a museum for those.


Regards,
Che.

 

Che I dont have time right now to finisht eh whole article but it is not forgotten people still remember it. It is mentioned in many fall of Berlin documentaries and books people just tend to disreguard it as they think Germans had it coming.

 

I dont think the rape of German women stacks up to either the Germans in Russia, OR the expulsion of Germans from East Europe after the war...

http://www.exulanten.com/murder.html

" Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people,
mostly women and children and overaged men, have
been killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern
Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported
or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the
road. About 25 per cent of these people, over
3,000,000 have perished. About 4,000,000 men and
women have been deported to eastern Europe and
Russia as slaves. It seems that the elimination of the
German population of eastern Europe - at least
15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance with
decisions made at Yalta." Sen. Homer Capehart in
speech before U.S. Senate, Feb. 5, 1946.

"Of the nearly 2.4 million East Prussians, more
than 1.9 million soon joined by ethnic Germans
from central Poland, fled westward under
harrowing conditions. 277,000 East Prussians died
or were killed, many when refugee ships in the
Baltic Sea were torpedoed. Some 173,000 people
remained, most of them in what is now the Polish
part of East Prussia, where only since 1989 they
again identify themselves openly as Germans. All
told, some 7.5 million from today's Poland and
the Russian part of East Prussia were affected by
expulsion. An estimated 1.4 million died or were
killed en route. U.S.Dept. of Defense poster,Below right

Three million Germans killed after the war for little more than revenge; thats a waste and a crime...

 

While you're at it, why not label that a holocaust? Or maybe the million Germans killed in strtegic bombing? Or the Japanese pillaging of Manchuria? These are all overlooked crimes of WW2 which are much MUCh more substantial ; its simply impossible to list or rectify for crimes in war as there are so many :cry:
The term Holocaust should not be thrown about lightly

 

This could therefore make the death by incindiary fires a "holocaust".

In a book I read it showed a picture of a person who died while being stuck in the asphalt on the street. It also described some of the conditions such as suffocation due to the oxygen the incindiers deprieved in their inviroment, clothing catching on fire, you skin burning, fire all around you. I could go on....

 

No wonder the Allies kicked, slammed, and blasted the Germans, especially the Nazis' butts on D-Day.

 

What has that to do with this topic (i wonder if you understand it at all):-?

 

I think that drawing comparisons of this type is at best hard to do, and at worst inappropriate. Rape is not a minor crime.

Much fuss is made of the Japanese behaviour in Nanking (one city) - Soviet soldiers behaved the same across half a country, and the fact is (as the topic highlights) far less known.

 

Cornelius Ryan, in the last few pages of his book "The Last Battle", estimates that about 120,000 German women were raped during and shortly after this one battle, and that doctors performed at least 30,000 off-the-record abortions afterwards.

It is horrifying. Indeed, the term "holocaust" (originally meaning "sacrificial fire") is not appropriate; in my opinion, raping people and then letting them live is much worse than 'just' killing them.

 

Don't forget the fire bombing of Tokyo the killed over 100,000 in one night and destroyed 16 square miles of the city.

 

Well Dave if we want to include strategic bombing and the civilian deaths lets not leave out the Brits, after all they sort of pioneered the concept. Personally I believe that any bombing of civilians that could not be shown to have saved more lives than they took to be very difficult to defend from a moral standpoint. At least the bombing of Japan can be said to have had a significant in not decisive effect on ending the war thus ending the killing. It is much harder to make that claim for the bombing of Germany.

 

I dont want to get into a "but they started it first" debate, but please remember that bombing of civilian targets with dubious military value goes back to:
Guernica (Condor Legion)
Warsaw / Rotterdam (Luftwaffe)
The Blitz (Luftwaffe)

It is very easy to look back at an event and say that it was not morally defensible. When you are fighting for your survival, as Britain was in WW2, different decisions apply.

IIRC Britain originally started bombing only military targets but found that night bombing was so inaccurate that they were lucky to get within several miles of a target. At that point the only options were to abandon the campaign (and leave German industry untouched) or target the infrastructure (housing, transport, workforce) to at least attempt to have some impact on the German economy and morale.

As technology improved, more accurate bombing was attempted but it was still nowhere like todays "laser-guided video game" bombing missions.

If we were in the shoes of the British leadership or, more importantly, the crews risking their lives night after night over Germany, I wonder if we would be so quick to condemn?

While we're at it, my Mother and Grandmother (who werein occupied Hong Kong) told me about the time, probably late '44 when the US got within range of the colony and broadcast that they were going to attack the port and "our bombadiers can hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet". You can guess the rest of the story, the residential districts got clobbered.

Tom

 

Grieg - absolutely, and there are many today who consider it to have been a war crime. But that is a debate for another topic

Actually the case can be made for the Zeppelin raids of WW1 being the first - although they were more limited in scope. I have an interest in the Zeppelin raids, as my Grandad's dad was part of an AA gun crew that shot one down.

 

I'm not forgetting the bombing that us Brits did but I would like to mention the often neglacted fact that the most devastating raid of the war was done by the USAAF on Tokyo and that it shouldn't just be the British who are blamed for "terror Bombing" everyone who had the equipment was doing it, to make it seem like they were taking the war to the enemy.

 

It seems to me that there is a distinct difference between civilians caught in the cross-fire and deliberate targetting of civilians for revenge or sadistic amusement.

The actions by the Red Army in occupied Germany and the East or the Japanese practically everywhere were the sadistic amusements of a conqueror who can exploit the vanquished at will.

In the case of the Red Army, another point Beevor makes is that the Soviets weren't too concerned with who was on the recieving end of the revenge, over-running concentration camps and extermination camps Poles and liberated Jewish women were raped and murdered too.

Whilst the actions of the Nazi administration in the East perhaps make the reprisals understandable it does not make them excusable in the slightest and is as far as I am concern a huge stain on the honour of the Red Army.

There is to me a huge difference morally between the rapes of Berlin and the RAF bombing offensives over Europe or the US attacks against Japan. In both cases the intent for the most part (Examples such as Dresden aside) were to damage the enemy's war effort with minimal casualties to the attacking forces, something any commander should be aiming for.

I don't believe the British pioneered Terror bombing at all, Britain learned that from the Luftwaffe.

 

Edit: Deleted after I found I accidently deleted 4/5th of my post.

 

There is also evidence that Red Army soldiers crucified (dead?i'm not so sure about that) Germans in Prussia for intimidating reasons. Also, about the Battle of Berlin; I've read that by the time the Soviets started the opperations to capture Berlin, the infantry divisions of the 1st line were composed mostly of soldiers conscripted from the Asian populations of USSR and committed the majority of crimes. Most divisions with European Russian populations were held as reserves ,or had a supporting role to the the frontline ones, as these took the heaviest toll during the war for almost 4 years. Of course this doesn't excuse the Red Army actions by any means. In general, atrocities committed by the Allies & Soviets remain in the shadow of the German ones...

*****
Something irrelevant with the topic; Gunter, do you speak Greek?

 

No I dont I speak some Polish (forgot most of what i knew) and english. The Polish attack from North if I remember correctly and from from west.

 

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying here though. I'm not condemning anyone especially those who had to make the very difficult decisions at a time when the survival of the free world was not assured by any means.

One distinction that I did think was legitimate is more of a hindsight judgement that history will address rather than a criticism of the people involved; that is: one campaign (bombing German civilians) apparently had little effect on ending the war whereas the other (bombing Japan) was just as brutal but was also effective in ending Japan's ability to continue the war.

Kind of a "does the end justify the means" test of morality.

 

A test of morality? Would this be an example; Your friend has his legs blown of by a mine on the battlefield and he askes you do shoot him you both know he is gonna die, would you shoot him?