"They raped everyone from eight to 80"

[Hortlund]

"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."

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.

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 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.

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.

If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution.

© Antony Beevor.

[funkedup]

Yes, and the Nazi soldiers were perfect gentlemen during their invasion of the USSR.

[Wingnut_0]

Like always Hortlund, what's your point.

[Elfenwolf]

Good read, Hortlund. Thanks for posting.

Wingnut, the point Hortlund makes for me is that war is hell and encompasses all the evil Hell has to offer, including rape, murder, and every other autrocity. Rape has been a part of war since the first cave men attacked their neighbors and, no doubt, rape continues today in every Nation currently involved in armed conflict.

Maybe the point is we should all work for peace. Maybe the point is we should all listen to what people who have been through an occupation are saying to us. Maybe we should decide to make war obsolete before war makes us obsolete. Maybe posting something like this will give people cause to reflect and ask themselves why we, as a species, insist upon killing, maiming, raping and conquering those who are different from us.

Like I said, good read, Hort, thanks for posting.

[babek-]

100% agree

[Nifty]

Originally posted by funkedup
Yes, and the Nazi soldiers were perfect gentlemen during their invasion of the USSR.

two wrongs make a right, eh funked?

Point?  A simple one from the above article could be  "One man's hero is another man's villain."  Although I think Elfenwolf is right on the money.

[Boroda]

What a pile of roadkill...

Everyone found guilty in rape or maraudering was executed in front of his unit. All vets I know said they didn't have any desire for any experiments after the first of their comrades got shot for rape.

They all say they were disappointed and angry (if you can describe this feeling in such a way), because they all saw what nazis did to their home land, and their own command made any attempt of revenge impossible...

The worst crime of the Soviet command was to allow every soldier to send 16kg of "trophy" home.

[Mighty1]

The Russians never did anything wrong nor did the Germans. The only people that did anything wrong were the Americans and English.

[Boroda]

Looks like perfect roadkill for me. Z. Agranenko (Yerukhimovich) died in 1960. Who was the clever guy to find this quote!? It is the ONLY signed quote in that crap.

Since the seven-years war German propaganda pictures Russians as "asian hordes of barbarians". It is even older then Goebbels "asian hordes of Jewish bolsheviks".

[miko2d]

Originally posted by Boroda
Since the seven-years war German propaganda pictures Russians as "asian hordes of barbarians". It is even older then Goebbels "asian hordes of Jewish bolsheviks".

 Ironically, that may have a grain of truth. If some notable scientists are correct, there is a good chance that ashkenazi jews are descendants of turk nation of khasars and admixture mideastern jews rather then direct descendants of jews scaterred from ancient Israel.

 As for mass rapes committed by soviet army, what is so surprising about it? I thought it was a common knowlege.
 The government did everything possible to destroy any vestiges of morality in the population, the officers could not care less, etc.
 Russian soldiers lived in pretty brutal conditions even before the war and the war did nothing to improve the national character. Banditism and rape were spread not only in occupied territories but drastically increased in the Soviet Union itself during and after the war.

 I do not see any point to pick on russians though. Other people would and did behave the same way in the same conditions.

 miko

[funkedup]

Boroda you should get Beevor's book and check the bibliography.  IIRC many of his facts on this subject come from Soviet archives.  Soviet command was aware of the widespread rapes, although I'm sure some of them found it just as distasteful as we do.

[Wotan]

Ironically, that may have a grain of truth. If some notable scientists are correct, there is a good chance that ashkenazi jews are descendants of turk nation of khasars and admixture mideastern jews rather then direct descendants of jews scaterred from ancient Israel.

There seems to be some real evidence to support what miko said.

German Jews and those Jews from eastern Europe are not blood decendents of the ancient hebrews .

They can be ethnically traced back to the Khazars, a warlike Gentile nation from Southern Russia who converted to the Jewish religion in the eigth or 9th century.

However it is this Branch of the Jewish Nation that are the die hard Zionists and that formed the terrorists gangs and did most of the dirty work wresting Palestine from the Arabs.

[Curval]

Originally posted by Boroda
The worst crime of the Soviet command was to allow every soldier to send 16kg of "trophy" home.

Nonsense Boroda...despite all efforts to cover up mass rapes which were condoned by the high command, much of the information (evidence) was retained and is now open for public inspection.  I have only read about it - you are the closest to it...go have a look.

[Pongo]

Reads just like Nanking.
Dont anyone kid themselves that this was a Russian or a German or a Japanese problem. That is lying right underneath the skin in a scary amount of the population of every country.

[--am--]

Originally posted by Wotan
Beevor's book and check the bibliography. IIRC many of his facts on this subject come from Soviet archives. Soviet command was aware of the widespread rapes, although I'm sure some of them found it just as distasteful as we do.

Beevor the usual liar. It has taken from archives only those documents which speak for the benefit of its theory and has not resulted the documents, which showed struggle of the Soviet government with these phenomena. It simply makes money and it the historical truth is uninteresting.

Besides if in 1945 prostitution there was one of mass ways to earn of products for itself and families, now many from those who was engaged in it for a survival, now prefer to tell about it, as about mass violence.