Boroda, you wanted sources?
Fine, I'll post some sources, then perhaps you can post your sources too? And I would appreciate it if you included some other sources than yourself and some alleged conversations with old soviet ww2 veterans.
The last battle, Cornelius Ryan, New York, Simon and Schuster,1966
ISBN: 0684803291
In his book, Ryan personally interviewed 5 eyewitnesses and/or victims, they are:
Ursula Köster, mother of 3, victim
Ilse Antz, victim
Josef Michalke and Alfons Matzker, Jesuits in Charlottenburg's St. Canisius Church, witnesses
Father Michalke tells of one of his parishioners, Hannelore von Cmuda, a 17-year-old girl, was repeatedly raped by a mob of drunken Red Army men; when they were finished they shot the girl three times.
Margarete Promeist, victim "wave after wave of Russians came into my shelter plundering and raping. Women were killed if they refused. Some were shot and killed anyway. In one room alone I found the bodies of six or seven women, all lying in the position in which they were raped, their heads battered in."
[Note, these 5 testimonies are evidence enough to get a conviction in any trial. As a sidenote, there are several accounts of German warcriminals being convicted on evidence far less than this.]
The Fall of Berlin 1945, Antony Beevor, Viking Press 2002
ISBN: 0670030414
My original post in this thread is a review of this book, let me just highlight a part of it for you:
"One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape."
"Can't he understand it if a soldier has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?" Stalin's retort to a protest from Yugoslav Community Milovan Dijilas about Soviet troops raping Romanian, Croatian and Hungarian women.
[Note that Ryan only writes about rapes in Berlin, while Beevor include all the eastern parts of Germany]
Anthony Read and David Fisher, Berlin Rising: The Biography of a City (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994
You might find this quote interesting:
For nearly two weeks after the fall of the city, the Soviet authorities turned a blind eye to the sexual assaults, and to the looting and robbery that went on unchecked. Clearly they believed their men deserved 'a little fun', as Stalin described it, after their years of fighting. Then, suddenly, the party was over: from 15 May, discipline was restored, and any Red Army man who stepped out of line was liable to be shot.
Perhaps those veterans you refer too are talking about that order? And perhaps they have chosen to forgot what took place before May 15th 1945?
And if you know German:
Die grosse Flucht. Es begann an der Weichsel. Das Ende an der Elbe. Jurgen Thorwald Neuer Kaiser V., Klf. 1991.
ISBN: 370434057X
One of the legacies of the Soviet occupation of Germany has been that, at least until very recently, East German women of the wartime generation referred to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist."
