This is a most horrible chapter in the end of the war. Beevor states in his "Berlin" book that a Russian Officer was taking German Prisoners through the Ruins of Stalingrad and told them to look around, that this is what will happen to Berlin. The germans who fought in Russia knew exactly what was coming to the Reich if the Russians broke through. They had seen first hand of how the Russians were treated and knew that they could expect no less mercy for their folk. A lot of stories state that the Russian Fighting Units were ok but that the main offenders were the units coming up from the rear and the units made up of recently liberated prisoners of the germans. It started in Nemmersdorf and continued all the way through to the gates of Berlin. Curiously enough when refugees from the East made their way west they found little sympathy from the Western Provinces populace. The reason was that the Westerners has suffered for years at the hands of the West's Strategic Air Forces and felt that the Eastern Provinces were finally finding out what it was like to be under attack.
The rapes were so bad that the Arch Bishop of Berlin wrote to the Pope explaining that German Women were committing suicide believeing they had committed a cardinal sin. The Red Army behaved terribly at the end of the war but the whole conflict in the East was a war of annihalation of two ideologies and races. You might be disgusted by the Actions of the Russians but they werent the only side who committed atrocities in the East. There are many towns in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic States who found out that the Germans were as bad.
