Red Army rape.

[Owen]

In several of the posts by forum member "stalin" he says we in the west dropped the bomb on Japan's innocent women and children to punish them for what the Japanese soldiers had done.
No that was not deliberate policy UNLIKE the Red Army's vengful rape of women and young girls in Eastern Germany in 1945.
As the following wil show it was ever better vengence when the husband was there to witness the rape.

This is an interview with Anthony Beevor about his book BERLIN, one I'm sure most of us has read.

Beevor, the author of the best-selling Stalingrad, says advancing Soviet troops raped large numbers of Russian and Polish women held in concentration camps, as well as millions of Germans.
The extent of the Red Army's indiscipline and depravity emerged as the author studied Soviet archives for his forthcoming book Berlin, to be published in April by Viking.
Beevor - who was educated at Sandhurst and served in the 11th Hussars (Prince Albert's Own), an elite cavalry regiment - says details of the Soviet soldiers' behaviour have forced him to revise his view of human nature.
"Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential rapists, I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists," he told The Bookseller.
He appears to echo the American feminist Marilyn French's notorious claim that "in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that's all they are".
Any such resemblance is, however, superficial. Beevor is careful to qualify any suggestion that what happened from 1944 onwards is in any way typical of male behaviour in peacetime. But he admits that he was "shaken to the core" to discover that Russian and Polish women and girls liberated from concentration camps were also violated.
"That completely undermined the notion that the soldiers were using rape as a form of revenge against the Germans," he said.
"By the time the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding women almost as carnal booty; they felt because they were liberating Europe they could behave as they pleased. That is very frightening, because one starts to realise that civilisation is terribly superficial and the facade can be stripped away in a very short time."
Beevor's high reputation as a historian ensures that his claims will be taken seriously. Stalingrad was widely praised and awarded the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize.
His account of the siege of Berlin, however, promises to be more controversial. "In many ways the fate of the women and the girls in Berlin is far worse than that of the soldiers starving and suffering in Stalingrad."
To understand why the rape of Germany was so uniquely terrible, the context is essential. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, began the most genocidal conflict in history. Perhaps 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union are now thought to have died during the war, including more than three million who were deliberately starved in German PoW camps.
The Germans, having shown no quarter, could expect none in return. Their casualties were also on a vast scale. In the Battle of Berlin alone more than a million German soldiers were killed or died later in captivity, plus at least 100,000 civilians. The Soviet Union lost more than 300,000 men.
Against this horrific background, Stalin and his commanders condoned or even justified rape, not only against Germans but also their allies in Hungary, Romania and Croatia. When the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas protested to Stalin, the dictator exploded: "Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"
And when German Communists warned him that the rapes were turning the population against them, Stalin fumed: "I will not allow anyone to drag the reputation of the Red Army in the mud."
The rapes had begun as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944. In many towns and villages every female, aged from 10 to 80, was raped. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate who was then a young officer, described the horror in his narrative poem Prussian Nights: "The little daughter's on the mattress,/Dead. How many have been on it/A platoon, a company perhaps?"
But Solzhenitsyn was rare: most of his comrades regarded rape as legitimate. As the offensive struck deep into Germany, the orders of Marshal Zhukov, their commander, stated: "Woe to the land of the murderers. We will get a terrible revenge for everything."
By the time the Red Army reached Berlin its reputation, reinforced by Nazi propaganda, had already terrified the population, many of whom fled. Though the hopeless struggle came to an end in May 1945, the ordeal of German women did not.
How many German women were raped? One can only guess, but a high proportion of at least 15 million women who either lived in the Soviet Union zone or were expelled from the eastern provinces. The scale of rape is suggested by the fact that about two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
It was not until the winter of 1946-47 that the Soviet authorities, concerned by the spread of disease, imposed serious penalties on their forces in East Germany for fraternising with the enemy.
Soviet soldiers saw rape, often carried out in front of a woman's husband and family, as an appropriate way of humiliating the Germans, who had treated Slavs as an inferior race with whom sexual relations were discouraged. Russia's patriarchal society and the habit of binge-drinking were also factors, but more important was resentment at the discovery of Germany's comparative wealth.
The fact, highlighted by Beevor, that Soviet troops raped not only Germans but also their victims, recently liberated from concentration camps, suggests that the sexual violence was often indiscriminate, although far fewer Russian or Polish women were raped when their areas were liberated compared to the conquered Germans.
Jews, however, were not necessarily regarded by Soviet troops as fellow victims of the Nazis. The Soviet commissars had commandeered German concentration camps in order to incarcerate their own political prisoners, who included "class enemies" as well as Nazi officials, and their attitude towards the previous inmates was, to say the least, unsentimental.
As for the millions of Russian prisoners or slave workers who survived the Nazis: those who were not executed as traitors or sent to the Gulag could count themselves lucky. The women among them were probably treated no better than the Germans, perhaps worse.
The rape of Germany left a bitter legacy. It contributed to the unpopularity of the East German communist regime and its consequent reliance on the Stasi secret police. The victims themselves were permanently traumatised: women of the wartime generation still refer to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist".

[Owen]

Originally Posted by stalin

out of sheer anti-sovietism, Anthony Beevor wrote outrageous libel.

I've tried to open your eyes but now I give up.

[von Poop]

You utter blind fool.
My aunt, who died recently was in her 20's and living in Silesia at the time. She could have told you how little libel there is in the above.......

There's a chap on here who believes there were 'standing orders to rape'. I don't believe that but I do believe that the behaviour of the troops was repellent in this respect, largely ignored by their officers and stains their otherwise great achievements.

[von Poop]

Originally Posted by stalin

up until now no evidences of rape cases was subjected.

Up until recently any such suggestion would have been severely repressed in the SU.
Up until recently the Soviet records had not been opened exposing just how much the red Army itself was concerned at the violations.
Up until recently most violated women did not want to discuss such things.

(especially since many were children at the time. Who could blame them for wanting to forget and get on with their lives?)
Do you think the perpetrators would boast of their crimes? even now?

Originally Posted by stalin

up until now no evidences of rape cases was subjected.

Funny, so why all of the records coming out of Russian archives? Oh, i get it, Russia are liars as well. Okay, just so we're all equal in your closed eyes Stalin.
Kitty

[plant-pilot]

I for one am getting very bored with stalin's childish, unsubstantiated non-arguments and selective-denial. It seems any evidence put before him against his claims is western libel and lies, while at the same time forwarding no evidence himeslf to substantiate his pathetic bias and claims.

Funnily it is the same tactics that all supporters of the un-supportable use in order to keep their heads in a cloud of self-denial. An immature trait of a coward who defends the wrong doings of the people he supports and refuses to acknowledge the valid acts of those he does not. He will probably never see military service and would run from a fight, unless supported by enough fellow cowards to outnumber the opposition. The same type of insecure person who happily took the role of concentration camp guard or other power seeking bully.

I know the type and they are often looked at.... not in awe, fear or respect but in pity.

I appologise now to everyone (except stalin) for this outburst of personal insult, but the kid's an idiot.

Originally Posted by plant-pilot

I appologise now to everyone (except stalin) for this outburst of personal insult, but the kid's an idiot.

You know what the scariest part of this is? i think that he is actually classed as an adult. The body may be, but the brain ain't.
Kitty

[Owen]

He really has stirred us up.
I've learnt from this experience.
He has united all of us against him.
Thank you stalin!

[morse1001]

Time to get back to the topic. its gone too far.

[Gotthard Heinrici]

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.