Soviet soldiers raped German women in 1945 - a black western myth

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The black myth about hundreds of thousands and millions of German women raped in 1945 by Soviet soldiers (and representatives of other nations) has recently become part of an anti-Russian and anti-Soviet information campaign. This and other myths contribute to the transformation of the Germans from aggressors into victims, to equalize the USSR and Nazi Germany and, ultimately, to revise the results of World War II with all the ensuing historical geopolitical consequences.

On September 24, the liberal press recalled this myth again. A large piece of material was published on the website of the Russian service "BBC": "The Rape of Berlin: The Unknown History of the War." The article informs that a book is on sale in Russia - a diary of an officer of the Soviet Army Vladimir Gelfand, in which "the bloody everyday life of the Great Patriotic War is described without embellishment and cuts."

The article begins with a reference to the Soviet monument. This is a monument to the Liberator Soldier in Berlin's Treptower Park. If for us this is a symbol of the salvation of European civilization from Nazism, then “for some in Germany this memorial is a reason for different memories. Soviet soldiers raped countless women on their way to Berlin, but this was rarely talked about after the war - in both East and West Germany. And in Russia today, very few people talk about it."

The diary of Vladimir Gelfand tells about “the lack of order and discipline in the regular troops: meager rations, lice, routine anti-Semitism and endless theft. As he says, the soldiers even stole the boots of their comrades. And also reports on the rape of German women, and not as isolated cases, but to the system.

It remains only to wonder how the Red Army, in which there was no "order and discipline", reigned "routine anti-Semitism and endless theft", where the soldiers were criminals, stealing things from comrades and en masse raping girls, was able to defeat the "superior race" and the disciplined Wehrmacht … Apparently, they "filled up with corpses", as liberal historians have been convincing us for a long time.

The author of the article, Lucy Ash, calls for rejecting prejudices and learning the true history of World War II with all its unsightly sides: "… future generations must know the true horrors of war and deserve to see the unadorned picture." However, instead, he only repeats black myths, which have already been refuted more than once. “What was the real scale of the rape? The most commonly cited figures are 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany. These numbers, hotly contested, were extrapolated from the meager medical records that have survived to this day."

The myth of hundreds of thousands and millions of German women raped in 1945 by Soviet soldiers has been regularly raised over the past 25 years, although it did not rise before perestroika either in the USSR or by the Germans themselves. In 1992, a book by two feminists, Helke Zander and Barbara Jor, "Liberators and Liberated" was published in Germany, where this shocking average number appeared: two million.

In 2002, Anthony Beevor's book "The Fall of Berlin" was published, in which the author cited this figure without paying attention to its criticism. According to Beevor, he found in the Russian state archives reports "of an epidemic of sexual violence in Germany." At the end of 1944, these reports were sent by employees of the NKVD to Lavrentiy Beria. “They were passed on to Stalin,” says Beevor. - You can see by the marks whether they were read or not. They report the mass rapes in East Prussia and how German women tried to kill themselves and their children to avoid this fate."

In the work of Beevor, the following data are given: “According to estimates of the two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims of raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women had been raped in Berlin alone. Moreover, about ten thousand of them died mainly as a result of suicide. The number of deaths throughout East Germany is probably much higher when you take into account the million four hundred thousand who were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. It seems that in total, about two million German women were raped, many of whom (if not most) suffered this humiliation several times."

That is, we see the opinion of "one doctor"; the sources were described with the phrases “apparently”, “if” and “appears to be”. In 2004, Anthony Beevor's book "The Fall of Berlin" was published in Russia and became a "source" for numerous anti-Sovietists who picked up and spread the myth of "Soviet soldiers-rapists". Now another similar "work" will appear - Gelfand's diary.

In fact, such facts, and they are inevitable in war, because even in peacetime, violence - this is one of the most widespread crimes, were an exceptional phenomenon, and for crimes they were severely punished. Stalin's order of January 19, 1945 read: “Officers and Red Army men! We are going to the enemy country. Everyone must keep composure, everyone must be brave … The remaining population in the conquered areas, whether German, Czech, or Pole, must not be subjected to violence. The perpetrators will be punished under martial law. In the conquered territory, sexual intercourse with the female sex is not allowed. The perpetrators will be shot for violence and rape."

They fought hard against looters and rapists. The criminals were put under military tribunals. For looting, rape and other crimes, the punishments were severe: 15 years in the camps, penal battalion, execution. The report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front on unlawful actions against the civilian population for the period from April 22 to May 5, 1945, contains the following figures: in seven front armies for 908, 5 thousand people 124 crimes were recorded, of which 72 were rapes. 72 cases out of 908.5 thousand. Where are the hundreds of thousands of raped German women here?

With tough measures, the wave of revenge was quickly extinguished. It is worth remembering that not all crimes were committed by Soviet soldiers. It was noted that the Poles took particular revenge on the Germans for the years of humiliation. Former forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were freed; some of them took revenge. Australian war correspondent Osmar White was in Europe with the US 3rd Army and noted: “… when former forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners filled the roads and began to loot one town after another, the situation got out of control … Some of the survivors of the camp gathered in gangs to settle accounts with the Germans."

On May 2, 1945, the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front, Yachenin, reported: “Repatriated people who go to the repatriation points, and especially Italians, Dutch and even Germans, are widely engaged in violence, and especially robbery and hoarding. At the same time, all these outrages are dumped on our servicemen … "This was also reported to Stalin and Beria:" In Berlin there is a large number of Italians, French, Poles, Americans and British prisoners of war released from the camps, who take personal belongings and property from the local population, load on carts and heading west. Measures are being taken to confiscate the stolen property from them."

Osmar White also noted the high discipline in the Soviet troops: “There was no terror in Prague or any other part of Bohemia on the part of the Russians. Russians are harsh realists towards collaborators and fascists, but a person with a clear conscience has nothing to fear. Severe discipline reigns in the Red Army. There are no more robberies, rapes and bullying here than in any other zone of occupation. Wild stories of atrocities emerge from exaggerations and distortions of individual cases under the influence of Czech nervousness caused by the immoderate manner of Russian soldiers and their love of vodka. One woman who told me most of the tales of Russian atrocities that made her hair stand on end was eventually forced to admit that the only evidence she saw with her own eyes was drunken Russian officers shooting pistols into the air or at bottles ….

Many veterans and contemporaries of World War II noted that severe discipline reigned in the Red Army. Do not forget that in the Stalinist USSR a society of service and creation was created. They brought up heroes, creators and producers, not punks and rapists. Soviet troops entered Europe as liberators, not conquerors; Soviet soldiers and commanders behaved accordingly.

It is worth recalling that the Nazis, representatives of European civilization, behaved like animals on Soviet soil. The Nazis slaughtered people like cattle, raped, wiped out entire settlements. For example, what an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier was like was described at the Nuremberg trials. Müller, a typical corporal of the 355th Security Battalion, killed 96 Soviet citizens during the occupation, including the elderly, women and babies. He also raped thirty-two Soviet women, and six of them were killed. It is clear that when it became clear that the war was lost, many were seized by horror. The Germans were afraid that the Russians would take revenge on them. And the just punishment was deserved.

In fact, the first to launch the myth of the "red rapists" and "hordes from the East" were the ideologues of the Third Reich. Today's "researchers" and liberal publicists only repeat rumors and gossip that were invented in Nazi Germany in order to intimidate the population, to keep it submissive. For the Germans to fight until the very last moment. So that death in battle seemed to them an easy fate compared to captivity and occupation.

Reich Minister of Education and Propaganda of Germany Joseph Goebbels wrote in March 1945: “… in fact, in the face of Soviet soldiers, we are dealing with steppe scum. This is confirmed by information about the atrocities that came to us from the eastern regions. They really cause horror … In some villages and cities, all women from ten to seventy years old were subjected to countless rapes. It seems that this is being done by order from above, since an explicit system can be seen in the behavior of the Soviet soldiers."

This myth was immediately replicated. Hitler himself addressed the population: “Soldiers on the Eastern Front! For the last time, the mortal enemy in the person of the Bolsheviks and Jews goes on the offensive. He is trying to crush Germany and destroy our people. You, soldiers on the Eastern Front, for the most part already know yourself what fate awaits primarily German women, girls and children. While old men and children will be killed, women and girls will be relegated to barracks' prostitutes. The rest will go to Siberia. On the Western Front, German propaganda used the image of a Negro raping blond German women instead of Russians to intimidate the local population.

Thus, the leaders of the Reich tried to make people fight to the end. At the same time, people were driven to panic, mortal horror. A significant part of the population of East Prussia fled to the western regions. In Berlin itself, a series of suicides took place. Whole families passed away.

After the war, this myth was supported by the Anglo-Saxon publications. The Cold War was in full swing, and the United States and Britain waged an active information war against Soviet civilization. Many myths that were actively used in the Third Reich were adopted by the Anglo-Saxons and their singers in Western Europe. In 1954, the book "Woman in Berlin" was published in the USA. Its author is considered to be journalist Martha Hillier. In West Germany, the diary was published in 1960. In 2003, "The Woman in Berlin" was reprinted in many countries, and the Western media eagerly picked up the theme of "raped Germany." A few years later, the film "Nameless" was shot based on this book. After that, the work of E. Beevor "The Fall of Berlin" was accepted by the liberal editions "with a bang." The soil was already prepared.

At the same time, the West turns a blind eye to the fact that American, French and British troops are responsible for massive crimes in Germany, including rape. For example, the German historian M. Gebhardt believes that the Americans alone raped at least 190 thousand German women, and this process continued until 1955. Particularly atrocities were committed by soldiers from the colonial units - Arabs and Negroes. But the West is trying not to remember this.

Also, in the West, they do not want to remember that a strong German socialist state of the GDR was created on the German territory controlled by the USSR (the 6th economy in Europe in 1980). And "raped Germany" was the most loyal and self-sufficient ally of the USSR in Europe. If all the crimes that the followers of Goebbels and Hitler write about were in fact, then in principle it would hardly be possible to have good-neighborly and allied relations that lasted more than four decades.

Thus, there were indeed rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers, there are documents and statistics on the number of convicts. But, these crimes were of an exceptional nature, not of a massive and systematic nature. If we relate the total number of those convicted of these crimes to the entire number of Soviet troops in the occupied territories, then the percentage will turn out to be quite insignificant. At the same time, crimes were committed not only by Soviet troops, but also by Poles, French, Americans, British (including representatives of the colonial troops), prisoners of war released from camps, etc.

The black myth about "Soviet soldiers-rapists" was created in the Third Reich to scare the population, make them fight to the end. Then this myth was restored by the Anglo-Saxons, who were waging an information war against the USSR. This war continues at the present time, with the aim of turning the USSR into an aggressor, Soviet soldiers into invaders and rapists, to equalize the USSR and Nazi Germany. Ultimately, our "partners" seek to revise the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War with all the ensuing historical and geopolitical consequences.

Samsonov Alexander