Facts of Soviet soldiers' violence against German women. Sexual violence in World War II
Below are excerpts from various books (I don’t remember the names, alas)
1. Our past neighbors - grandparents - got married in the war. She was a nurse, she slept, and he raped her sleeping. In the process, I realized that she was a virgin, was afraid of arrest and offered to marry: “anyway, no one will marry you anymore.” She was scared and agreed. So he later reminded her all his life: “Now, if I hadn’t taken pity on you, no one would have taken you.”
2. Then there was Allenstein and there was even more fire and more death. Near the post office, he (Kopelev) met a woman with a bandaged head, who tightly held the hand of a young girl with blond pigtails, she was crying, the child's legs were stained with blood ... "The soldiers kicked us out of the house," she said to the Russian officer, " they beat and raped us, my daughter was only 13, she was raped by two, and everyone else raped me" She asked him to help her find her little son. Another woman asked him to shoot her.
3. "I remember what happened the first three days after the capture of Stettin, all the roads were covered with feathers from featherbeds, posters were placed on the approaches to the city - "Blood for blood!", And the corpses of civilians here and there did not cause anyone surprise As if the Mongol horde had passed. And when it became clear to the command that the time had come to urgently curb the vengeful impulse of the advanced units, then the order of Marshal Zhukov appeared - “For violence and looting - to be court-martialed and shot” ... Then Alexandrov’s article “Comrade Ehrenburg” appeared simplifies", and the commanders, together with political workers and tribunals, were able to restore discipline in the army units."
4. “They poked here,” the beautiful German woman explained, lifting up her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a girl,” she sighed and cried. “They ruined my youth. they climbed on me, they all poked at me. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes, - and she burst into tears.
“They raped my daughter in my presence,” the poor mother put in, “they can still come and rape my girl again.” From this again everyone was horrified, and bitter sobbing swept from corner to corner of the basement where the owners had brought me. here, - the girl suddenly rushed to me, - you will sleep with me. You can do whatever you want with me, but you are the only one!" writes Gelfand in his diary.
5. “There is no way to say that the major is raping me,” she writes. “Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? I like the Major, and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person."
Many of her neighbors made similar deals with the winners of defeated Berlin.
6. "Unexpectedly, tanks appeared on our street, bodies of Russians and German soldiers she recalls. “I remember the terrifying lingering sound of falling Russian bombs. We called them Stalinorgels ("Stalin's organs")".
One day, between bombings, Ingeborg climbed out of the basement and ran upstairs for a rope, which she adapted for a lamp wick.
“Suddenly, I saw two Russians pointing guns at me,” she says. “One of them forced me to undress and raped me. Then they switched places and another raped me. I thought I was going to die, that they would kill me.”
Today, Tatyana Tolstaya (mother of a blogger and apparently a writer) patriotically remarked:
"I'm thinking: if Russian soldiers raped millions of German women, as we are told here, then these German women, presumably - well, maybe not all, but half, say, - gave birth to children. This means that the population of Germany in the conquered territories is now Russian and not German?
The people have already been outraged about this, but, it seems to me, the best answer to Tatyana is the Soviet veteran Leonid Rabichev. Below is an excerpt from his book of memoirs "War will write everything off":
Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and left along the highway, and in front of each stands a cackling armada of men with their trousers down.
Those who are bleeding and losing consciousness are dragged aside, children who rush to help them are shot. Cackle, growl, laughter, cries and groans. And their commanders, their majors and colonels stand on the highway, who laughs, and who conducts, no, rather regulates. This is so that all their soldiers, without exception, participate.
No, not mutual responsibility and not at all revenge on the damned occupiers, this hellish deadly group sex.
Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and cruel logic of the distraught crowd.
Shocked, I sat in the cab of a lorry, my driver Demidov stood in line, and I imagined Flaubert's Carthage, and I understood that the war would not write off everything. The colonel, the one who had just conducted, could not stand it and took the queue himself, and the major shot the witnesses, the hysterical children and the elderly.
Cum! By cars!
And behind is the next unit.
And again a stop, and I can not keep my signalmen, who are also already getting into new queues. I have nausea in my throat.
To the horizon between the mountains of rags, overturned wagons are the corpses of women, old people, children. The highway is cleared for traffic. It's getting dark.
Me and my control platoon get a farm two kilometers from the highway.
In all rooms there are corpses of children, old people, raped and shot women.
We are so tired that, paying no attention to them, we lie down on the floor between them and fall asleep.
In the morning we deploy the walkie-talkie, we communicate with the front via SSR. We are instructed to establish lines of communication. The advanced units finally encountered the German corps and divisions that had taken up the defense.
The Germans no longer retreat, they die, but do not surrender. Their aircraft appears in the air. I'm afraid to make a mistake, it seems to me that in terms of cruelty, uncompromisingness and the number of losses on both sides, these battles can be compared with the battles near Stalingrad. It's all around and ahead.
I don't leave my phones. I take orders, I give orders. Only during the day there is time to bring the corpses out into the yard.
I don't remember where we took them.
In office buildings? I can’t remember where, I know that we never buried them.
The funeral teams seem to have been, but it is far in the rear.
So, I help carry out the corpses. I freeze at the wall of the house.
Spring, the first on earth green grass, bright hot sun. Our house is pointed, with weathervanes, in gothic style, covered with red tiles, probably two hundred years old, a courtyard paved with stone slabs, which are five hundred years old.
We are in Europe, we are in Europe!
I was dreaming, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls enter the open gate. There is no fear in the eyes, but a terrible anxiety.
They saw me, ran up and, interrupting each other, they were trying to explain something to me in German. Although I don’t know the language, I hear the words “muter”, “vater”, “bruder”.
It becomes clear to me that in the atmosphere of the stampede they lost their family somewhere.
I feel terribly sorry for them, I understand that they need to run wherever their eyes look and quickly from our headquarters yard, and I tell them:
Mutter, fater, brooder - niht! - and I point my finger at the second distant gate - there, they say. And I push them.
Then they understand me, they quickly leave, disappear from sight, and I sigh with relief - at least I saved two girls, and I head to the second floor to my phones, carefully follow the movement of the parts, but twenty minutes do not pass before me some screams, screams, laughter, obscenities are heard from the yard.
I rush to the window.
Major A. is standing on the steps of the house, and two sergeants twisted their arms, bent those same two girls into three deaths, and on the contrary - all the staff servants - drivers, orderlies, clerks, messengers.
Nikolaev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov ... - Major A. commands. - Take the girls by the arms and legs, skirts and blouses off! Stand in two lines! Unfasten your belts, lower your pants and underpants! Right and left, one at a time, start!
A. is in command, and my signalmen, my platoon, run up the stairs from the house and line up. And the two girls “rescued” by me are lying on ancient stone slabs, their hands are in a vice, their mouths are stuffed with scarves, their legs are spread apart - they no longer try to escape from the hands of four sergeants, and the fifth rips and tears apart their blouses, bras, skirts, panties.
My telephone operators ran out of the house - laughter and obscenities.
the ranks do not decrease, some rise, others descend, and around the martyrs there are already pools of blood, and there is no end to the ranks, cackle and obscenity.
The girls are already unconscious, and the orgy continues.
Proudly akimbo, Major A is in command. But then the last one rises, and executioner sergeants attack two half-corpses.
Major A. pulls out a revolver from a holster and shoots at the bloody mouths of the martyrs, and the sergeants drag their mutilated bodies into the pigsty, and the hungry pigs begin to tear off their ears, noses, chests, and after a few minutes only two skulls, bones, vertebrae remain from them .
I'm scared, disgusting.
Suddenly, nausea rises in my throat, and I turn inside out.
Major A. - God, what a scoundrel!
I can't work, I run out of the house, not making out my way, I'm going somewhere, I'm coming back, I can't, I have to look into the pigsty.
In front of me are bloodshot eyes of a pig, and among the straw, pig droppings are two skulls, a jaw, several vertebrae and bones and two golden crosses - two girls “rescued” by me.
The commandant of the city, a senior colonel, tried to organize all-round defense, but half-drunk soldiers dragged women and girls out of their apartments. In a critical situation, the commandant decides to get ahead of the soldiers who have lost control of themselves. On his instructions, the liaison officer gives me an order to set up military guards of eight of my machine gunners around the church, and a specially created team beats off the captured women from the victorious warriors who have lost control of themselves.
Another team returns the soldiers and officers who fled around the city in search of "pleasures", explains to them that the city and the region are surrounded. With difficulty creates a circular defense.
At this time, about two hundred and fifty women and girls are driven into the church, but after about forty minutes several tanks drive up to the church. Tankers squeeze, push my submachine gunners away from the entrance, break into the temple, knock down and start to rape women.
I can not do anything. A young German woman seeks protection from me, another kneels down.
Herr Lieutenant, Herr Lieutenant!
Hoping for something, surrounded me. Everyone is saying something.
And already the news is sweeping through the city, and a line has already lined up, and again this damned cackle, and a line, and my soldiers.
Back, f ... your mother! - I yell and I don’t know where to put myself and how to protect those lying around my feet, and the tragedy is growing rapidly.
The groans of dying women. And now, up the stairs (why? why?), they are dragging them up to the platform, bloody, half-naked, unconscious, and through the broken windows they are thrown onto the stone slabs of the pavement.
They seize, undress, kill. There is no one left around me. Neither I nor any of my soldiers have ever seen anything like this. Strange hour.
The tankers left. Silence. Night. An eerie mountain of corpses. Unable to stay, we leave the church. And we can't sleep either.
So the Soviet veteran Leonid Nikolaevich Rabichev answered, apparently, the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. The Germans, of course, gave birth - but only those who were not killed. And the dead, Tanya, do not give birth.
3.7 (74.36%) 39 votesWomen captured by the Germans. How the Nazis mocked captured Soviet women
Second World War rolled over humanity. Millions of dead and many more crippled lives and destinies. All the belligerents did truly monstrous things, justifying everything with war.
Carefully! The material presented in the collection may seem unpleasant or intimidating.
Of course, in this regard, the Nazis were especially distinguished, and this is not even taking into account the Holocaust. There are many both documented and frankly fictional stories about what the German soldiers did.
One of the high-ranking German officers recalled the briefings they went through. Interestingly, there was only one order regarding female soldiers: “Shoot.”
Most did so, but among the dead, the bodies of women in the form of the Red Army are often found - soldiers, nurses or nurses, on whose bodies there were traces of cruel torture.
Residents of the village of Smagleevka, for example, say that when they had Nazis, they found a seriously wounded girl. And in spite of everything they dragged her onto the road, stripped her and shot her.
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But before her death, she was tortured for a long time for pleasure. Her entire body was turned into a continuous bloody mess. The Nazis did the same with female partisans. Before being executed, they could be stripped naked and for a long time keep in the cold.
Women soldiers of the Red Army in captivity and the Germans 1 part
Of course, the captives were constantly raped.
Women soldiers of the Red Army captured by the Finns and Germans part 2. Jews
And if the highest German ranks were forbidden to have an intimate relationship with the captives, then ordinary privates had more freedom in this matter.
And if the girl did not die after a whole company used her, then she was simply shot.
The situation in the concentration camps was even worse. Unless the girl was lucky and one of the higher ranks of the camp took her to him as a servant. Although it did not save much from rape.
In this regard, camp No. 337 was the most cruel place. There, the prisoners were kept naked for hours in the cold, hundreds of people were settled in the barracks at once, and anyone who could not do the work was immediately killed. About 700 prisoners of war were destroyed daily in the Stalag.
Women were subjected to the same torture as men, and even much worse. In terms of torture, the Nazis could be envied by the Spanish Inquisition.
Soviet soldiers knew exactly what was happening in the concentration camps and what the threat of captivity was. Therefore, no one wanted to give up and was not going to. They fought to the end, until death, she was the only winner in those terrible years.
Blessed memory of all those who died in the war ...
In October 1944, the Red Army invaded East Prussia. For the first time during the war years, a Soviet soldier set foot on German soil. At the border, he was already met by an inciting poster, possibly composed by Ilya Ehrenburg himself: “HERE IT IS, DAMNED GERMANY!”. For greater clarity, the poster was crowned with a huge plywood pointing finger, turned towards the hated west.
The entire Red Army remembered well the fiery lines of Comrade Ehrenburg, which were sold in millions of copies: “... We understood: the Germans are not people. From now on, the word "German" is the worst curse for us. From now on, the word "German" unloads a gun. Let's not talk. Let's not get angry. We will kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is gone. If you think that your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you don't kill the German, the German will kill you. He will take yours and torture them in his accursed Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull in your area, if you are waiting for a fight, kill the German before the fight. If you let a German live, the German will hang a Russian man and dishonor a Russian woman. If you killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count miles. Count one thing: the Germans you killed. Kill the German! - this asks the old woman-mother. Kill the German! - it begs you child. Kill the German! - it screams motherland. Don't miss. Do not miss. Kill!" ("Red Star", July 24, 1942).
In the autumn of 1944, Ehrenburg, who, according to the English correspondent in Moscow, Alexander Werth, had "a brilliant talent for inciting hatred of the Germans," proclaimed: "We are on German soil, and in these words all our hope: Germany is not enough to defeat, it must be finished off "("Great day", 10/24/44). A month later, another “pearl” of racial hatred appeared: “We don’t need blond hyenas. We go to Germany after another: after Germany. And this blond witch will not do well ”(“ The blond witch, 11/25/44).
And now this “cursed”, “damned”, “blond” and, moreover, such a well-organized, strong kulak-like Germany, stretched out in front of a war, vodka and propaganda, inflamed with vodka and propaganda, armed to the teeth with a scoop.
In the poem of the front-line soldier Alexander Solzhenitsyn "Prussian Nights" this tramp envy of bourgeois prosperity, multiplied by the bandit "freedom of action" is aptly depicted:
“Get out, foreign land!
Open your gates!
This is our remote
The Russian infantry is coming!
“On the cars! .. On the road!
To Europe! - on-fall!
The enemy is neither smell nor hearing.
Fluffed down with spirit!
Oh, let's roll far! ..
Just something wild for us
And the heart is not easy?
It's strange to look from afar,
And up close - even more marvelous:
unknown land,
It's not like people
Not like in Poland, not like at home
Roofs are covered - not with straw,
And the sheds are like mansions! .. "
Solzhenitsyn shows well how the drunken revelry of murders, violence, robberies, arson and senseless destruction, covered up by the phraseology of "just historical retribution", is growing during the Soviet offensive.
And our lava is rushing
With a boom, whistle, headlights shine -
Klein Koslau, Gros Koslau -
That the village is a fire!
Everything is on fire! mooing cows,
Locked in burning barns, -
Eh, darlings
You are not ours!
Dear me, brothers, your robber
Not a good cheerful look.
We didn't choose ourselves.
Not willingly this way
But now behind the belts
There is something to shoot in the sky!
So, the Red Army takes on a frankly "robbery look." In other words, wild. And, with the highest permission. Writer Lev Kopelev, at that time a Soviet major, an eyewitness to the death of East Prussia, writes in his amazing memoirs :
“Yes, parcels were indeed allowed. Shortly before the start of the winter offensive. Each soldier was given the right to send one or two eight-kilogram parcels a month. Officers are twice as big and heavier.
It was a direct and unambiguous encouragement to future marauders, inciting robberies. What else could a soldier send home? Old footcloths? Leftover rations? ("Keep forever").
The results of the authoritative encouragement of murderers, rapists and robbers were not long in coming.
“The Russians behaved like wild animals. Moving from farm to farm, they devoured everything in their path. Flour, ham, canned food - everything went into action. Products were pulled out of the cellars and scattered around the yard. When the sun began to bake - spring came - they began to deteriorate, and the smell of decaying food permeated the farm ...
Often, Russian soldiers tore children from their mothers and took them to camps. Many died along the way. And many later at home, infected with venereal diseases, which wildly spread after the invasion of our “liberators” ”(Horst Gerlach. “In Siberian camps. Memoirs of a German prisoner”. M., 2006).
Again the word to Lev Kopelev: “By evening we drove into Naidenburg. The city was light from the fires: entire neighborhoods were on fire. And here ours were set on fire. The town is small. The sidewalks are lined with branched trees. In one of the side streets, under the patterned fence of the front garden, lay the corpse of an old woman: a torn dress, between her skinny legs an ordinary landline phone. They tried to stick a tube into the perineum.
Soldiers in groups and one by one slowly walked from house to house, some dragging bundles or suitcases. One loquaciously explained that this German woman was a spy, she was caught on the phone, and they didn’t talk for a long time.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at that time the captain of the Red Army, was also then in Neidenburg, perhaps somewhere near Major Kopelev, who was trying to stop the atrocities of the Soviet military (later Kopelev would “rattle” for this and they would meet Isaich on a “sharashka” in Marfino) . Solzhenitsyn also has something to say about this East Prussian city: “Heringstrasse, house 22. It was not burned, only looted, devastated. Sobs against the wall, half muffled: a wounded mother, barely alive. Little girl on the mattress, dead. How many were on it? Platoon, company? A girl turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse... The mother pleads: "Soldier, kill me!" ».
This plea for death as a mercy then sounded throughout East Prussia. Lev Kopelev recalls the station in Allenstein:
“... Near the passenger car is the corpse of a little woman. The face is covered with a wrapped coat, the legs, steeply bent at the knees, are wide open. A thin layer of snow and some kind of rag barely covered the frozen, defiled body. Apparently, they raped her en masse and immediately killed her, or she herself died and froze in the last convulsion. A few more corpses - female and male in civilian clothes - near the cars, on the platforms.
A series of open platforms lined with large boxes. Belyaev, the driver, the sergeant and his companions got axes and crowbars. We break open the boxes, and in them are mainly household belongings - feather beds, mattresses, pillows, blankets, coats.
Between the boxes of different sizes nest of mattresses, blankets. In it is an old woman, wrapped in scarves, shawls, in a large dark bonnet, powdered with snow. Triangle of a pale wrinkled face. Big bright eyes. They look very calm, reasonable and almost friendly.
How did you get here, grandma? I was not even surprised by the German speech.
“Soldier, please shoot me. Please be so kind.
- What are you, grandmother! Do not be afraid. Nothing bad will happen to you.
Once again I repeat this standard nonsense. Nothing good will happen to her.
– Where were you going? Do you have relatives here?
- I don't have anyone. Your soldiers killed your daughter and grandchildren yesterday. The son was killed in the war earlier. And the son-in-law must have been killed. All are killed. I shouldn't live, I can't live..."
And right there, nearby, looting work is in full swing:
“On all the tracks, the carriages are roamed alone and in groups, just like us, trophy hunters. A bunch of receivers have red stripes shining - a general, and with him an adjutant officer and two soldiers dragging suitcases and bales. The general gives orders, pokes a silver-headed wand into the air. (That's where the same comrade Zhukov got 7 wagons with luxury furniture, a lot of gold watches, rings, necklaces, as well as furs, paintings, tapestries ...).
An ordinary street scene of those days, immortalized by Lev Kopelev:
“Two people are walking in the middle of the pavement: a woman with a bundle and a bag and a girl clutching her hand. The woman's head is bandaged across her forehead, like a bandage, with a bloody handkerchief. Hair is disheveled. Girl 13-14 years old, blond pigtails, tearful. Short coat; long, like a shearer's, legs, on light-colored stockings - blood. From the pavement, soldiers call them merrily, laughing. They both walk quickly, but every now and then look back, stop. The woman tries to return, the girl clings to her, pulling her in the other direction.
I go and ask. The woman rushes to me crying.
- Oh, mister officer, mister commissar! Please, for God's sake... My boy stayed at home, he is very small, he is only eleven years old. But the soldiers drove us away, they don't let us in, they beat us, they raped us... And my daughter, she's only 13. There are two of her, such a misfortune. And there are a lot of me. Such a misfortune. We were beaten, and the boy was beaten, for God's sake, help us... They drove us away, he lies there, in the house, he is still alive... She is afraid... They drove us away. They wanted to shoot. She doesn't want to follow her brother...
Girl whimpering:
“Mom, he’s already dead anyway…”
American revisionist historian William Pierce writes about East Prussia in January 1945:
“When Soviet military units intercepted columns of German refugees fleeing to the west, they did things that had not been seen in Europe since the invasion of the Mongols in the Middle Ages. All men - most of whom were peasants or Germans employed in vital professions and thus exempted from military service - were usually simply killed on the spot. All women, almost without exception, were subjected to gang rape. Such was the fate of eight-year-old girls, and eighty-year old women, and women in the last stages of pregnancy. Women who resisted being raped had their throats cut or shot. Often, after gang rape, women were killed. Many women and girls were raped so many times that they died from it alone.
Sometimes Soviet tank columns simply crushed the escaping refugees with caterpillars. When the parts Soviet army occupied the settlements of East Prussia, they began such a bestial, bestial orgy of torture, rape and murder that it is not possible to describe it in full in this article. Sometimes they castrated men and boys before killing them. Sometimes they gouged out their eyes. Sometimes they burned them alive ( any blond teenager could be suspected of an SS man with all the ensuing consequences - A.Sh.). Some women, after gang rape, were crucified by nailing them still alive to the doors of barns, and then using them as targets for shooting ”( "Revisionist History: A View from the Right", M., 2003, p. 61).
It was the civilians of East Prussia, primarily women, children and the elderly, who fled in horror from the drunken Stalinist hordes, that made up the vast majority of passengers on the infamous Wilhelm Gustloff liner, which was sunk on January 30, 1945 by a Soviet submarine under the command of the notorious Marinesco. Of the more than 10 thousand people on board the liner, according to various estimates, from 7 to 9 thousand died (I remind you that it was 18-degree frost, ice floes were floating in the sea). The death of the Wilhelm Gustloff became the largest maritime disaster in history (more on this in the famous novel by Günter Grass "Crab Trajectory").
However, back to land. Front-line soldier Leonid Rabichev (then a starley signalman) made a killer sketch of what he saw personally:
“Yes, it was five months ago, when our troops in East Prussia overtook the civilian population evacuating from Goldap, Insterburg and other cities left by the German army. On wagons and cars, on foot, old people, women, children, large patriarchal families slowly went west along all roads and highways of the country.Our tankers, infantrymen, gunners, signalmen caught up with them to clear the way, threw their carts with furniture, bags, suitcases, horses into ditches on the sides of the highway, pushed aside the elderly and children and, forgetting about duty and honor and about retreating without a fight German units, by the thousands pounced on women and girls.
Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and left along the highway, and in front of each stands a cackling armada of men with their trousers down.
Those who are bleeding and losing consciousness are dragged aside, children who rush to help them are shot. Cackle, growl, laughter, cries and groans. And their commanders, their majors and colonels stand on the highway, who chuckles, and who conducts - no, rather, regulates. This is so that all their soldiers, without exception, participate. No, not mutual responsibility, and not at all revenge on the damned occupiers - this hellish deadly group sex.
Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and cruel logic of the distraught crowd. Shocked, I sat in the cab of a lorry, my driver Demidov stood in line, and I imagined Flaubert's Carthage, and I understood that the war would not write off everything. And the colonel, the one who had just conducted, cannot stand it and takes the queue himself, and the major shoots the witnesses, the hysterical children and the elderly.
Cum! By cars!
And behind is the next unit. And again a stop, and I can’t keep my signalmen, who also stand in new queues, and my telephone operators choke with laughter, and nausea rises in my throat. To the horizon between the mountains of rags, overturned wagons are the corpses of women, old people, children.
The highway is cleared for traffic. It's getting dark. Left and right are German farms. We receive an order to settle down for the night. This is part of the headquarters of our army: the commander of artillery, air defense, political department. Me and my control platoon get a farm two kilometers from the highway. In all rooms there are corpses of children, old people and raped and shot women. We are so tired that, not paying attention to them, we lie down on the floor between them and fall asleep” (“War will write everything off”, “Znamya” No. 2, 2005).
“The invasion of the Red Army into East Prussia, West Prussia and Danzig, into Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia was everywhere equally accompanied by atrocities, the likes of which are still to be found in modern military history. Massacres prisoners of war and civilians of any age and gender, mass rape of women, even old women and children, with disgusting accompanying phenomena, repeatedly, sometimes even to death, deliberate arson of houses, villages, city blocks and entire cities, systematic looting, looting and destruction of private and public property and, finally, the mass deportation of men, as well as women and youth into labor slavery Soviet Union– usually with the separation of mothers from their children and with the severing of family ties – these were the salient features of an event that was blatantly contrary to the principles of orderly warfare.”
The Red Army moved further and further west, according to I. Hoffmann, more and more resembling a hybrid of a warlike Asian horde and a noisy gypsy camp: tanks covered with expensive Persian carpets are rushing by, on which warriors sit with bottles of collection wine; every now and then drunken soldiers in some kind of mackintosh and Napoleonic cocked hats, with umbrellas flash by in the columns, but an old carriage is rolling, dragged from some kind of baronial family estate ... In March 1945, the Soviet "liberators" reached the Oder. On March 1, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “We are now receiving countless information about the Bolshevik atrocities. They are so terrible in their truthfulness that there is nowhere else to go ... ". The next day, March 2, he continues: “Konev demands that the commanders take the strictest measures against the decomposition of the troops. He also points out that arson and robbery can only be carried out by order. The characterization he gives to these facts is extremely interesting. From it it is clear that in the face Soviet soldiers we are dealing with steppe scum. This is confirmed by the reports of atrocities that have come to us from the eastern regions. They are truly terrifying. They cannot even be played separately. First of all, we should mention the terrible documents that came from Upper Silesia. In some villages and cities, all women from 10 to 70 years old were subjected to countless rapes. It seems that this is being done by order from above, since one can see an obvious system in the behavior of the Soviet soldiery ”(J. Goebbels, “Last Records”, M., 1998).
"The shock group of the Vlasov army, led by Colonel ROA Sakharov February 9, 1945 with the support of the Germans again occupied the settlements located in the bend of the Oder Neulevin and Kerstenbruch. According to a German report from March 15, 1945, population of both locations "subjected to to our horrendous abuses." IN Neulevin were found shot dead by the burgomaster, as well as Wehrmacht soldier who was on vacation. In one barn lay the corpses of three defiled and murdered women, two of which had tied legs. One German woman lay shot dead at the door of her house. elderly marriedthe couple was strangled. In Neubarnim, 19 residents were found dead. The body of the hostess guests nitsa was mutilated, legs tied with wire. Here, like in other settlements, women and girls were defiled, and in Kerstenbruch - even a 71-year-old old woman with an amputiro bath feet. A picture of violent crime Vet troops in these villages of the bend of the Oder, as elsewhere, are supplemented by robberies and deliberate destruction ... "( Mark Solonin, “Spring of Victory. Stalin's Forgotten Crime").
And at the same time, on March 14, 1945, Ehrenburg, this monster of false Soviet propaganda, brazenly declared in his next article: “Our hatred is a lofty feeling, it requires judgment, not reprisals, punishment, not violence. Warrior of the Red Army - knight. He frees Ukrainian girls and French prisoners. He liberates the Poles and Serbs. He kills Hitler's soldiers, but he does not mock German old women. He is not an executioner or a rapist. We stayed on German soil Soviet people. We see German women, who yesterday mocked our girls. These German women are frightened, obsequious, lascivious. We say: let them work in the sweat of their brow. Let those of them who are guilty of atrocities answer before the court. But a Soviet soldier will not touch a woman. But the Soviet soldier will not mock a German woman or be nice to her: he is taller than her, he despises her because she was the wife of an executioner, because she raised a fanatic. Silently, a Soviet warrior will pass by a German woman: he came to Germany not for booty, not for junk, not for concubines, he came to Germany for justice. He did not come to look at a stupid and greedy doll, but to tame Germany.
In 2002, a book by the authoritative English historian Anthony Beevor was published. "The Fall of Berlin. 1945". In this book, E. Beevor proves that in Berlin alone, up to 130,000 German women and girls became victims of violence, often repeated, by Soviet soldiers. About 10,000 women subsequently died, often by suicide. Many were killed on the spot by the rapists. It was simply contraindicated for all German women aged 8 to 80 to appear on the streets of Berlin. In total, during the "liberation" of Germany, Soviet soldiers, according to E. Beevor, raped about 2 million German women - from girls to old women.
Reviewing the book by E. Beevor, the newspaper " The Daily Telegraph" January 24, 2002 cites the following data: “When a Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas protested to Stalin, the dictator exploded: “How can you not understand a soldier who has walked thousands of kilometers through blood, fire and death and wants to have fun with a woman or take some trinket for himself?”. And when the German communists warned him that rape turned the population away from them, Stalin flared up: "I will not allow anyone to trample the reputation of the Red Army into the dirt!"
Anthony Beevor shows that Soviet soldiers mercilessly raped not only German women, but also Russian women freed from "fascist slavery." What can we say about other Slavs? Lev Kopelev recalls how he barely saved a Polish girl from a horde of drunken tankers, who yelled: “Jesus Maria, I am Polish!”; however, this did not have the slightest effect on the valiant scoops, they were stopped only by a pointing pistol (and it might not have been stopped!). Why are there Poles: let's remember the autumn of 1944, the "liberation" of Yugoslavia. The Serbs were very soon horrified by the wild behavior of the “brothers” who flooded in from the east. Not in East Prussia, long before Berlin, in the "brotherly" Slavic country - rape, robbery, in short, the entire gentleman's set of the red military. By the way, an acquaintance of a White émigré who lived then in Belgrade, said that the scoops brutally, en masse, raped her friend, a Russian.
The mass war crimes of the Reds continued after the surrender of Germany. In May 1945, the famous German ace pilot Erich Hartmann, as part of a column of prisoners and civilian refugees, was handed over by the Americans to the scoop. He had to become a powerless eyewitness to the monstrous "feast of the victors."
“After several miles, the column stopped. Erich and his comrades were ordered to descend to the ground. And then in the field they were surrounded by Russian soldiers. Full of foreboding Germans began to get out of the trucks. The Russians immediately began separating the women from the men.
Before the Americans left, they got an idea of the fate they unwittingly condemned German women and children, whose only crime was that they were born in Germany. The Americans discovered that their allies were capable of surpassing all conceivable and unimaginable limits of human cruelty. Young guys from Alabama and Minnesota saw the Bear in action firsthand.
Half-drunk soldiers of the Red Army, hung with rifles and machine guns, lined up the unarmed Germans. Other Russians began to throw women and girls to the ground, rip off their clothes and began to rape their victims right in front of the rest of the Russians. The Germans could only silently clench their fists. American soldiers from their trucks looked at all this with wide eyes.
It seemed that they were simply paralyzed by this sight. When two young German girls, stripped naked, rushed to the trucks screaming and began to climb up in desperation, the American sentries were smart enough to haul them up. The Russians did not like such nobility at all. Shooting into the air and screaming wildly, the Russians rushed towards the American trucks. The American soldiers hurriedly drew their weapons and the trucks rushed down the road. When the last obstacle was gone, the Russians attacked the German women.
A young German woman in her early thirties, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, knelt at the feet of a Russian corporal and prayed to God that the Soviet soldiers would take her and not the girl. But her prayers went unanswered. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she sent prayers to heaven. German men stood surrounded by machine-gun barrels.
The Russian corporal moved away from the woman, his face twisted into a mocking grin. One of the soldiers kicked the woman in the face with all his might. “Damned fascist pig!” he yelled. The young mother fell on her back. The soldier who hit her shot her in the head with a rifle and killed her.
The Russians grabbed every German woman they saw. The murdered woman's little daughter was dragged behind a tank by her mother's killer. Other Russians joined him. For half an hour wild cries and groans were heard. Then a completely naked girl, unable to stand on her feet, crawled back. She cringed and froze.
However, in that big picture atrocities that the meadow now represented, this girl's suffering was nothing special. The helpless Germans urged the Russian sentries to let them help the girl. Taking their rifles at the ready, the Russians allowed the German medic to approach the girl. She died an hour later, and her last sobs burned the hearts of Erich and his soldiers.
8- and 9-year-old girls were repeatedly mercilessly raped by brutalized Russian soldiers. They showed no other feelings than hatred and lust. While all the monsters satisfied themselves among the wild screams and weeping of women, Erich and his soldiers sat under the muzzles of machine guns.
The Russians, splattered with blood, having satisfied their lust, replaced their comrades behind machine guns, taking guard over the German soldiers. Mothers tried to protect their daughters, but they were beaten unconscious and dragged to the side, and then raped in that state. Battle-hardened pilots who had gone through hundreds of battles and received many wounds were simply thrown aside. Struck to the very heart by what he saw, Erich suppressed an attack of vomiting with an inhuman effort of will.
Such an orgy simply could not last long. Lust was saturated, and the first signs of pity began to appear. Sometimes grinning, sometimes indifferently, sometimes a little dejectedly, the Russian soldiers returned the women and girls they had finished mocking. Those dragged away from the trucks were never seen again. The rest fell senseless into the arms of shocked fathers and husbands. They have taken a full measure of humiliation and suffering, but it is not over yet.
The Germans were herded into a makeshift camp in a meadow. They were allowed to go to the lake to wash and wash their clothes. Then a ring of 30 tanks was built around the meadow to organize guards for the night. Russian soldiers again and again returned to the Germans, dragging away women and girls who could not be helped by the presence of husbands and fathers. The violence continued throughout the night, stopping just before dawn. The women were dragged back like broken dolls when the Russians got their fill. Soldiers JG-52 ( the squadron in which E. Hartmann served - A.Sh.) this night had to do difficult choice and many of them did.
When the first rays of the sun fell on the meadow surrounded by tanks, many Germans did not rise. Those who woke up found that they were in the terrible realm of death, which was imprinted with a red-hot iron in their memory forever. When Erich woke up, he saw a non-commissioned officer with his wife and daughter lying next to him. The sergeant quietly cut the veins in his wife's arms with a homemade dagger. Then he also killed his 11-year-old daughter, after which he cut his own veins. Life was slowly draining from them as Erich slept nearby.
Other men strangled their wives and daughters, after which they themselves hanged themselves on the sides of trucks. They preferred death to a long and painful death. Erich began to calmly talk to himself in order to overcome the terrible impact of bloody scenes on consciousness. “You must live, Erich, no matter what happens. You MUST survive to tell others what you yourself can't believe now that you're looking at it all. You will never be able to forget what people who have sunk below all animals are capable of doing” (R. F. Toliver, T. J. Constable, “Erich Hartmann: the blond knight of the Reich”, Yekaterinburg, 1998).
According to a famous journalist
how it was at the end of the warHow did the Germans behave when meeting with Soviet troops?
In the report of the Deputy Head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army Shikin in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G.F. Aleksandrov dated April 30, 1945 on the attitude of the civilian population of Berlin to the personnel of the Red Army troops said:
“As soon as our units occupy one or another area of the city, residents begin to gradually take to the streets, almost all of them have white armbands on their sleeves. When meeting with our servicemen, many women raise their hands up, cry and tremble with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all the same as they were painted by their fascist propaganda, this fear quickly disappears, more and more population takes to the streets and offers their services, trying in every possible way to emphasize their loyal attitude to the Red Army.
The greatest impression on the winners was made by the humility and prudence of the German women. In this regard, it is worth citing the story of the mortar man N.A. Orlov, who was shocked by the behavior of German women in 1945.
“No one in the minbat killed civilian Germans. Our special officer was a "Germanophile". If this happened, then the reaction of the punitive authorities to such an excess would be quick. About violence against German women. It seems to me that some, when talking about such a phenomenon, “exaggerate” a little. I have a different kind of example. We went to some German city, settled in the houses. A "frau", about 45 years old, appears and asks for "the commandant's hero". They brought her to Marchenko. She declares that she is responsible for the quarter, and has gathered 20 German women for sexual (!!!) service to Russian soldiers. Marchenko German understood, and to the political officer Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me, I translated the meaning of what the German woman said. The reaction of our officers was angry and obscene. The German woman was driven away, along with her "detachment" ready for service. In general, German obedience stunned us. Expected from the Germans guerrilla war, sabotage. But for this nation, order - "Ordnung" - is above all. If you are a winner, then they are “on their hind legs”, moreover, consciously and not under duress. That's the kind of psychology...
A similar case is cited in his military notes. David Samoilov :
“In Arendsfeld, where we had just settled down, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by a huge mustachioed German woman of about fifty - Frau Friedrich. She stated that she was a representative of the civilian population and requested that the remaining residents be registered. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant's office appeared.
"That's impossible," said Frau Friedrich. - There are women and children. They need to be registered.
The civilian population with a cry and tears confirmed her words.
Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they take the basement of the house where we were located. And they calmed down went down to the basement and began to be accommodated there, waiting for the authorities.
“Herr Commissar,” Frau Friedrich told me benevolently (I wore a leather jacket). We understand that soldiers have small needs. They are ready, - continued Frau Friedrich, - to provide them with several younger women for ...
I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich.
After talking with the residents of Berlin on May 2, 1945, Mr. Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary:
“We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock, please open. You can hear whispering in the corridor, muffled and excited conversations. Finally the door opens. Women without age, huddled together in a close group, bow frightened, low and obsequiously. German women are afraid of us, they were told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them... Fear and hatred on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like to be defeated - their behavior is so helpful, their smiles are so touching and their words are sweet. These days, there are stories about how our soldier went into a German apartment, asked for a drink, and the German woman, as soon as she saw him, lay down on the sofa and took off her tights.
“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them, ”such an opinion was common in Soviet troops and supported not only by many good examples, but also their unpleasant consequences, which were soon discovered by military doctors.
Directive of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front No. 00343/Sh dated April 15, 1945 read: “During the stay of troops on enemy territory, cases of venereal diseases among military personnel have sharply increased. A study of the reasons for this situation shows that venereal diseases are widespread among Germans. Before the retreat, and also now, in the territory we occupied, the Germans took the path of artificially infecting German women with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to create large foci for the spread of venereal diseases among the Red Army soldiers.
On April 26, 1945, the Military Council of the 47th Army reported that “... In March, the number of venereal diseases among military personnel increased compared to February of this year. four times. ... The female part of the German population in the surveyed areas is affected by 8-15%. There are cases when German women with venereal diseases are deliberately left by the enemy to infect military personnel.
Interesting diary entries left Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944-1945. was in Europe in the ranks of the 3rd American Army under the command of George Paton. Here is what he wrote down in Berlin in May 1945, just a few days after the end of the assault:
“I walked through the night cabarets, starting with the Femina near Potsdammerplatz. It was a warm and humid evening. The air smelled of sewage and rotting corpses. The front of the Femina was covered in futuristic nudes and advertisements in four languages. The dance hall and restaurant were filled with Russian, British and American officers escorting (or hunting for) the women. A bottle of wine cost $25, a horsemeat and potato burger $10, a pack of American cigarettes a mind-boggling $20. The cheeks of Berlin women were rouged and their lips made up in such a way that it seemed that Hitler had won the war. Many of the women were wearing silk stockings. The hostess of the evening opened the concert in German, Russian, English and French. This provoked a taunt from the captain of the Russian artillery, who was sitting next to me. He leaned towards me and said in decent English: “Such a rapid transition from national to international! RAF bombs make great professors, don't they?".
The general impression of European women that Soviet servicemen have is that they are well-groomed and smart (in comparison with compatriots exhausted by the war in the half-starved rear, on lands liberated from occupation, and even with front-line girlfriends dressed in washed-out tunics), accessible, self-serving, dissolute or cowardly submissive. The exceptions were Yugoslav and Bulgarian women.
Severe and ascetic Yugoslav partisans were perceived as comrades in arms and were considered inviolable. And given the severity of morals in the Yugoslav army, "partisan girls probably looked at the PPZh [camping field wives] as creatures of a special, nasty sort."
About Bulgarians Boris Slutsky he recalled as follows: “... After Ukrainian complacency, after Romanian debauchery, the severe inaccessibility of Bulgarian women struck our people. Almost no one boasted of victories. It was the only country where officers were accompanied on walks very often by men, almost never by women. Later, the Bulgarians were proud when they were told that the Russians were going to return to Bulgaria for brides - the only ones in the world who remained clean and untouched.
But in other countries through which the victorious army passed, the female part of the population did not command respect. “In Europe, women gave up, changed before anyone else ... - wrote B. Slutsky. - I was always shocked, confused, disoriented by lightness, shameful lightness love relationships. Decent women, of course, disinterested, were like prostitutes - in hasty availability, the desire to avoid intermediate stages, disinterest in the motives that push a man to get closer to them.
Like people who learned three obscene words from the entire lexicon of love lyrics, they reduced the whole thing to a few gestures, causing resentment and contempt among the most yellow-mouthed of our officers ... It was not ethics at all that served as restraining motives, but the fear of getting infected, the fear of publicity, of pregnancy " , - and added that in the conditions of the conquest"general depravity has covered and concealed the particular depravity of women, made her invisible and shameless."
Interesting, isn't it?
