In a
column yesterday for the London Guardian's Comment is Free
site, I took the Washington Post to task, in no uncertain terms,
for daring to suggest that the Soviet Army in World War II shed
blood "for other people's liberty." To which an old friend of mine,
Charlie DeWitt, responded with an e-mail to me that presents one
part of the story in all its gory-ness:
Quin, that is a good piece. Here is an excerpt from a
journalist named Daniel Johnson about the "Soviet Horror Orgy of
Rape" at the end of World War II. The Soviets even raped Russian
and Polish women who were freed from the concentration camps. The
Washington Post reporter is obviously [quite foolish]....
:
......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".
