Crimes of Soviet soldiers on German territory, or how the Red Army differed from the Wehrmacht. Fanatics of the Soviet Army - About the atrocities of the Soviet “liberators” in Europe

Forensic psychologists have long established that rape, as a rule, is explained not by a desire to obtain sexual satisfaction, but by a thirst for power, a desire to emphasize one’s superiority over a weaker person through humiliation, and a feeling of revenge.

What if not war contributes to the manifestation of all these base feelings?

On September 7, 1941, at a rally in Moscow, an appeal was adopted by Soviet women, which said: “It is impossible to convey in words what the fascist villains are doing to women in the areas of the Soviet country they temporarily captured. There is no limit to their sadism. These vile cowards are driving women, children and old people ahead of them in order to hide from the fire of the Red Army. They rip open the bellies of the victims they rape, cut out their breasts, crush them with cars, tear them apart with tanks..."

What state can a woman be in when she is subjected to violence, defenseless, depressed by the feeling of her own defilement, shame?

A stupor arises in the mind from the murders happening around. Thoughts are paralyzed. Shock. Alien uniforms, alien speech, alien smells. They are not even perceived as male rapists. These are some monstrous creatures from another world.

And they mercilessly destroy all the concepts of chastity, decency, and modesty that have been brought up over the years. They get to what has always been hidden from prying eyes, the exposure of which has always been considered indecent, what they whispered about in the gateways, that they trust only the most beloved people and doctors...

Helplessness, despair, humiliation, fear, disgust, pain - everything is intertwined in one ball, tearing from the inside, destroying human dignity. This tangle breaks the will, burns the soul, kills the personality. They drink away life... They tear off clothes... And there is no way to resist this. THIS will still happen.

I think thousands and thousands of women cursed at such moments the nature by whose will they were born women.

Let us turn to documents that are more revealing than any literary description. Documents collected only for 1941.

“...This happened in the apartment of a young teacher, Elena K. In broad daylight, a group of drunken German officers burst in here. At this time, the teacher was teaching three girls, her students. Having locked the door, the bandits ordered Elena K. to undress. The young woman resolutely refused to comply with this impudent demand. Then the Nazis tore off her clothes and raped her in front of the children. The girls tried to protect the teacher, but the scoundrels also brutally abused them. The teacher's five-year-old son remained in the room. Not daring to scream, the child looked at what was happening with his eyes wide open in horror. A fascist officer approached him and cut him in two with a blow from his saber.”

From the testimony of Lydia N., Rostov:

“Yesterday I heard a strong knock on the door. When I approached the door, they hit it with rifle butts, trying to break it down. 5 German soldiers burst into the apartment. They kicked my father, mother and little brother out of the apartment. Then I found my brother's body on the staircase. A German soldier threw him from the third floor of our house, as eyewitnesses told me. His head was broken. Mother and father were shot at the entrance to our house. I myself have been subjected to gang violence. I was unconscious. When I woke up, I heard the hysterical screams of women in the neighboring apartments. That evening, all the apartments in our building were desecrated by the Germans. They raped all the women." Terrible document! The fear this woman experienced is involuntarily conveyed in a few meager lines. Butts hitting the door. Five monsters. Fear for oneself, for relatives taken away in an unknown direction: “Why? So they don't see what's going to happen? Arrested? Killed? Doomed to vile torture that leaves you unconscious. A multiply amplified nightmare from the “hysterical screams of women in neighboring apartments,” as if the whole house was groaning. Unreality…

Statement from a resident of the village of Novo-Ivanovka, Maria Tarantseva: “Having broken into my house, four German soldiers brutally raped my daughters Vera and Pelageya.”

“On the very first evening in the city of Luga, the Nazis caught 8 girls on the streets and raped them.”

“To the mountains. In Tikhvin, Leningrad Region, 15-year-old M. Kolodetskaya, wounded by shrapnel, was brought to the hospital (formerly a monastery), where wounded German soldiers were located. Despite being wounded, Kolodetskaya was raped by a group of German soldiers, which was the cause of her death.”

Every time you shudder when you think about what is hidden behind the dry text of the document. The girl is bleeding, she is in pain from the wound she received. Why did this war start? And finally, the hospital. The smell of iodine, bandages. People. Even if they are non-Russian. They will help her. After all, people are treated in hospitals. And suddenly, instead, there is a new pain, a cry, an animal melancholy, leading to madness... And consciousness slowly fades away. Forever.

“In the Belarusian town of Shatsk, the Nazis gathered all the young girls, raped them, and then drove them naked into the square and forced them to dance. Those who resisted were shot on the spot by the fascist monsters. Such violence and abuse by the invaders was a widespread mass phenomenon.”

“On the very first day in the village of Basmanovo, Smolensk region, fascist monsters drove into the field more than 200 schoolchildren and schoolgirls who had come to the village to harvest the harvest, surrounded them and shot them. They took the schoolgirls to their rear “for the gentlemen officers.” I struggle and cannot imagine these girls who came to the village as a noisy group of classmates, with their teenage love and experiences, with the carefreeness and cheerfulness inherent in this age. Girls who then immediately, instantly, saw the bloody corpses of their boys and, without having time to comprehend, refusing to believe in what had happened, found themselves in a hell created by adults.

“On the very first day of the Germans’ arrival in Krasnaya Polyana, two fascists came to Alexandra Yakovlevna (Demyanova). They saw Demyanova’s daughter, 14-year-old Nyura, in the room, a frail and weak girl. A German officer grabbed the teenager and raped her in front of her mother. On December 10, a doctor at a local gynecological hospital, having examined the girl, stated that this Hitler bandit had infected her with syphilis. In the next apartment, the fascist beasts raped another 14-year-old girl, Tonya I.

On December 9, 1941, the body of a Finnish officer was found in Krasnaya Polyana. A collection of women's buttons was found in his pocket - 37 pieces, counting rape. And in Krasnaya Polyana he raped Margarita K. and also tore a button off her blouse.”

Killed soldiers were often found with “trophies” in the form of buttons, stockings, and locks of women’s hair. They found photographs depicting scenes of violence, letters and diaries in which they described their “exploits.”

“In their letters, the Nazis share their adventures with cynical frankness and bragging. Corporal Felix Capdels sends a letter to his friend: “Having rummaged through the chests and organized a good dinner, we began to have fun. The girl turned out to be angry, but we organized her too. It doesn’t matter that the whole department...”

Corporal Georg Pfahler writes without hesitation to his mother (!) in Sappenfeld: “We stayed in a small town for three days... You can imagine how much we ate in three days. And how many chests and closets were rummaged through, how many little young ladies were spoiled... Our life is now fun, not like in the trenches...”

In the diary of the killed chief corporal there is the following entry: “October 12. Today I took part in clearing the camp of suspicious people. 82 were shot. Among them was a beautiful woman. We, me and Karl, took her to the operating room, she bit and howled. 40 minutes later she was shot. Memory - a few minutes of pleasure."

With prisoners who did not have time to get rid of such documents compromising them, the conversation was short: they were taken aside and - a bullet in the back of the head.

A woman in military uniform aroused special hatred among her enemies. She is not only a woman - she is also a soldier fighting with you! And if captured male soldiers were broken morally and physically by barbaric torture, then female soldiers were broken by rape. (They also resorted to him during interrogations. The Germans raped the girls from the Young Guard, and threw one naked onto a hot stove.)

The medical workers who fell into their hands were raped without exception.

“Two kilometers south of the village of Akimovka (Melitopol region), the Germans attacked a car in which there were two wounded Red Army soldiers and a female paramedic accompanying them. They dragged the woman into the sunflowers, raped her, and then shot her. These animals twisted the arms of the wounded Red Army soldiers and also shot them...”

“In the village of Voronki, in Ukraine, the Germans housed 40 wounded Red Army soldiers, prisoners of war and nurses in a former hospital. The nurses were raped and shot, and guards were placed near the wounded...”

“In Krasnaya Polyana, wounded soldiers and a wounded nurse were not given water for 4 days and food for 7 days, and then they were given salt water to drink. The nurse began to agonize. The Nazis raped the dying girl in front of the wounded Red Army soldiers.”

The twisted logic of war requires the rapist to exercise FULL power. This means that humiliating the victim alone is not enough. And then unimaginable abuses are committed against the victim, and in conclusion, her life is taken away, as a manifestation of the HIGHEST power. Otherwise, what good, she will think that she gave you pleasure! And you may look weak in her eyes if you can’t control your sexual desire. Hence the sadistic treatment and murder.

“Hitler’s robbers in one village captured a fifteen-year-old girl and brutally raped her. Sixteen animals tormented this girl. She resisted, she called for her mother, she screamed. They gouged out her eyes and threw her, torn to pieces, spit on the street... It was in the Belarusian town of Chernin.”

“In the city of Lvov, 32 workers of a Lvov garment factory were raped and then killed by German stormtroopers. Drunken German soldiers dragged Lviv girls and young women into Kosciuszko Park and brutally raped them. Old priest V.L. Pomaznev, who with a cross in his hands tried to prevent violence against girls, was beaten by the Nazis, tore off his cassock, burned his beard and stabbed him with a bayonet.”

“The streets of the village of K., where the Germans were rampaging for some time, were covered with the corpses of women, old people, and children. The surviving village residents told the Red Army soldiers that the Nazis herded all the girls into the hospital building and raped them. Then they locked the doors and set the building on fire.”

“In the Begomlsky district, the wife of a Soviet worker was raped and then put on a bayonet.”

“In Dnepropetrovsk, on Bolshaya Bazarnaya Street, drunken soldiers detained three women. Having tied them to poles, the Germans savagely abused them and then killed them.”

“In the village of Milutino, the Germans arrested 24 collective farmers and took them to a neighboring village. Among those arrested was thirteen-year-old Anastasia Davydova. Throwing the peasants into a dark barn, the Nazis began to torture them, demanding information about the partisans. Everyone was silent. Then the Germans took the girl out of the barn and asked in which direction the collective farm cattle had been driven away. The young patriot refused to answer. The fascist scoundrels raped the girl and then shot her.”

“The Germans broke into us! Two 16-year-old girls were dragged by their officers to the cemetery and violated. Then they ordered the soldiers to hang them from trees. The soldiers carried out the order and hung them upside down. There, soldiers violated 9 elderly women.” (Collective farmer Petrova from the Plowman collective farm.)

“We were standing in the village of Bolshoye Pankratovo. It was on Monday the 21st, at four o'clock in the morning. The fascist officer walked through the village, entered all the houses, took money and things from the peasants, and threatened that he would shoot all the residents. Then we came to the house at the hospital. There was a doctor and a girl there. He told the girl: “Follow me to the commandant’s office, I have to check your documents.” I saw how she hid her passport on her chest. He took her into the garden near the hospital and raped her there. Then the girl rushed into the field, she screamed, it was clear that she had lost her mind. He caught up with her and soon showed me his passport covered in blood...”

“The Nazis broke into the sanatorium of the People's Commissariat of Health in Augustow. (...) The German fascists raped all the women who were in this sanatorium. And then the mutilated, beaten sufferers were shot.”

It has been repeatedly noted in historical literature that “during the investigation of war crimes, many documents and evidence were discovered about the rape of young pregnant women, whose throats were then cut and their breasts pierced with bayonets. Obviously, hatred of women’s breasts is in the blood of the Germans.”

I will provide several such documents and evidence.

“In the village of Semenovskoye, Kalinin Region, the Germans raped 25-year-old Olga Tikhonova, the wife of a Red Army soldier, the mother of three children, who was in the last stage of pregnancy, and tied her hands with twine. After the rape, the Germans cut her throat, pierced both breasts and sadistically drilled them.”

“In Belarus, near the city of Borisov, 75 women and girls who fled when German troops approached fell into the hands of the Nazis. The Germans raped and then brutally killed 36 women and girls. 16-year-old girl L.I. Melchukova, on the orders of the German officer Hummer, was taken into the forest by soldiers, where she was raped. After some time, other women, also taken into the forest, saw that there were boards near the trees, and the dying Melchukova was pinned to the boards with bayonets, in front of whom the Germans, in front of other women, in particular V.I. Alperenko and V.M. Bereznikova, they cut off her breasts..."

(With all my rich imagination, I cannot imagine what inhuman scream that accompanied the torment of women must have stood over this Belarusian town, over this forest. It seems that you will hear this even in the distance, and you will not be able to stand it, you will cover your ears with both hands and run away , because you know that it is PEOPLE SCREAMING.)

“In the village of Zh., on the road, we saw the mutilated, naked corpse of old man Timofey Vasilyevich Globa. He is all striped with ramrods and riddled with bullets. Not far away in the garden lay a murdered naked girl. Her eyes were gouged out, her right breast was cut off, and there was a bayonet stuck in her left. This is the daughter of old man Globa - Galya.

When the Nazis burst into the village, the girl was hiding in the garden, where she spent three days. By the morning of the fourth day, Galya decided to make her way to the hut, hoping to get something to eat. Here she was overtaken by a German officer. The sick Globa ran out to his daughter’s scream and hit the rapist with a crutch. Two more bandit officers jumped out of the hut, called the soldiers, and grabbed Galya and her father. The girl was stripped, raped and brutally abused, and her father was held so that he could see everything. They gouged out her eyes, cut off her right breast, and inserted a bayonet into her left. Then they stripped Timofey Globa, laid him on his daughter’s body (!) and beat him with ramrods. And when he, having gathered his remaining strength, tried to escape, they caught him on the road, shot him and bayoneted him.”

It was considered some kind of special “daring” to rape and torture women in front of people close to them: husbands, parents, children. Maybe the audience was necessary to demonstrate their “strength” in front of them and emphasize their humiliating helplessness?

“Everywhere, brutalized German bandits break into houses, rape women and girls in front of their relatives and their children, mock the raped and brutally deal with their victims right there.”

“The collective farmer Ivan Gavrilovich Terekhin walked through the village of Puchki with his wife Polina Borisovna. Several German soldiers grabbed Polina, dragged her aside, threw her into the snow and, in front of her husband’s eyes, began to rape her one by one. The woman screamed and resisted with all her might.

Then the fascist rapist shot her at point-blank range. Polina Terekhova began to writhe in agony. Her husband escaped from the hands of the rapists and rushed to the dying woman. But the Germans caught up with him and put 6 bullets in his back.”

“On the Apnas farm, drunken German soldiers raped a 16-year-old girl and threw her into a well. They also threw her mother there, who tried to stop the rapists.”

Vasily Vishnichenko from the village of Generalskoye testified: “German soldiers grabbed me and took me to headquarters. At that time one of the fascists dragged my wife into the cellar. When I returned, I saw that my wife was lying in the cellar, her dress was torn and she was already dead. The villains raped her and killed her with one bullet in the head and another in the heart.”

In the European information space, the topic of the “atrocities” of the Red Army in the territory of the Third Reich occupied by it in 1945 is constantly raised. How does this relate to reality – past and present? The main thing is being replaced from the historical memory of the Second World War - that the USSR and the Soviet people saved Europe from the destruction of entire states and peoples, and even democracy itself, and at the cost of colossal losses and sacrifices, unprecedented suffering and destruction on Soviet soil and incredible strain of strength. Moreover, in the western zones of occupation of Germany, as documents show, there was no such idyll, the image of which is instilled in the public consciousness today. Eisenhower's radio message "We Come Victorious!" implied both “the right of the victors” and “woe to the vanquished.” The “paradise life” in the western sectors sometimes turned out to be such that even refugees intimidated by propaganda about “Russian atrocities” returned to areas occupied by Soviet troops.

In January-February 1945, Soviet troops entered German soil. The day we have been waiting for so long has arrived.

Long before the army approached the enemy border, passing through their native land tormented by the invaders, seeing tortured women and children, burned and destroyed cities and villages, Soviet soldiers swore to take revenge on the invaders a hundredfold and thought about the time when they would enter enemy territory. And when this happened, there were - could not help but be - psychological breakdowns, especially among those who lost their relatives and their homes.

Acts of revenge were inevitable. And it was necessary to make special efforts to prevent their widespread distribution.

On January 19, 1945, Stalin signed a special order “On behavior on German territory,” which read: “Officers and Red Army soldiers! We are going to the enemy's country. Everyone must maintain self-control, everyone must be brave... The remaining population in the conquered areas, regardless of whether they are German, Czech, or Pole, should not be subjected to violence. The perpetrators will be punished according to martial law. In conquered territory, sexual relations with the female sex are not allowed. Those responsible for violence and rape will be shot.”

These were the guidelines of the victorious army, but this is how Germany planned its actions in the occupied territories in 1941.

According to the recipes of Dr. Goebbels

Evacuated Leningraders and the corpses of those who died of starvation in the port of Kobona (the village of Sukhovsky rural settlement, Kirovsky district, Leningrad region. Located on the shore of Lake Ladoga at the mouth of the Kobona (Kobonki) river, at its intersection with the Ladoga Canal). April 12, 1942
On March 2, 1945, in his diary, the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, J. Goebbels, wrote: “... in fact, in the person of Soviet soldiers, we are dealing with steppe scum. This is confirmed by information about atrocities received from the eastern regions. They are truly terrifying. They cannot even be reproduced individually. First of all, mention should be made of the terrible documents that came from Upper Silesia. In some villages and towns, all women from ten to 70 years of age were subjected to countless rapes. It seems that this is being done on orders from above, since an obvious system can be seen in the behavior of the Soviet soldiers. We will now launch a broad campaign against this within the country and abroad” 1 . On March 13, a new entry appears: “In the war in the east, they will now be guided by only one feeling - the feeling of revenge. Now all compatriots believe that the Bolsheviks are committing atrocities. There is no longer a person who would ignore our warnings" 1 . March 25: “Published reports of Soviet atrocities aroused anger and a thirst for revenge everywhere” 1.

Later, Assistant Reich Commissioner Goebbels, Dr. Werner Naumann, admits: “Our propaganda regarding the Russians and what the population should expect from them in Berlin was so successful that we brought the Berliners to a state of extreme horror,” but “we overdid it - our propaganda ricocheted back at us.” ourselves" 2. The German population had long been psychologically prepared for the image of an animal-like cruel “subhuman” and was ready to believe in any crimes of the Red Army 3 .

“In an atmosphere of horror, on the verge of panic, whipped up by the stories of refugees, reality was distorted, and rumors defeated facts and common sense. Horrible stories of the most horrendous atrocities crawled throughout the city. The Russians were described as narrow-eyed Mongols who killed women and children mercilessly and without a second thought. They said that priests were burned alive with flamethrowers, nuns were raped and then driven naked through the streets. They were afraid that women were being turned into prostitutes, moving after military units, and men were being sent to hard labor in Siberia. They even said on the radio that the Russians were nailing the victims’ tongues to the tables.”2

Soviet citizens hanged by the Germans in the first days of the occupation of Kharkov on Sumskaya Street. October 25, 1941
According to Australian war correspondent Osmar White, “Goebbels’ propaganda<...>drove into the heads of the Germans a paranoid fear of the “hordes from the East.” As the Red Army approached the outskirts of Berlin, a wave of suicides swept the city. According to some estimates, in May-June 1945, from 30 to 40 thousand Berliners voluntarily took their lives” 4. In his diaries, he wrote that “there was nothing new in Russophobia. The troops faced this all the way from the Rhine as they encountered thousands of panic-stricken people fleeing to the West. The Russians are coming! Be that as it may, you need to run away from them! When it was possible to question any of them, it almost always turned out that they knew nothing about the Russians. That's what they were told. They heard it from a friend, brother or relative who served on the Eastern Front. Well, of course, Hitler lied to them! His theories about a superior race were absurd, his claims that the British were decadent and that the Jews were subhumans feeding on rotten brains were lies. But speaking about the Bolsheviks, the Fuhrer was right!” 4

At the same time, the initiative in promoting anti-Soviet horrors was taken up by the allied media. Moreover, “the anti-Russian hysteria was so strong, there were so many stories about Russian atrocities that the chief of the Anglo-American Public Relations Bureau (PR) found it necessary to gather correspondents in order to give “explanations”: “Remember,” he said, “that There is a strong and organized movement among the Germans aimed at sowing the seeds of mistrust between the Allies. The Germans are convinced that they will benefit from a split between us. I want to warn you not to believe German stories about Russian atrocities without carefully checking their authenticity." 4 But a cold war was brewing. And already in 1946, Austin Epp’s brochure “The Rape of the Women of Conquered Europe” was published in the USA.

Corpses of Leningraders in a vacant lot near the Volkov cemetery. In the background you can see barrage balloons lowered to the ground. Spring 1942
In 1947, Ralph Killing published the book “A Terrible Harvest” in Chicago. An expensive attempt to exterminate the people of Germany,” which was based on press reports about “atrocities in the Soviet zone of occupation” and materials from hearings in the American Parliament on the actions of the Red Army in post-war Germany.

The rhetoric of the latter is especially revealing: “Bolshevized Mongolian and Slavic hordes came from the East, immediately raping women and girls, infecting them with venereal diseases, impregnating them with the future race of Russian-German half-breeds...” 5 .

The following notable publications on this topic are the books by the German Erich Kube “Russians in Berlin, 1945” and the American Cornelius Ryan “The Last Battle: The Storming of Berlin through the Eyes of Eyewitnesses”; both come out in the mid-60s. Here, the age range of victims increases even in comparison with Goebbels’s statements: in the offensive zone of the Red Army, “every woman from eight to eighty years old faces rape” 2. Subsequently, it is this figure that will regularly “pop up” in publications in Western media at the beginning of the 21st century. However, wondering “how many women have been raped” and admitting that “nobody knows”, Ryan says that “doctors give figures from 20,000 to 100,000” 2. Compared to the figures his followers will announce, these will seem incredibly modest...

A new surge of interest in “raped Germany” occurred in the early 90s after the collapse of the USSR.

Thus, “in united Germany, they hastily began to publish books and make films branding the Red Army and the Communists for the “crimes of 1945.”

Removal of corpses from the vacant lot of the Volkov cemetery in besieged Leningrad. Spring 1942
For example, the famous documentary film “Liberators and Liberated. War, violence, children" (1992), filmed by Helke Zander and Barbara Yohr, where video sequences from war chronicles, recordings of memories combined with musical accompaniment produce a strong emotional impact on the viewer" 5 .

In the same year, a book of the same name was published in Munich, to which Antony Beevor would later actively refer. Among the most famous are the work of Alfred de Zayas, published in 1994 in New York, “A Terrible Vengeance: The Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans, 1944-1950,” and in 1995 in Harvard, by Norman M. Neumark, “Russians in Germany. History of the Soviet zone of occupation. 1945-1949".

In our country, this topic has been slightly touched upon since the times of perestroika and glasnost in connection with references to it in the works of famous dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev. But the real information boom began in the mid-2000s, when “a wave of anti-Russian books quickly spread to newspapers of the relevant orientation, which happily began to reproduce descriptions of the horrors of “raped Germany” for various war anniversaries” 5. The topic became especially fashionable after the 2002 publication of the book “The Fall of Berlin. 1945" by the English historian Anthony Beevor 6, who called "absolutely fantastic data on the number of women who became victims of Soviet soldiers" 5. After the book was published in Russian, the myth of mass rape began to be actively exaggerated in the Russian liberal press and on the Russian-language Internet.

Very soon it became clear that accusations of the Red Army of crimes against the civilian population of Germany and calls for modern Russia to “realize and repent” mark a new stage in the struggle for the history of the Second World War and a revision of the role of the Soviet Union in it.

The corpses of Leningraders who tried to walk across Lake Ladoga. April 12, 1942
The peak of massive attacks on the role of the USSR in World War II occurred in 2005 - the year of the 60th anniversary of the Victory. The Western media reacted especially actively to this information occasion. Thus, Konstantin Eggert of the BBC complained that “the war remains the only bright spot of the Soviet period of history for the majority of the Russian population, and therefore has been declared outside the zone of critical study and discussion.” And, calling on Russia to “rethink the past,” he rather openly hinted that “only a deep national crisis can today return Russians to the situation of the late eighties, when the discussion about Soviet history, interrupted in the nineties, was in full swing” 7 .

In a special review by RIA Novosti, prepared on the basis of monitoring television and radio broadcasts of 86 foreign radio stations and television companies on April 19, 2005, it was stated: “The information fuss over the historical interpretation of the Great Patriotic War is not complete without an arsenal of horror propaganda. Journalists’ reliance on subjective memoirs, personal experience of former battle participants and frank speculation of Goebbels’s propaganda leads to the fact that images associated with revenge, hatred and violence come to the fore, which do little to consolidate public opinion and resurrect previous foreign policy guidelines. The presence of a “dark side” of the liberation feat of the Red Army, which is allegedly hushed up in modern Russia, is postulated” 8 .

"Scientific" methods of Mr. E. Beevor and Co.

Thus, in the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, in an article with the eloquent title “Red Army troops raped even Russian women whom they liberated from camps,” it was said: “Soviet soldiers viewed rape, often carried out in front of a woman’s husband and family members, as an appropriate way of humiliation the German nation, which considered the Slavs an inferior race with which sexual contacts were not encouraged. Russian patriarchal society and the habit of riotous revelry also played a role, but more important was the indignation at the sight of the relatively high welfare of the Germans” 9 .

Captured Red Army soldiers who died from hunger and cold. The prisoner of war camp was located in the village of Bolshaya Rossoshka near Stalingrad. The photograph was taken during an inspection of the camp by the Soviet military after the defeat of the German troops (filming footage of the camp, including with these dead prisoners, is included in the documentary film “The Battle of Stalingrad” (from the 57th minute). The author’s title of the photograph is “Faces of War” "January 1943
The article prompted an angry letter to the editor from the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Great Britain, Grigory Karasin, dated January 25, 2002. 10

The “scientific integrity” of the English author can be judged by a specific example. The following text caused the greatest stir in the Western media: “The most shocking, from the Russian point of view, are the facts of violence by Soviet soldiers and officers committed against Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian women and girls liberated from German work camps” with reference to my book “Psychology wars in the 20th century. Historical experience of Russia" 11.

In the monograph of the author of the article we read something that can indirectly be attributed to the issue raised by Mr. Beevor: “Worldviews and the moral and socio-psychological qualities that flowed from them were also manifested in relation to the enemy. Already in the spring of 1942, in one of the divisional newspapers of the Karelian Front, there was an essay by a Red Army soldier under the eloquent heading “We have learned to hate.” And this just hatred was one of the dominant feelings in the active Soviet Army throughout the war.

However, depending on its specific stage and the conditions associated with it, the attitude towards the enemy acquired different shades. Thus, a new, more complex range of feelings began to appear among Soviet soldiers and officers in connection with the transfer of hostilities outside our country, to foreign, including enemy, territory. Quite a few military personnel believed that as victors they could afford anything, including arbitrariness against civilians.

Patients of a Leningrad hospital who died as a result of a German artillery attack. December 28, 1943
Negative phenomena in the liberating army caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and its armed forces, and could negatively affect future relations with the countries through which our troops passed. The Soviet command had to again and again pay attention to the state of discipline in the troops, conduct explanatory conversations with the personnel, adopt special directives and issue stern orders. The Soviet Union had to show the peoples of Europe that it was not a “horde of Asians” that had entered their land, but the army of a civilized state. Therefore, purely criminal crimes in the eyes of the USSR leadership acquired political overtones. In this regard, on the personal instructions of Stalin, several show trials were organized with death sentences imposed on the guilty, and the NKVD regularly informed the military command about their measures to combat the facts of robbery against the civilian population” 11.

Well, where are the “facts of violence by Soviet soldiers and officers committed against Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian women and girls liberated from German work camps”?

Perhaps Mr. Beevor meant that this is stated in the work of M.I. Semiryagi, to which I refer? But there is nothing like that there either: neither on pages 314-315, nor on any others!

However, in the West, Mr. Beevor's statements are viewed as absolutely reliable.

Thus, K. Eggert, in the article “Memory and Truth,” written in 2005 for the BBC project for the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, wrote: “When Anthony Beevor’s book “The Fall” was first published in London in 2002 Berlin" (now translated in Russia by AST publishing house), the Russian Ambassador to Great Britain Grigory Karasin wrote an angry letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The diplomat accused the famous military historian of slandering the glorious feat of Soviet soldiers. Cause? Beevor, based on documents from the main military archive in Podolsk, spoke, among other things, about the atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers in liberated Poland, East Prussia and in Berlin itself. Historians from the Russian Academy of Sciences condemned the book “The Fall of Berlin” almost before the ambassador. Meanwhile, the reference apparatus of Beevor's book is in perfect order: incoming and outgoing report numbers, folder, shelf, and so on. That is, you cannot accuse a writer of lying." 7

But if such an obvious falsification was allowed in this particular example, where is the guarantee that the other so-called facts cited in Mr. Beevor’s book were not fabricated using the same “methodology”? Many falsifications are based on this simple calculation: the reference apparatus looks solid and convincing, especially for an inexperienced reader, and hardly anyone will check each of the 1007 author’s footnotes in the archive and library...

However, some people check it and find a lot of interesting things. It was with Beevor’s light hand that the “accurate statistics” were launched and subsequently replicated in thousands of publications - two million German women were raped, one hundred thousand of them in Berlin.

The bodies of Soviet citizens hanged by the Germans during the occupation of Volokolamsk. Moscow region, winter 1941
In his book, he writes: “Berliners remember the piercing screams at night that were heard in houses with broken windows. According to estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women were 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 apparently much higher if one takes into account the one million four hundred thousand raped people in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. It appears that about two million German women were raped, many of whom (if not most) suffered this humiliation several times.”6

At the same time, he refers to the book by Helke Sander and Barbara Yohr “Liberators and Liberated” 12, where calculations are made on data not from “two main Berlin hospitals”, but from one children’s clinic 5, 13, i.e. “to add solidity” makes a completely conscious distortion. Not to mention that these data are very doubtful, since Barbara Yore's calculation system, based on an arbitrary extrapolation of the number of children whose fathers are Russian, born in 1945 and 1946. and examined in one Berlin clinic, for the total female population of East Germany aged “from 8 to 80 years”, does not stand up to criticism 41 . The result of such a “generalization” of individual cases implies that “every 6th East German woman, regardless of age, was raped at least once by the Red Army” 13 .

But even where E. Beevor refers to real archival documents, this does not prove anything. The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation actually stores materials from political departments with reports, which contain protocols of Red Army, Komsomol and party meetings describing cases of deviant behavior of military personnel. These are plump folders, the contents of which are pure black stuff.

But they were compiled precisely “thematically,” as evidenced by their very names: “Emergency Incidents and Immoral Phenomena” for such and such a period in such and such a military unit. By the way, these names already show that this kind of phenomenon was considered by the army leadership not as a behavioral norm, but as an emergency event requiring decisive measures.

The archive also contains materials from military tribunals - investigative cases, verdicts, etc., where you can find many negative examples, because this is where such information is concentrated. But the fact is that the perpetrators of these crimes accounted for no more than 2% of the total number of military personnel. And authors like Mr. Beevor extend their accusations to the entire Soviet Army as a whole. Unfortunately, not only foreign 14. It is noteworthy that Beevor's book was translated into Russian and published in Russia in 2004 - just before the anniversary of the Victory.

In 2005, another “revealing sensation” followed from former allies in the anti-Hitler coalition: “... in the West, the new book by British military historian Max Hastings “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945”, dedicated to the crimes of the Soviet Army against peaceful population of Germany and German prisoners of war. The historian depicts literally ritual retribution inflicted by the Soviet Army on the Germans who were losing the war, and even calls it “primitive “rape” of an entire nation” 15.

Soviet women push a cart containing the bodies of men shot by the Germans. Author's title of the photograph: “Shooted by the Nazis.” 1942
In 2006, a book by the German author Joachim Hoffmann, “Stalin's War of Extermination (1941-1945), was published in Russian. Planning, implementation, documents” 16, which was widely distributed abroad since the mid-90s and went through four editions in Germany alone. At the same time, the preface to the Russian edition states that this work “is one of the best historical studies of the “dark spots” of the Soviet-German war,” and its author is “one of the most prominent representatives of the direction of West German historical science, which defended the postulate that in 1941 “In 1945, the war was fought between two criminal regimes: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR.”

Naturally, several chapters are devoted to the last months of the war from a very specific perspective, as evidenced by their titles: ““No mercy, no leniency.” Atrocities of the Red Army while advancing onto German soil,” “Woe to you, Germany!” The atrocities continue." The list of literature of this kind, reviving the spirit and letter of Goebbels’s propaganda in new historical conditions, can be continued for quite a long time.

Information war in electronic media

Thus, in May 2005, a certain Yu. Nesterenko wrote an article “Day of National Shame”, initiating an open-ended “Anti-Victory” campaign, within the framework of which “numerous evidence of the monstrous crimes of the Soviet “liberator soldiers” (often exceeding the worst acts in cruelty) was disseminated Nazis)": "...Instead of fanning yet another propaganda hysteria and demanding gratitude from those raped for the pleasure they gave, we must put an end to the practice of many years of hypocritical lies and double standards, stop honoring the servants of the criminal regime and repent to everyone who innocently suffered from the actions of the "soldiers" -liberators"" 17 - this is the main message of the organizer of the action.

In May 2009, also on the eve of Victory Day, A. Shiropaev’s provocative post “Tomb of the Unknown Rapist” 18 appeared, exposing our veterans as pedophile rapists, which received a huge number of comments and hung in the Yandex top 19 for a long time.

On Wikipedia, many pages are directly or indirectly devoted to the topic of rape at the end of the war: “Violence against German civilians (1945)”, “Deportation of Germans after World War II”, “German population in East Prussia after World War II” , “Murder in Nemmersdorf”, “The Fall of Berlin. 1945" and others.

And the radio station “Echo of Moscow” (2009) in the “Price of Victory” program twice broadcast on “painful topics” - “The Wehrmacht and the Red Army against the civilian population” (February 16) and “The Red Army on German territory” (October 26) 20, inviting G. Bordyugov and the notorious M. Solonin to the studio.

Finally, in 2010, the year of the 65th anniversary of the Victory, another anti-Russian wave arose, sweeping across Europe and especially noticeable in Germany.

“Sometimes a pitiful thought pops up on the Russian Internet that the Germans are so poor and tired of repenting,” A. Tyurin writes on Pravaya.ru. “There is no need to worry, even under the anti-fascist Chancellor Willy Brandt, Germany did not apologize for its crimes committed in Russia.”

And he shares his observations with readers: “While the German chancellor was looking at the Victory Parade, a Russophobic bacchanalia was raging in Germany. The Russians who defeated Hitler were shown as a horde of subhumans - quite according to Goebbels' patterns. For three days in a row I watched programs on German state and commercial news channels dedicated to the end of World War II in Europe and the first post-war weeks. There are a lot of programs, both documentary and fiction. The general leitmotif is this. Americans are humanists, breadwinners... Russians are robbers and rapists. The topic of Wehrmacht crimes against the civilian population of the USSR is absent. The number of Soviet people killed in the zone of German-Romanian-Finnish occupation is not given.

A Soviet child crying over the body of his dead mother. A still from a Soviet film during the war, which showed the crimes of the Nazis. 1942
Having taken Berlin, the Russians feed the poor Berliners poorly, leading them to dystrophy, but they drag everything in a row and rape them.

And here the feature television series “One Woman in Berlin” (central channel ZDF) is typical. The Russians are shown not as an army, but as a horde. Against the background of thin, pale, spiritual German faces, these terrible Russian muzzles, gaping mouths, thick cheeks, greasy eyes, nasty smiles. The horde is precisely Russian, there are no nationalities, except for one Asian soldier, whom the Russians call “hey, Mongol” 21.

Such propaganda clichés, spilled into art, have an emotional impact on viewers, are firmly entrenched in the mass consciousness, and form not only a distorted “retrospective” view of the events of the Second World War, but also the image of modern Russia and Russians.

At the same time, as a result of a powerful information war, the very term “liberation mission” is subject to the most violent attacks by anti-Russian forces both in the West and within the country. The desire to rewrite the history of World War II comes from the states of the former socialist camp, which today find themselves members of NATO, and from the former union republics of the USSR, gravitating toward the West, and from countries that were former opponents of the USSR in World War II, and from countries that were former allies in the anti-Hitler coalition.

The general leitmotif of these attacks is an attempt to replace “liberation” with “occupation”, the desire to present the liberation mission of the USSR in Europe as a “new enslavement” of countries that found themselves in the sphere of Soviet influence, accusations not only against the USSR and the Soviet Army, but also against Russia as successor of the Soviet Union in imposing totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, in crimes against the civilian population, demands for her to “repent” and “redress the damage.”

The limits of hatred, the limits of revenge

Throughout the Great Patriotic War, the theme of retribution was one of the central ones in agitation and propaganda, as well as in the thoughts and feelings of the Soviet people. Long before the army approached the enemy border, passing through their native land tormented by the invaders, seeing tortured women and children, burned and destroyed cities and villages, Soviet soldiers vowed to take revenge on the invaders a hundredfold and often thought about the time when they would enter enemy territory. And when this happened, they were - they couldn’t help but be! - psychological breakdowns, especially among those who have lost their families.

In January-February 1945, Soviet troops launched the Vistula-Oder and East Prussian offensive operations and entered German soil. “Here it is, damned Germany!” - a Russian soldier who was the first to cross the border wrote on one of the homemade billboards near the burnt house 22. The day we have been waiting for so long has arrived. And at every step, Soviet soldiers encountered things with our factory marks, looted by the Nazis; compatriots freed from captivity spoke about the horrors and abuses they experienced in German slavery. German ordinary people, who supported Hitler and welcomed the war, shamelessly enjoyed the fruits of the robbery of other nations, did not expect that the war would return to where it began - to German territory. And now these “civilian” Germans, frightened and ingratiating, with white bands on their sleeves, were afraid to look them in the eyes, expecting retribution for everything that their army had done on foreign soil.

Punishers shoot Jewish women and children near the village of Mizoch, Rivne region. Those who still show signs of life are finished off in cold blood. Before execution, victims were ordered to remove all clothing. USSR, Ukraine, Rivne region, October 14, 1942
The thirst for revenge on the enemy “in his own lair” was one of the dominant sentiments in the troops, especially since it was long and purposefully fueled by official propaganda.

Even on the eve of the offensive, rallies and meetings were held in combat units on the topic “How I will take revenge on the German invaders,” “My personal account of revenge on the enemy,” where the principle of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” was proclaimed the pinnacle of justice.

However, after our army left the state border of the USSR, the Soviet government had considerations of a different kind, dictated by plans for the post-war system in Europe.

The political assessment “Hitlers come and go, but the German people, and the German state remains” (Order No. 55 of the People's Commissar of Defense of February 23, 1942) was actively adopted by propaganda and was of considerable importance for the formation of a new (and, in essence, a reanimated old , pre-war) psychological attitude of Soviet people towards the enemy 23.

But it is one thing to understand this obvious truth with your mind, and quite another thing to rise above your grief and hatred, and not give free rein to the blind thirst for revenge. The explanations that followed at the beginning of 1945 from political departments about “how to behave” on German territory came as a surprise to many and were often rejected.

This is how front-line writer D. Samoilov recalled it: “The slogan “Kill the German!” solved an ancient problem using the method of King Herod. And all the years of the war there was no doubt. “Explanation” on April 17 (an article by Alexandrov, the then head of our propaganda, where the position of Ilya Ehrenburg was criticized - “Kill the German!” - and the question of the responsibility of the German nation for the war was interpreted in a new way) and especially Stalin’s words about Hitler and the people seemed to be canceled previous look. The army, however, understood the political background of these statements. Her emotional state and moral concepts could not accept pardon and amnesty for the people who brought so much misfortune to Russia” 24.

The pattern of hatred towards Germany on the part of the Soviet troops entering its territory was understood at that time by the Germans themselves.

This is what 16-year-old Dieter Borkowski wrote in his diary on April 15, 1945 about the mood of the Berlin population: “... At noon we left on a completely overcrowded S-Bahn train from Anhalt station. There were many women on the train with us - refugees from the Russian-occupied eastern regions of Berlin. They carried with them all their belongings: a stuffed backpack. Nothing more. Horror froze on their faces, anger and despair filled the people! I have never heard such curses before...

Then someone shouted over the noise: “Quiet!” We saw a nondescript, dirty soldier with two iron crosses and a gold German cross on his uniform. He had a patch on his sleeve with four small metal tanks, which meant that he had knocked out 4 tanks in close combat.

“I want to tell you something,” he shouted, and there was silence in the train car. “Even if you don’t want to listen! Stop whining! We must win this war, we must not lose courage. If others win - Russians, Poles, French, Czechs - and do to our people even one percent of what we did to them for six years in a row, then in a few weeks not a single German will be left alive. This is being told to you by someone who was in occupied countries for six years!” It became so quiet on the train that you could have heard a hairpin fall." 25

The bodies of two German women and three children allegedly killed by Soviet soldiers in the town of Metgethen in East Prussia in January-February 1945. German propaganda photo
This soldier knew what he was talking about.

Acts of revenge were inevitable.

The leadership of the Soviet Army took severe measures against violence and atrocities against the German population, declaring such actions criminal and unacceptable, and putting those guilty of them on trial by a military tribunal, up to and including execution.

On January 19, 1945, Stalin signed a special order “On behavior on German territory” 26.

The order was communicated to every soldier. In its addition and development, the command and political agencies of fronts, associations and formations drew up relevant documents.

Thus, having entered the lands of East Prussia, on January 21, 1945, the commander of the 2nd Belorussian Front, Marshal K.K. Rokossovsky, issued order No. 006, designed to “direct the feeling of hatred of people to exterminate the enemy on the battlefield,” punishing looting, violence, looting, senseless arson and destruction. The danger of such phenomena for the morale and combat effectiveness of the army was noted.

On January 29, the order of Marshal G.K. was read out in all battalions of the 1st Belorussian Front. Zhukov, who forbade the Red Army soldiers to “oppress the German population, rob apartments and burn houses.”

On April 20, 1945, a special directive from the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command on the conduct of Soviet troops in Germany was adopted 27. And although “it was not possible to completely prevent incidents of violence, they managed to contain it and then reduce it to a minimum” 28 .

The political workers themselves drew attention to the contradictions in political attitudes before and after entering enemy territory.

This is evidenced by the speech of the head of the Political Directorate of the 2nd Belorussian Front, Lieutenant General A.D., on February 6, 1945. Okorokova at a meeting of workers of the agitation and propaganda department of the front and the Main Directorate of the Red Army on the moral and political state of the Soviet troops on enemy territory: “... The question of hatred of the enemy. The mood of people now boils down to the fact that they said one thing, but now it turns out something else. When our political workers began to explain order No. 006, exclamations were heard: is this not a provocation? In General Kustov’s division, during conversations, there were the following responses: “These are political workers! They told us one thing, and now they told us something else!”

Moreover, it must be said frankly that stupid political workers began to view Order No. 006 as a turn in politics, as a refusal to take revenge on the enemy. We must wage a decisive struggle against this, explaining that the feeling of hatred is our sacred feeling, that we have never given up revenge, that this is not a question of turning around, but of correctly explaining the issue.

Of course, the influx of feelings of revenge among our people is enormous, and this influx of feelings led our fighters into the lair of the fascist beast and will lead further to Germany. But revenge cannot be equated with drunkenness and arson. I burned the house, and there was nowhere to put the wounded. Is this revenge? I wantonly destroy property. This is not an expression of revenge. We must explain that all property and livestock were won with the blood of our people, that we must take all this to ourselves and, due to this, to some extent strengthen the economy of our state in order to become even stronger than the Germans.

The soldier just needs to be explained, simply told that we have conquered this and must treat what we have conquered like a master. Explain that if you kill some old German woman in the rear, this will not speed up the death of Germany. Here is a German soldier - destroy him, and take the one who surrenders to the rear. Channel people's feelings of hatred into exterminating the enemy on the battlefield. And our people understand this. One said that I was ashamed of what I had previously thought: I would burn the house down and take revenge.

Our Soviet people are organized and they will understand the essence of the issue. Now there is a decree of the State Defense Committee that all able-bodied German men from 17 to 55 years old should be mobilized into work battalions and sent with our officer cadres to Ukraine and Belarus for restoration work. When we truly instill in a fighter a feeling of hatred for the Germans, then the fighter will not attack a German woman, because he will be disgusted. Here we will need to correct the shortcomings, channel the feeling of hatred towards the enemy in the right direction” 29.

Funeral of Young Guard Sergei Tyulenin. In the background are the surviving Young Guard members Georgy Harutyunyants (the tallest) and Valeria Borts (the girl in the beret). In the second row is the father of Sergei Tyulenin (?). Sergei Gavrilovich Tyulenin (1925-1943) - one of the organizers and active participants in the underground Komsomol organization “Young Guard” in the occupied city of Krasnodon, Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region of the Ukrainian SSR. On January 27, 1943, he was arrested by the Germans and executed on January 31, 1943. After the liberation of Krasnodon, he was buried on March 1, 1943 in the mass grave of Young Guard heroes in the central square of the city of Krasnodon. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 13, 1943, S.G. Tyulenin and 4 other Young Guard members were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. USSR, Ukraine, Krasnodon, Voroshilovgrad region, March 01, 1943
And indeed, a lot of work had to be done to change the army’s attitude towards revenge on Germany, which had been formed during the course of the war itself and previous political work. We had to again differentiate the concepts of “fascist” and “German” in people’s minds.

“Political departments are doing a lot of work among the troops, explaining how to behave with the population, distinguishing incorrigible enemies from honest people, with whom we will probably still have to work a lot. Who knows, maybe they will still have to help them restore everything that was destroyed by the war, wrote E.S. Katukova, an employee of the headquarters of the 1st Guards Tank Army, in the spring of 1945. - To tell the truth, many of our soldiers find it difficult to accept this line of tactful treatment of the population, especially those whose families suffered from the Nazis during the occupation.

But our discipline is strict. Probably years will pass and a lot will change. We may even go to visit the Germans to look at the current battlefields. But before that, much must burn out and boil over in the soul; everything that we experienced from the Nazis, all these horrors, is still too close” 30.

Various kinds of “extraordinary incidents and immoral phenomena” in units of the advancing Red Army were carefully recorded by special departments, military prosecutors, and political officers, suppressed whenever possible and severely punished. However, it was mainly the rear officers and transport workers who carried out the outrages. The combat units simply had nothing to do with it - they fought. Their hatred spilled out onto the armed and resisting enemy. And those who tried to stay away from the front line “fought” women and old people.

Recalling the battles in East Prussia, Lev Kopelev, a former political worker, later a writer and dissident, said: “I don’t know the statistics: how many scoundrels, marauders, rapists there were among our soldiers, I don’t know. I'm sure they were a tiny minority. However, it was they who made, so to speak, an indelible impression” 31.

It should be noted that many soldiers and officers themselves resolutely fought against robberies and violence. Their suppression was also facilitated by harsh sentences from military tribunals. According to the military prosecutor's office, “in the first months of 1945, 4,148 officers and a large number of privates were convicted by military tribunals for committing atrocities against the local population. Several show trials of military personnel resulted in death sentences being imposed on the perpetrators.”32

At the same time, if we turn to the documents of the German side, we will see that even before the start of the war against the USSR it was announced in advance that “in the fight against Bolshevism it is impossible to build relations with the enemy on the principles of humanism and international law” 33, thereby initially allowing any violations of international law in the future relations of German troops towards civilians and Soviet prisoners of war.

As one of the many examples of policy statements of the German leadership, we quote the Decree of Hitler as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht of May 13, 1941 on military proceedings in the war with the Soviet Union: “For actions against enemy civilians committed by Wehrmacht military personnel and civilians, there will be no mandatory prosecution, even if the act is a war crime or misdemeanor... The judge orders the prosecution of acts against local residents in military courts only when it comes to non-compliance with military discipline or a threat to the safety of the troops” 33.

Or let’s remember the famous “Memo of a German Soldier” (which became one of the prosecution documents at the Nuremberg trials), where the following “humane” calls were made: “Remember and follow: 1)... No nerves, heart, pity - you are made of German iron... 2) ... Destroy pity and compassion in yourself, kill every Russian, don’t stop if in front of you is an old man or a woman, a girl or a boy... 3)... We will bring the whole world to its knees... The German is the absolute master of the world. You will decide the fate of England, Russia, America... destroy all living things that resist in your way... Tomorrow the whole world will kneel before you” 34.

This was the policy of the fascist leadership of Germany in relation to “racially inferior peoples,” among which it included the Slavs.

With regard to the German population or prisoners of war, the Soviet leadership never set such tasks for its army. Consequently, we can talk specifically about isolated (especially in comparison with the actions of the German side) violations of international law in the conduct of war. Moreover, all these phenomena were spontaneous, not organized, and were suppressed with all severity by the Soviet army command. And yet, as the German historian Reinhard Rürup noted, in defeated Germany, “fear and horror towards Soviet troops was widespread to a much greater extent than towards the British or Americans. Indeed, in the first days of the arrival of the Red Army, its fighters committed significant excesses, robberies, and violence.

The publicist E. Kubi was not mistaken when, looking back, he stated that Soviet soldiers could have behaved like a “punishing heavenly army,” guided only by hatred of the German population.

Many Germans knew more or less definitely what exactly happened in the Soviet Union, and therefore feared revenge or retribution in kind. The German people can actually consider themselves lucky - they have not suffered justice” 35.

Speaking about the scale of rape in the zone of responsibility of the Soviet troops, an excerpt from the report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front on the implementation of the directive of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command No. 11072 and the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front No. 00384 on the change in attitude towards the German population as of May 5 should be cited 1945: “Fulfilling the instructions of the Military Council of the Front, the Military Prosecutor's Office of the Front systematically monitors the implementation of the directives of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and the Military Council of the Front on changing attitudes towards the German population. We have to admit that the facts of robberies, violence and other illegal actions on the part of our military personnel against the local German population not only did not stop, but even in the period from April 22 to May 5 continued to be quite widespread.

I give figures characterizing this situation for the 7 armies of our front: the total number of atrocities by military personnel against the local population recorded for these 7 armies is 124, of which: rapes of German women - 72, robberies - 38, murders - 3, others illegal actions - 11" 36.

Let us emphasize that this is data for 7 armies of the front storming Berlin in the midst of urban battles, that is, 908.5 thousand people. personnel at the beginning of the Berlin operation, of which 37.6 thousand were irretrievable and 141.9 thousand sanitary losses 37 - and only 72 cases of rape in two weeks! Considering that in the future the number of rapes and “other atrocities,” according to the materials of the military prosecutor’s office and tribunals, began to decline, the figure of 100 thousand Berlin residents who were subjected to “abuse by Soviet barbarians,” to put it mildly, does not stand out. Not to mention two million.

At the same time, according to Osmar White, the actions of the Soviet administration to improve the lives of the German civilian population (immediately after the end of the fighting!) were much more effective than those of its Western colleagues. “At the end of my first day in Berlin,” he wrote in his diary, “I was sure that the city was dead. Human beings could not live in this horrific pile of garbage.

By the end of the first week, my ideas began to change.

Society began to come to life among the ruins. Berliners began to receive food and water in quantities sufficient to survive. More and more people were employed in public works carried out under the leadership of the Russians.

Thanks to the Russians, who had extensive experience in dealing with similar problems in their own devastated cities, the spread of epidemics was brought under control.

I am convinced that the Soviets did more in those days to allow Berlin to survive than the Anglo-Americans could have done in their place.

Russian methods of maintaining order and achieving results in the most essential things did not have such a deterrent as good-naturedness. They understood the psychology of the masses and knew that the sooner Berliners were inspired by the idea of ​​​​helping themselves, the better it would be for everyone. A few days after the surrender, they supported the idea of ​​publishing newspapers. Then they restored radio broadcasting, allowed the organization of entertainment events and announced that they would approve the creation of trade unions and democratic political parties...” 4 .

The family of a Soviet collective farmer killed on the day of the retreat of German troops
He further writes, focusing on the reaction of the Germans themselves: “Radio, newspapers, politics, concerts... The Russians wisely fueled the revival in the desert of despair. They showed generosity to the followers of the monster, who lay in his lair under the mountains of rubble. But the Berliners did not look at the world the way the Russians would like. Whispers could be heard everywhere: “Thank God that you - the British and the Americans - came here. Russians are animals, they took away everything I had... they rape, steal and shoot..." 4.

In this regard, it is worth citing the story of one veteran, mortarman N.A. Orlov, shocked by the behavior of the Germans (and German women) in 1945: “No one in the Minbat killed German civilians. Our special officer was a “Germanophile.” If this happened, then the reaction of the punitive authorities to such an excess would be quick. Regarding violence against German women. It seems to me that when talking about this phenomenon, some people “exaggerate things” a little. I remember an example of a different kind.

We went to some German city and settled in houses. Frau, about 45 years old, appears and asks for “Herr Kommandant.” They brought her to Marchenko. She declares that she is in charge of the quarter, and has gathered 20 German women for sexual (!!!) service of Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood German, and to the political officer Dolgoborodov standing next to me, I translated the meaning of what the German woman said. The reaction of our officers was angry and abusive. The German woman was driven away, along with her “squad” ready for service.

In general, the German submission stunned us. They expected partisan warfare and sabotage from the Germans. But for this nation, order - "Ordnung" - is above all. If you are a winner, then they are “on their hind legs”, and consciously and not under duress. This is the psychology.

I say again, I don’t remember anyone from my company raping a German woman. There are not many people in the minrot, such “deeds” would sooner or later become known to their comrades. My tongue is my enemy, one of my own would have blurted out something, the main thing is so as not to the special agent...” 38 .

Continuing the theme of “German obedience”, several more documents should be cited.

In the report of the Deputy Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army Shikin to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to G.F. Alexandrov dated April 30, 1945, about the attitude of the civilian population of Berlin towards the personnel of the Red Army troops it was 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 bands on their sleeves. When meeting our military personnel, many women raise their hands up, cry and shake with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all what their fascist propaganda portrayed them to be, this fear quickly passes, more and more the population takes to the streets and offers their services, trying in every possible way to emphasize their loyal attitude to the Red Army" 39 .

Practical Germans were most concerned about the issue of food supply, for the sake of which they were ready to do literally anything.

One official, in a conversation with another, said: “The Russians didn’t start very well, they took my watch off, but if they give me the standards, then we can live without a watch” 39 .

Finally, it should be noted the interesting reaction of the population of one of the districts of Berlin in connection with the spread of a rumor about the cessation of food distribution.

On June 4, 1945, I. Serov reported to L. Beria: “On May 28, in the Prenzlaunsberg area, a shot was fired from one house at the Red Army soldier on duty at the commandant’s office. A detachment sent to the scene took some of the residents of this house into the commandant's office, and therefore a rumor was spread that the Red Army would stop issuing food to the population. After this, several delegations from the region came to the commandant’s office with a request to publicly shoot 30-40 hostages in the square, but not to stop issuing food. The population of this area was asked to find the culprit and bring him to the commandant’s office” 40.

Ally behavior: “women as prey”

The report of the 7th branch of the Political Department of the 61st Army of the 1st Belorussian Front dated May 11, 1945, “On the work of the American army and military authorities among the German population,” stated: “American soldiers and officers are prohibited from communicating with the local population. This prohibition, however, is violated. Recently there have been up to 100 cases of rape, although rape is punishable by execution” 42 .

The black units especially distinguished themselves.

Blacks also served in the Wehrmacht
At the end of April 1945, the German communist Hans Jendretsky, released from prison by the Western Allies, reported on the situation in the zone of Germany occupied by American troops: “Most of the occupation troops in the Erlangen area to Bamberg and in Bamberg itself were black units. These black units were located mainly in those places where there was great resistance. I was told about such atrocities of these blacks as robbing apartments, taking away decorations, destroying residential premises and attacks on children.

In Bamberg, in front of the school building where these blacks were quartered, lay three shot blacks, who some time ago had been shot by a military police patrol for attacking children. But also white regular American troops committed similar atrocities...” 42. O.A. Rzheshevsky cites data according to which in the US Army, where the number of rapes sharply increased after entering Germany, 69 people were executed for this crime and for murder. 43

Interesting evidence was left by the 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. His diaries and newspaper articles formed the basis of the book "Conquerors" Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945, which contains many unflattering characteristics of the behavior of American soldiers in defeated Germany. The book was written back in 1945 g., but then the publishers refused to publish it because of its criticism of the Allied occupation policy. It was published only at the end of the 20th century.

In it, O. White, in particular, wrote: “After the fighting moved to German soil, many rapes were committed by the soldiers of the front units and those who followed directly behind them. Their number depended on the attitude of senior officers to this. In some cases, the perpetrators were identified, prosecuted and punished. Lawyers remained secretive, but admitted that some soldiers were shot for cruel and perverted sexual acts with German women (especially in cases where they were blacks). However, I knew that many women had also been raped by white Americans. No actions were taken against the criminals” 44.

“On one sector of the front, one rather distinguished commander wittily remarked: “Copulation without conversation is not fraternization!” Another officer once dryly remarked about the anti-fraternization order: “This is certainly the first time in history that a serious effort has been made to deny soldiers the right to women in a defeated country.”

Part I

More and more often recently, from different sides, accusations have been heard against the Red Army that it allegedly behaved “inappropriately” in Germany in 1944-1945. 1 She raped (and the number of victims of sexual violence is sometimes estimated at a million people), killed, robbed, abused civilians - in general, she carried out a consistent genocide of the German people. These accusations, most often coming from the West, are happily supported by some of our fellow citizens, who really want to show the Soviet Union in an unfavorable light. In this case, of course, all methods are good - even throwing faces in the mud of those people who gave their lives liberating our country from the German occupiers. A distinctive feature of all these lampoons addressed to Soviet soldiers is their complete scientific failure. Let's take for example Beevor's article 2, the primary source of which we can find in the wonderful book of this magnificent historian, “The Battle of Berlin.” 3 How does its author justify the barbaric behavior of the Bolshevik hordes on the territory of the Third Reich? Let me give you a few quotes: « The tank unit commander recalled: “They all lifted their skirts and lay down on the bed”; Soviet the major told an English journalist at the time: “Our comrades were so hungry for female affection that they often raped sixty-, seventy- and even eighty-year-olds, to their outright surprise, if not pleasure”; "According to data from two city hospitals, 95,000-130,000 women became victims of rape”; « One doctor calculated“that out of 100,000 people raped, about 10,000 later died, mostly by committing suicide.” So, the commander recalled, the major declared, and the doctor counted. No names, no dates, nothing. The passage with hospitals is absolutely magnificent. To draw conclusions about the number of raped people without even indicating the names of hospitals, let alone what data the author relies on, is something incredible. And thus, in general, all articles of this kind were written - no documents, only speculation and, at most, references to “memories of eyewitnesses” (and where these memories came from is also unknown). This style of writing can only tell us one thing: the authors are clearly not strong in history. But they have a lot of desire to denigrate the Red Army. Moreover, such a desire leads them to open lies. For example, such historians are very fond of asserting that « The historical mission" of the Soviet army, as stated in the editorial concocted by Stalin's chief propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg on March 3, 1945, "is the humble and honorable task of reducing the population of Germany." . 4 In reality, Ehrenburg did not write anything like that, but his phrase sounds like this: “In the fall, in East Prussia, as well as throughout Germany, the “Volkssturm” was created... The Volkssturmists were armed with anything; they fight poorly - not because they are smarter than the soldiers, but because they are older and weaker. This is cannon fodder, and, apparently, the historical role of the Volkssturm will be reduced to one simple, but, in my opinion, worthy cause: to reduce the population of Germany.". 5 Do you feel the difference? And even though Ehrenburg never made statements similar to those attributed to him, his excessive harshness towards the Germans attracted criticism from officials. 6

By the way, fans of military smut do not ignore our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. 7 Those, too, just as luck would have it, turn out to be rapists and perverts.

However, of course, it must be recognized that rape, as well as all other crimes, was committed by the Red Army soldiers in abundance. Moreover, in order to prove this, there is no need to resort to lies or use the mythical “data from two hospitals.” It’s enough just to read Soviet documents (I’ll give them below). Why was the situation this way? Alas, this is the norm for war. And the larger the army, the more terrible its crimes will be in the occupied territory. Remember what the spacecraft was like in 1945. 11 million people who had to meet only three requirements to join the army: be male, belong to a certain age group and be able to hold a weapon in their hands. As a result, all sorts of rabble ended up in the Soviet troops. Everyone came to defend their homeland, including even criminals. If a small professional army is able to control almost every member of it even on enemy territory, then a mass army of this size and composition is simply not able to do this. And everyone faced such problems: the British, the Americans, the Finns. Alas, the Red Army was no exception.

From a report from a member of the military council of the 1st Ukrainian Front to the head of the main political department of the Red Army on the political situation in the occupied German territory in the zone of front troops dated April 4, 1945 8:

... Individual cases of arbitrariness, especially cases of rape of women, keep the Germans in constant fear and tension.

From the report of the head of the political department of the 8th Guards Army to the head of the political department of the 1st Belorussian Front on the attitude of Soviet military personnel towards the German population dated April 25, 1945 9:

Military commandants note that in recent days the number of cases of fleas, rape of women and other immoral acts on the part of military personnel has sharply decreased. 2-3 cases are registered in each locality, while previously the number of cases of immoral phenomena was much greater.

From the report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front to the Military Council of the Front on the implementation of the directives of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and the Military Council of the Front on changing attitudes towards the German population dated May 2, 1945 10:

A significant change has certainly been achieved in the attitude of our military personnel towards the German population. Facts of aimless and (unfounded) executions of Germans, looting and rape of German women have decreased significantly, nevertheless, even after the publication of directives from the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and the Military Council of the front a number of such cases have still been recorded.

If executions of Germans are currently almost never observed, and cases of robbery are isolated, then violence against women still occurs; The barbarity has not yet stopped, which consists of our military personnel walking through junk apartments, collecting all sorts of things and objects, etc.

Special message by L.P. Beria I.V. Stalin and V.M. Molotov on the unworthy behavior of Red Army soldiers dated March 17, 1945 11:

In the process of filtering the civilian population by the operational military group of the NKVD of the 43rd Army, the German women m. Spaleitten Tsepancik Gertruda, born in 1912, Zimantsik Gelgrad, born in 1913, and Korn Emma, ​​born in 1908, and all their 12 Children aged 3 to 6 years were found with the wrist joints of their right hands cut. When questioned about the reasons for the self-injuries, Emma Korn testified: “Before the retreat, the command of the German army suggested that we evacuate to the city of Konigsberg, declaring that the “Red Asians” were committing unheard-of atrocities against the German population. On the advice of German soldiers, we did not evacuate and remained to live in the town of Spaleitten. February 3 this year The advanced units of the Red Army entered our town, the soldiers burst into our basement and, pointing weapons at me and the other two women, ordered us to go out into the yard. In the yard, 12 soldiers raped me one by one, and the rest of the soldiers did the same to my neighbors. On the night of the same date, 6 drunken soldiers burst into our basement and also raped us in the presence of children. On February 5, 3 soldiers came into our basement, and on February 6, 8 drunken soldiers, who also raped and beat us... We decided to commit suicide, for which on February 8 we cut the wrist joints and veins of our right hands for ourselves and our children.”

So, we see that there were cases of rape and other crimes, and, alas, they were not uncommon. Of course, we are not able to talk about any approximate numbers of victims, due to the fragmentary information, but we can draw up an approximate picture of what happened. So what, then, really is the difference between the spacecraft and the Wehrmacht, if both committed crimes? And the only difference is the attitude of the command and leadership of the country to these crimes. It's no secret that Hitler and his comrades initially set themselves the task of destroying the Russian people. This task was carried out systematically. Picturesque evidence of this is the simply mind-boggling number of civilian casualties. The Germans, by order of the command, exterminated entire villages and killed thousands of people in concentration camps. During the occupation, German soldiers tried such a variety of tortures and executions on Soviet citizens that medieval craftsmen never dreamed of such things. And not a single German was punished for his cruelty to the civilian population of the occupied areas. None. Now let's see how the Red Army treated the German people and their own criminals. Again based on the documents...

Below are excerpts from various books (I don’t remember the names, alas)

1. Our past neighbors - grandfather and grandmother - got married during the war. She was a nurse, she was sleeping, and he raped her while she was sleeping. In the process, he realized that she was a virgin, was afraid of arrest and proposed marriage: “no one will marry you anyway.” She was scared and agreed. So he reminded her all his life: “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 was tightly holding the hand of a young girl with blonde pigtails, she was crying, the child’s legs were stained with blood... “The soldiers kicked us out of the house,” she told the Russian officer, “ they beat and raped us, my daughter is only 13, two raped her, 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 feather beds, on the approaches to the city posters were placed - “Blood for blood!”, and the corpses of civilians here and there did not surprise anyone It was 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 - court martial and shoot”... Then Alexandrov’s article “Comrade Ehrenburg” appeared. simplifies," and the commanders, together with political workers and tribunal officers, were able to restore discipline in the army units."

4. “They poked here,” explained the beautiful German woman, 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. Among them were old, pimply, and that’s all.” they climbed on me, they all poked me. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes,” and she burst into tears.”

“They raped my daughter in front of me,” the poor mother interjected, “they can still come and rape my girl again.” Everyone was horrified by this again, and a bitter sob swept from corner to corner of the basement where the owners brought me. “Stay.” here,” the girl suddenly rushed to me, “you will sleep with me.” You can do whatever you want with me, but only you!” Gelfand writes in his diary.

5. “In no way can one say that the major is raping me,” she writes. “Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent, I’m sure that’s true. But also I like the major, and the less he wants to get from me as a man, the more I like him as a person."

Many of her neighbors made similar deals with the victors of defeated Berlin.

6. “Suddenly, tanks appeared on our street, the bodies of Russian and German soldiers were lying everywhere,” she recalls. “I remember the terrifying, drawn-out sound of falling Russian bombs. We called them Stalinorgels (“Stalin’s organs”).”

One day, during a break between bombings, Ingeborg crawled out of the basement and ran upstairs to get a rope, which she used as a wick for a lamp.

“Suddenly I saw two Russians pointing guns at me,” she says. “One of them forced me to take off my clothes and raped me. Then they switched places and the other one raped me. I thought I was going to die, that they were going to kill me.”

The Red Army soldiers, mostly poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance of sexual matters and a rude attitude towards women

“The soldiers of the Red Army do not believe in “individual connections” with German women,” wrote playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary, which he kept during the war in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve at once - they rape them collectively.”

The long columns of Soviet troops that entered East Prussia in January 1945 were an unusual mixture of modern and medieval: tank crews in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses with loot tied to their saddles, Dodges and Studebakers received under Lend-Lease, followed by a second echelon consisting of carts. The variety of weapons was fully consistent with the variety of characters of the soldiers themselves, among whom were outright bandits, drunkards and rapists, as well as idealistic communists and representatives of the intelligentsia who were shocked by the behavior of their comrades.

In Moscow, Beria and Stalin were well aware of what was happening from detailed reports, one of which reported: “many Germans believe that all German women remaining in East Prussia were raped by Red Army soldiers.”

Numerous examples of gang rapes of “both minors and old women” were given.

Marshall Rokossovsky issued order #006 with the goal of channeling “the feeling of hatred towards the enemy onto the battlefield.” It didn't lead to anything. There were several arbitrary attempts to restore order. The commander of one of the rifle regiments allegedly “personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up his soldiers in front of a German woman who had been knocked to the ground.” But in most cases, either the officers themselves participated in the outrages or the lack of discipline among drunken soldiers armed with machine guns made it impossible to restore order.

Calls for revenge for the Fatherland, which was attacked by the Wehrmacht, were understood as permission to show cruelty. Even young women, soldiers and medical workers, did not oppose it. A 21-year-old girl from the reconnaissance detachment Agranenko said: “Our soldiers behave with the Germans, especially with German women, absolutely correctly.” Some people found this interesting. Thus, some German women recall that Soviet women watched them being raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalia Hesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: “Russian soldiers raped all German women aged from 8 to 80. It was an army of rapists.”

Booze, including dangerous chemicals stolen from laboratories, played a significant role in this violence. It seems that Soviet soldiers could attack a woman only after getting drunk for courage. But at the same time, they too often got drunk to such a state that they could not complete sexual intercourse and used bottles - some of the victims were mutilated in this way.

The topic of mass atrocities by the Red Army in Germany was taboo for so long in Russia that even now veterans deny that they took place. Only a few spoke about it openly, but without any regrets. The commander of a tank unit recalled: “They all lifted their skirts and lay down on the bed.” He even boasted that “two million of our children were born in Germany.”

The ability of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either satisfied or agreed that this was a fair price to pay for the Germans' actions in Russia is astonishing. A Soviet major told an English journalist at the time: “Our comrades were so hungry for female affection that they often raped sixty-, seventy- and even eighty-year-olds, to their outright surprise, not to say pleasure.”

One can only outline the psychological contradictions. When the raped women of Königsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, the Red Army soldiers considered themselves insulted. They answered: “Russian soldiers don’t shoot women. Only the Germans do that.” The Red Army convinced itself that, since it had taken on the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers had every right to behave as they pleased.

A sense of superiority and humiliation characterized the behavior of most soldiers towards the women of East Prussia. The victims not only paid for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but also symbolized an atavistic object of aggression - as old as the war itself. As historian and feminist Susan Brownmiller has noted, rape, as a conqueror's right, is directed "against the women of the enemy" to emphasize victory. True, after the initial rampage of January 1945, sadism manifested itself less and less. When the Red Army reached Berlin 3 months later, the soldiers were already viewing the German women through the prism of the usual “right of the victors.” The feeling of superiority certainly remained, but it was perhaps an indirect consequence of the humiliations that the soldiers themselves suffered from their commanders and the Soviet leadership as a whole.

Several other factors also played a role. Sexual freedom was widely discussed in the 1920s within the Communist Party, but in the next decade Stalin made sure that Soviet society became virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with the puritanical views of Soviet people - the fact is that love and sex did not fit into the concept of “deindividualization” of the individual. Natural desires had to be suppressed. Freud was banned, divorce and adultery were not approved by the Communist Party. Homosexuality became a criminal offense. The new doctrine completely prohibited sex education. In art, the depiction of a woman’s breasts, even covered by clothing, was considered the height of eroticism: it had to be covered by work overalls. The regime demanded that any expression of passion be sublimated into love for the party and for Comrade Stalin personally.

The Red Army men, mostly poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance of sexual matters and a rude attitude towards women. Thus, the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its citizens resulted in what one Russian writer called "barracks erotica," which was significantly more primitive and cruel than even the hardest pornography. All this was mixed with the influence of modern propaganda, which deprives man of his essence, and atavistic primitive impulses, indicated by fear and suffering.

Writer Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent for the advancing Red Army, soon discovered that Germans were not the only victims of rape. Among them were Polish women, as well as young Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians who found themselves in Germany as a displaced labor force. He noted: “Liberated Soviet women often complain that our soldiers rape them. One girl told me in tears: “He was an old man, older than my father.”

The rape of Soviet women nullifies attempts to explain the behavior of the Red Army as revenge for German atrocities on the territory of the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1945, the Komsomol Central Committee notified Malenkov about a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov reported: “On the night of February 24, a group of 35 soldiers and their battalion commander entered a women’s dormitory in the village of Grütenberg and raped everyone.”

In Berlin, despite Goebbels's propaganda, many women were simply not prepared for the horrors of Russian revenge. Many tried to convince themselves that, although the danger must be great in the countryside, mass rapes could not take place in the city in full view of everyone.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Cunegonde, the abbess of a convent that housed an orphanage and a maternity hospital. The officers and soldiers behaved impeccably. They even warned that reinforcements were following them. Their prediction came true: nuns, girls, old women, pregnant women and those who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Within a few days, the custom arose among the soldiers to select their victims by shining torches in their faces. The very process of choice, instead of indiscriminate violence, indicates a certain change. By this time, Soviet soldiers began to view German women not as responsible for Wehrmacht crimes, but as spoils of war.

Rape is often defined as violence that has little to do with sexual desire itself. But this is a definition from the point of view of the victims. To understand the crime, you need to see it from the point of view of the aggressor, especially in the later stages, when “simple” rape has replaced the boundless revelry of January and February.

Many women were forced to "give themselves" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, tried to hide in a closet but was pulled out by a young soldier from Central Asia. He was so excited by the opportunity to make love to a beautiful young blonde that he came prematurely. Magda tried to explain to him that she agreed to become his girlfriend if he protected her from other Russian soldiers, but he told his comrades about her, and one soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, Magda's Jewish friend, was also raped. When the Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and that she was being persecuted, they received the answer: “Frau ist Frau” ( A woman is a woman - approx. lane).

Soon the women learned to hide during the evening "hunting hours". Young daughters were hidden in attics for several days. Mothers went out for water only in the early morning, so as not to get caught by Soviet soldiers sleeping off after drinking. Sometimes the greatest danger came from neighbors who revealed the places where the girls were hiding, thus trying to save their own daughters. Old Berliners still remember the screams at night. It was impossible not to hear them, since all the windows were broken.

According to data from two city hospitals, 95,000-130,000 women were victims of rape. One doctor estimated that out of 100,000 people raped, about 10,000 later died, mostly by suicide. The mortality rate among the 1.4 million raped people in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia was even higher. Although at least 2 million German women were raped, a significant proportion, if not most, were victims of gang rape.

If anyone tried to protect a woman from a Soviet rapist, it was either a father trying to protect his daughter, or a son trying to protect his mother. “13-year-old Dieter Sahl,” neighbors wrote in a letter shortly after the event, “threw his fists at the Russian who was raping his mother right in front of him. All he achieved was that he was shot.”

After the second stage, when women offered themselves to one soldier to protect themselves from the rest, came the next stage - post-war hunger - as Susan Brownmiller noted, "the thin line separating war rape from war prostitution." Ursula von Kardorf notes that shortly after the surrender of Berlin, the city was filled with women trading themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film director who has studied this issue in depth, writes of "a mixture of direct violence, blackmail, calculation and real affection."

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation between Red Army officers and German “occupation wives.” Soviet officials became furious when several Soviet officers deserted the army when it was time to return home to stay with their German mistresses.

Even if the feminist definition of rape as solely an act of violence seems simplistic, there is no excuse for male complacency. The events of 1945 clearly show us how thin the veneer of civilization can be if there is no fear of retaliation. They also remind us that there is a dark side to male sexuality that we prefer not to acknowledge.

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(The Daily Telegraph, UK)

(The Daily Telegraph, UK)

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