By mid-May, 1945, the Allied conquerors had laid claim to virtually all of what was once the Third Reich—the Americans, British and French in the west, the Soviets in the east. Behind the Red Army lines, the final pockets of resistance also surrendered.
At the Courland enclave on the Baltic, over two hundred thousand German soldiers and Latvian volunteers laid down their arms, then joined the defenders of Berlin on the long, one-way march to Siberia. After seventy days of desperate, heroic struggle, the besieged garrison of Breslau also lowered its flag and these men too began their Siberian death march. And also after surrender, the already haggard females of Breslau began pondering “whether life had not been sweeter during the worst days of the siege.” Remembered one girl:
Rape began almost immediately and there was a viciousness in the acts as if we women were being punished for Breslau having resisted for so long… Let me say that I was young, pretty, plump and fairly inexperienced. A succession of Ivans gave me over the next week or two a lifetime of experience. Luckily very few of their rapes lasted more than a minute. With many it was just a matter of seconds before they collapsed gasping. What kept me sane was that almost from the very first one I felt only a contempt for these bullying and smelly peasants who could not act gently towards a woman, and who had about as much sexual technique as a rabbit.
“For four years [Propaganda Minister, Joseph] Goebbels kept telling us that the Russians were rapists, that they would violate, murder, rob and pillage us,” explained one woman. “Such propaganda did not shock us and we looked forward to being liberated by the Allies… We could not bear it when Goebbels turned out to be right.”
“Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 2 and 60. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth…,” a stunned American reporter revealed. “Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”
Although frantic females tried numerous stratagems to stop the attacks, nothing they did seemed to slow, much less halt, the Soviet sexual assaults-not age, not looks, not illness, nothing.
“A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me,” a mother of two small children reminisced. “I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least.” When this same woman later went with her sister to see a Soviet military physician, far from helping the females, the doctor and another officer raped them both. The young mother herself was on her menstrual cycle; her sister was in the late stages of pregnancy.
Far from being sanctuaries, houses of worship were some of the first stops for the Red Army. In addition to the mass rape of females who sought shelter in churches and cathedrals, nuns likewise suffered the same. In one Silesian city alone, Soviet soldiers brutally raped nearly two hundred Catholic sisters leaving sixty-six pregnant nuns in their wake.
Although German women were naturally their favorite targets, virtually any female in the path of the communist army would do. Thousands of women of all nationalities held in German and Polish labor camps were not merely liberated when the Soviets arrived.
“I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,” admitted one Russian female. “I waited for my liberation, but now our soldiers treat us far worse than the Germans did. They do terrible things to us.”
At devastated Dresden, Chemnitz and other cities in eastern Germany that now for the first time experienced Soviet occupation, the situation was the same. Encouraged by the Jewish propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet soldiers were not merely encouraged to rape and kill all Germans they encountered, they were all but ordered to do it; it was the Red soldier’s “patriotic duty,” insisted Stalin’s murderous mouthpiece.
“Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” demanded Ehrenburg. “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn… Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.”
Although front-line troops-Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians committed their share of savage atrocities, it was the rear echelon—Mongolians, and other Asiatics—that were responsible for perhaps not just the greatest number of crimes but also the greatest degree of crimes. To most Germans, however, all were known simply as “Russians,” or “Ivans.”
“There were no limits to the bestiality and licentiousness of these troops…,” remembered a pastor from Milzig. “Girls and women were routed out of their hiding-places, out of the ditches and thickets where they had sought shelter from the Russian soldiers, and were beaten and raped. Older women who refused to tell the Russians where the younger ones had hidden were likewise beaten and raped.”
When groups of fleeing refugees were overtaken by the Soviets the rapes and murders took on a massive, mechanical quality.
Typically, all captured females—old, young, sick, pregnant, mothers and their children included—were forced to lie by the sides of roads while the laughing Soviet soldiers lined up, then lowered their trousers. One after another, the attacks continued. Generally, as more passing troops arrived, the lines got longer, not shorter. Those females who lost consciousness from blood loss were dragged to the side or rolled into a ditch. Any mother who tried to save her daughter was automatically shot. Even those soldiers who would have otherwise avoided such sadistic crimes were compelled, “without exception,” to join in by “grinning officers” who stood at the head of each line.
Like the case above, whenever possible commissars made certain that German men—fathers, husbands, priests, soldiers—were forced to watch the rape of German women be it inside homes, schools, churches, in parks, on sidewalks, or by the roadsides.
With machine guns trained on them, one large group of surrendering German soldiers, including the famous air ace, Erich Hartmann, were forced to look on as a mob of drunken Soviets threw captured women and girls to the ground, tore off their clothes, then, amid howls and laughter, began their violent sexual attacks.
A young German woman, mother of a twelve-year-old girl, knelt at the feet of one Soviet and begged that he and the others take her, not the child. Ignoring her tearful pleas the man strode away, a mocking grin on his face. “Damned fascist pig!” yelled a soldier nearby as he kicked the mother in the face then shot and killed her. With that the killer dragged the dead woman’s daughter behind a nearby tank. He was joined by others and for half an hour only the screams of the little girl and laughter of the men was heard. Then, their hate and lust sated , the rapists finally withdrew. Completely naked and unable to stand, the bloodied child crawled slowly back to her dead mother. An hour later the sobbing little girl at last stopped crying and joined her mother in death.
At the same time as the above was transpiring, eight- and nine year-old children were also being raped and sodomized repeatedly by the Soviets. Mothers who tried to protect their daughters were beaten unconscious and dragged to the side where they themselves were savagely raped and killed.
“Kill! Kill!” urged the blood-thirsty propagandist , Ilya Ehrenburg. “In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil!… Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women… Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”
“Fear is always present,” young Regina Shelton admitted. “It flares into panic at tales of atrocities—mutilated nude bodies tossed by the wayside—a woman nailed spread-eagle to a cart and gang-raped while bleeding to death from her wounds-horrible diseases spread to their victims by sex-drunken Mongolians.” Those frustrated rapists too drunk to physically conclude their act instead used the bottle they were drinking from to symbolically continue the savagery with even more hideous damage done to the victim.
Certainly, not every soldier in the Soviet army was a drunken, sadistic monster. Some officers protected helpless German victims. Other upright soldiers placed their own lives on the line to defend the defenseless. A few, like the poet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were haunted for the rest of their lives by the things they had seen… and haunted by the things they had perhaps even done:
Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse… The mother begs, “Soldier, kill me!”
No, not all Soviet soldiers were child-killing rapists… but enough were. Ilya Ehrenburg:
Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.
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De bellis Parisiacis or ‘Nothing that would have been worthy of imperial majesty’
