"Can't you understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?" said Joseph Stalin when Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas complained about the rapes the Red Army committed in his country.
The Red Army, from 1943 slowly pushing the Wehrmacht back west, was not the same force that two years before had been quickly retreating east. Only a fraction of the original servicemen were still in the ranks; at least a million had perished on the battlefield, three had been or would be starved in German POW camps, more got wounded. The Soviet command had learned to use some tactics but still operated on the 1941 principle of throwing masses of grunts at the enemy. Yet, these masses were hard to control and these grunts wanted revenge.
And spoils of war. To millions of Red Army servicemen such spoils of war were women, especially the foreign ones. Polish, Czech, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanians females were seen as fair game, even though they were fellow victims of the Third Reich. Romanians, Hungarians and Slovaks even more so because they'd been Axis. The German and Austrian ones would be shown absolutely no mercy. In Yugoslavia, with its friendly Tito and communist National Liberation Army, only between 2,420 and 24,380 women were raped.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, numbers of victims ran into tens of thousands. In Czechoslovakia, between 10,000 and 20,000; in Poland, up to 100,000, especially in regions annexed by the Third Reich; in Romania, 335,200 in o n e m o n t h, from mid-September to mid-October 1944, and half a milion altogether; for Hungary it was worse, because the highest estimates say 800,000. Austrian women had it still worse than that: 70,000 to 100,000 in Vienna alone; in Germany it was 90,000 to 130,000 for Berlin, and 2 million in all Soviet-occupied regions.
Except this "army of rapists," as Natalya Gesse, a Soviet war correspondent, called it, attacked not only women but little girls as well ("eight to eighty"), and not only German females became victims in Germany. The army of rapists also brutalized Polish, Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women, who'd for years been suffering as slave laborers of the Third Reich: thousands of them, liberated from the camps, farms and factories, got violated either immediately, by the liberators, or on their way home, by rear echelon troops.
In addition to millions of rape victims, thousands of them murdered, sheer terror pushed more thousands to take their own lives. They did it either in the suicide wave sweeping across eastern Germany before the Red Army came – like whole families drowning themselves in the town of Demmin – or afterwards, to avoid more torment – like these five discovered at 5 Ziganstrasse in Striegau: "In the attic, next to one another are hanged two elderly women, one young woman, a girl about 20 years old and a girl, 10 -11 years, with traces of rape."
***
Yevgeny Khaldei, the author of the iconic photograph of Red Army servicemen raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, had some editing to do before it got published: one of the soldiers was wearing wristwatches on b o t h wrists.
When in March 1945 American, British and Canadian forces were crossing the Rhine in "Operation Plunder," the Red Army had been running its own operation plunder for over a year, from the moment it crossed the pre-war USSR borders. The Soviets were operating on a shoestring budget, so in addition to appropriating the spoils of war from the enemy, an average frontovnik used every opportunity to cash in the gratitude of the liberated peoples. Except these peoples remembered the 1939-1940 liberations, knew they didn't mean freedom, and felt no kind of profound gratitude.
On the rank and file level, it intesified in January 1945, just after Stalin allowed the troops to send home monthly parcels (five to fifteen kilograms, depending on rank) – which was nothing more than a state invitation to loot. The servicemen, suddenly exposed to alien material culture and luxury goods never owned before, plundered so many wristwatches, cameras, silk dresses and radios that separate rooms at train stations had to be dedicated to storing mountains of heavy boxes before the postal service could sort and send them on their way.
The state allowed the foot soldiers to do what it had been doing itself; back in March 1942, following the Moscow counter-offensive, it had set up so-called Trophy Commands, and after Stalingrad, a dedicated Trophy Committee. While these were perfectly reasonable efforts to collect and reuse enemy ordnance, the April 1944 order, specifying the responsibilities of trophy teams in the field, listed securing industrial machinery. Soon, the "liberated" territories, and then Axis countries saw plunder comparable only with looting by the Axis.
It accelerated with the birth of Trophy Brigades in early 1945; this 100,000-man army with a fleet of trucks and specializations grabbed everything of value, from machinery to pianos. Poland lost up to 1,000 factories, Hungary 90 per cent of its metalworking and engineering industries, Romania half of its railway stock, and Czechoslovakia 60 biggest enterprises. As soon as 2.6 million works of art and 6 million books from Germany rolled east, following the loot from Polish museums, 5,000 kilometers of tracks in Poland were dismantled and taken as well.
The loot, after a while called reparations, got stolen again in the USSR – like the 27,000 Polish and German cows, appropriated by 2,000 Belarussian party officials in 1945, or 3,000 meters of fabric, 1,470 pieces of dishware, 315 antique objects, 90 silver items, 41 carpets, 15 paintings, 359 pieces of feminine lingerie, 150 pairs of shoes, 60 dresses, 17 suits, 22 overcoats and furs, 323 pairs of stockings, 6 radios and 4 accordions, all found in the Moscow apartment of an army officer employed in the administration of the Soviet occupation zone.
***
It's true that the Soviets had suffered murder, rape and plunder by the German army – but responded in kind with random violence, political killing, rape and looting, extending that response to completely innocent nations.
It's true that on European fronts of WWII, German atrocities were unequalled – but if such a comparison is at all possible, the Soviet ones came close second.
***
source: Institute of National Remembrance (Poland)
Pictured, Soviet servicemen harassing a woman in Leipzig, 1945.
The Red Army, from 1943 slowly pushing the Wehrmacht back west, was not the same force that two years before had been quickly retreating east. Only a fraction of the original servicemen were still in the ranks; at least a million had perished on the battlefield, three had been or would be starved in German POW camps, more got wounded. The Soviet command had learned to use some tactics but still operated on the 1941 principle of throwing masses of grunts at the enemy. Yet, these masses were hard to control and these grunts wanted revenge.
And spoils of war. To millions of Red Army servicemen such spoils of war were women, especially the foreign ones. Polish, Czech, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanians females were seen as fair game, even though they were fellow victims of the Third Reich. Romanians, Hungarians and Slovaks even more so because they'd been Axis. The German and Austrian ones would be shown absolutely no mercy. In Yugoslavia, with its friendly Tito and communist National Liberation Army, only between 2,420 and 24,380 women were raped.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, numbers of victims ran into tens of thousands. In Czechoslovakia, between 10,000 and 20,000; in Poland, up to 100,000, especially in regions annexed by the Third Reich; in Romania, 335,200 in o n e m o n t h, from mid-September to mid-October 1944, and half a milion altogether; for Hungary it was worse, because the highest estimates say 800,000. Austrian women had it still worse than that: 70,000 to 100,000 in Vienna alone; in Germany it was 90,000 to 130,000 for Berlin, and 2 million in all Soviet-occupied regions.
Except this "army of rapists," as Natalya Gesse, a Soviet war correspondent, called it, attacked not only women but little girls as well ("eight to eighty"), and not only German females became victims in Germany. The army of rapists also brutalized Polish, Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women, who'd for years been suffering as slave laborers of the Third Reich: thousands of them, liberated from the camps, farms and factories, got violated either immediately, by the liberators, or on their way home, by rear echelon troops.
In addition to millions of rape victims, thousands of them murdered, sheer terror pushed more thousands to take their own lives. They did it either in the suicide wave sweeping across eastern Germany before the Red Army came – like whole families drowning themselves in the town of Demmin – or afterwards, to avoid more torment – like these five discovered at 5 Ziganstrasse in Striegau: "In the attic, next to one another are hanged two elderly women, one young woman, a girl about 20 years old and a girl, 10 -11 years, with traces of rape."
***
Yevgeny Khaldei, the author of the iconic photograph of Red Army servicemen raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, had some editing to do before it got published: one of the soldiers was wearing wristwatches on b o t h wrists.
When in March 1945 American, British and Canadian forces were crossing the Rhine in "Operation Plunder," the Red Army had been running its own operation plunder for over a year, from the moment it crossed the pre-war USSR borders. The Soviets were operating on a shoestring budget, so in addition to appropriating the spoils of war from the enemy, an average frontovnik used every opportunity to cash in the gratitude of the liberated peoples. Except these peoples remembered the 1939-1940 liberations, knew they didn't mean freedom, and felt no kind of profound gratitude.
On the rank and file level, it intesified in January 1945, just after Stalin allowed the troops to send home monthly parcels (five to fifteen kilograms, depending on rank) – which was nothing more than a state invitation to loot. The servicemen, suddenly exposed to alien material culture and luxury goods never owned before, plundered so many wristwatches, cameras, silk dresses and radios that separate rooms at train stations had to be dedicated to storing mountains of heavy boxes before the postal service could sort and send them on their way.
The state allowed the foot soldiers to do what it had been doing itself; back in March 1942, following the Moscow counter-offensive, it had set up so-called Trophy Commands, and after Stalingrad, a dedicated Trophy Committee. While these were perfectly reasonable efforts to collect and reuse enemy ordnance, the April 1944 order, specifying the responsibilities of trophy teams in the field, listed securing industrial machinery. Soon, the "liberated" territories, and then Axis countries saw plunder comparable only with looting by the Axis.
It accelerated with the birth of Trophy Brigades in early 1945; this 100,000-man army with a fleet of trucks and specializations grabbed everything of value, from machinery to pianos. Poland lost up to 1,000 factories, Hungary 90 per cent of its metalworking and engineering industries, Romania half of its railway stock, and Czechoslovakia 60 biggest enterprises. As soon as 2.6 million works of art and 6 million books from Germany rolled east, following the loot from Polish museums, 5,000 kilometers of tracks in Poland were dismantled and taken as well.
The loot, after a while called reparations, got stolen again in the USSR – like the 27,000 Polish and German cows, appropriated by 2,000 Belarussian party officials in 1945, or 3,000 meters of fabric, 1,470 pieces of dishware, 315 antique objects, 90 silver items, 41 carpets, 15 paintings, 359 pieces of feminine lingerie, 150 pairs of shoes, 60 dresses, 17 suits, 22 overcoats and furs, 323 pairs of stockings, 6 radios and 4 accordions, all found in the Moscow apartment of an army officer employed in the administration of the Soviet occupation zone.
***
It's true that the Soviets had suffered murder, rape and plunder by the German army – but responded in kind with random violence, political killing, rape and looting, extending that response to completely innocent nations.
It's true that on European fronts of WWII, German atrocities were unequalled – but if such a comparison is at all possible, the Soviet ones came close second.
***
source: Institute of National Remembrance (Poland)
Pictured, Soviet servicemen harassing a woman in Leipzig, 1945.
