What did Soviet soldiers do with Nazi rapists. The crimes of Soviet soldiers on the territory of Germany, or how the red army differed from the Wehrmacht

3. The myth of "raped Germany"

Per last years Victory Day has acquired another, alas, not a very beautiful tradition: the closer the holiday, the more often all kinds of “researchers” begin to broadcast the myth of “poor raped Germany”.

At the same time, the number of German girls who allegedly suffered from the sexual harassment of the Red Army is only growing over the years. But who needs the Russian soldier to remain in the people's memory not as a liberator and defender, but as a rapist and robber? We talked about this with the leading researcher of the Institute Russian history RAS, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Elena Senyavskaya.

"The Nazis were intimidated into committing suicide"

- Elena Spartakovna, is this all a consequence of perestroika? Those years gave rise to a lot of nonsense ...

Not certainly in that way. This vile story began much earlier, even with Goebbels' propaganda, when it was announced to the population that the Red Army was brutally raping all German women between the ages of 8 and 80. And the people were really intimidated to the limit, to the point that the activists of the Nazi party killed first their families, and then themselves.

- Why was such an image needed?

Firstly, in order to increase the resistance of the advancing Red Army, and secondly, so that the population would leave together with their retreating units, so that they would not help the Soviet troops.

The Goebbels case in the same 1945 was continued by the allies, then the first publications appeared, where they tried to present the Red Army as an army of marauders and rapists, while completely silent about the outrages that were happening in the western zone of occupation. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the topic has been exaggerated, but not as aggressively and massively as it has begun in the past twenty years. The numbers "raped" at first were modest: from 20 thousand to 150 thousand throughout Germany. But in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a book by two feminists, Helke Zander and Barbara Jor, "Liberators and Liberated", was published in Germany, where the figure of 2 million was first displayed. Moreover, it was derived on the basis of a completely incorrect premise: the standard ones were taken in one Berlin hospital for 1945-1946, where about 500 children were born a year, and about 15-20 people in the column “father’s nationality” indicated “ Russian". Moreover, in two or three such cases, it was indicated “raped”. What are these "explorers" doing? They considered that in all cases when the father was Russian, there was rape. Then the Goebbels form "from 8 to 80" was taken and simply multiplied. However, this figure has become widespread since 2002, with the publication of the book "The Fall of Berlin" by Anthony Beevor, which was also published here in 2004. And the mythical "2 million", on the eve of the Victory anniversary, went for a walk in the liberal media ...

Germans are tired of repenting

You can understand those who whipped up this topic during the Cold War. But then the Berlin Wall collapsed, and according to Gorbachev, “peace and friendship” was established ...

Geopolitical realities have changed. On the other side, attempts were made to revise the results of World War II, plus - the desire to withdraw the USSR (and Russia, as its successor) from among the winners, and here all means are good. This was one of the steps that led to the fact that in a number of decisions of European organizations, including the European Parliament, Stalinism and Nazism were equated, when the aggressor and her victim were put on the same level, replacing the theme of guilt, responsibility, and forcing us to repent for what was not.

It turns out that these "researchers" did not write essays by themselves, but received a certain order from those who built this new geopolitics? ..

Naturally. The second reason that the West liked the myth is in the psychology of the German people, who are tired of feeling guilty, where the last generations already declare: why should we repent for the guilt of our ancestors? A wave of sentiment is now rising among them, which, while shaping their national identity, is trying to affirm the idea that their ancestors are not so guilty, that there was no collective responsibility of the Germans ... This is where the geopolitical order merges with the sentiments of the masses.

Set aside revenge!

- And what actually happened to the rape?

We cannot say that there were no such phenomena at all. There were, but not on the scale that they lie to us today. The documents considered such facts as "emergencies and immoral phenomena." The very leadership of the country and the command believed that not only did it form a negative image of the Red Army, it also undermined discipline. And they fought against this by all means, from party political work, explanations, ending with the sentences of the tribunals, right up to the execution of marauders and rapists.

- Are there statistics?

Unfortunately, not all documents have been declassified yet. But those that exist allow us to calculate the scale of the phenomenon. Here is the report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front on unlawful actions against the civilian population for the period from April 22 to May 5, 1945. In seven armies of the front, for 908.5 thousand people, 124 crimes were recorded, of which 72 were rapes. Only 72 cases per 908.5 thousand ...

- Your opponents write that the wave of rapes happened before the capture of Berlin ...

On April 20, directives appeared to change the attitude towards the German civilian population and prisoners of war. So our opponents insist that the order was late, while the entire period of winter and the beginning of spring of the 45th Red Army was outraged with impunity. It is not true. Because in addition to this order and subsequent directives, there were orders at the level of fronts, armies, separate parts, which left before the entry of the Red Army on the territory of other states. Brochures were distributed, which told about the history of this or that country, its culture, local traditions. In January 1945, there were orders at the level of Konev, Rokossovsky, Zhukov, which were supposed to direct the feeling of revenge in the right direction and prevent negative phenomena.

And how did the soldiers perceive it? After all, many have lost loved ones, at home, they brought up this feeling of revenge, remember Ilya Ehrenburg with his "Kill the German!"

Naturally, many were not satisfied with those explanations about the new feeling of revenge. The political reports record conversations between the fighters, they are outraged by the orders: “first they said one thing, now another, and why should we feel sorry for these Germans if they behaved like this on our territory” ... But on the one hand, there are tough disciplinary measures, on the other, Russian Love for children (even the Germans admitted that our soldiers treated German children very well, fed them not only within the framework of a centralized food supply, but from their own rations, sometimes giving everything they had), did not allow large-scale acts of revenge to happen. And the main idea, which was emphasized at all levels - in our actions "we should not be like the Germans."

And this is for contrast. Here they are, the sinister Ivano-Mongols. Right now, they will rush to kill-rape, as I say.

Historian Yuri Zhukov argued that rape and other crimes were for the most part committed not by Red Army fighters, but by former Red Army soldiers and civilians who had just been freed from concentration camps, who were once driven to Germany ...

Yes, they were waiting to be sent home, they were not under the control of the command, there was generally a rather motley crowd of repatriates. They got lost in gangs and began to rob the locals, to take revenge for the humiliation they had to endure. And since this took place in the zone of responsibility of the Soviet troops, all this was shifted to our servicemen. There is other evidence: as the allies freed from the camps, they were engaged in robberies in Berlin, stuffing junk cars, and on the way out of the city ours already demanded that everything be returned to its place. Another point: in the same reports of military prosecutors, it is often indicated that slanderous cases occur when the alleged rapes were not confirmed, while the commanders managed to punish the innocent. A very interesting diary was left by the Australian correspondent Osmar White, who accompanied the American army and visited all the zones of occupation. He did not feel much sympathy for us, but argued that the Red Army, unlike the allies, was very disciplined, that the Soviet administration was very effective not only in combating crime, but also in the field of restoring cities, and providing the population with everything necessary for life. ... And that all the horrors that are told about our soldiers are, on the one hand, rumors and gossip, on the other, these crimes are mostly committed by repatriates.

Germans fled from Anglo-Americans to Russians

- And how did the women from those territories treat our soldiers in general?

Oh, you can write a whole dissertation on this topic. First, there is a colossal difference in mentality. Nonsense are all these stories that the soldiers, especially from the countryside, were ragged and lascivious by definition. On the contrary - for the most part they were brought up in patriarchal traditions, and for them it was a real savagery that the Hungarians and Austrians in the order of things were numerous intimate relationship before marriage. Who she is in the understanding of the Russian soldier, I will not say, so a certain disgust for such women flowed from here. The commanders were also shocked: there were a lot of reports in which it was reported that as soon as the unit had occupied a certain settlement, detachments of women led by "mothers" came to them. Who immediately offered their famous services. And in all cases, the reaction of our officers was angry and abusive. Plus, it was often revealed that the Nazis deliberately left a certain number of women infected with venous diseases. To incapacitate soldiers. Is this also "raped Germany"?

In Romania and Hungary, ours went to brothels. But, as a rule, not very many, out of curiosity, and even then they had unpleasant sensations, a feeling of disgust and misunderstanding. The very idea of ​​buying another person did not fit into the head of a Soviet person.

Do not forget that there was such a very widespread phenomenon as military prostitution. The diaries of German women have survived, where they philosophically argue that prostitution is a completely respectable profession. This was very common, especially in the Western zone of occupation, where the Germans, by the way, were very poorly supplied with food (in contrast to the Soviet zone, where children under 8 years old were even given milk). The German's daily ration was less than the American breakfast. Naturally, women were forced to hunt in a known way... At the same time, there were more than enough rapes. And if the Germans are to make claims for violence, then not to us, but to the allies, from whom the Germans fled en masse in horror to the Soviet occupation zone.

Poster "Polish Erotic Fantasies"

- And how, by the way, did the American command react to the crimes of subordinates?

Often they preferred not to pay attention. In the diaries of the same Osmar White it is said that crimes against German women were massive, that the American command did not suppress these phenomena in any way, and if any repression followed, it was only against the black rapists.

- Racism?

Yes. In the minds of American commanders, the negroes dared to raise their hand to white woman, and having tasted this thing, they could have brought this habit to American soil. The French troops also differed. In the American Senate after the war, it was told about the behavior of the native French formations, the Senegalese, in Stuttgart. The figures of those raped within one or two days were given: about three thousand in the Stuttgart subway alone. Until now, the Italians are making claims to the Anglo-American military for the Morroconate - the atrocities of the Moroccans that unfolded in Italy. These guys raped not only women, but also young men ...

Prostitution in Germany during WWII

“On the very first day in the village of Basmanovo, Smolensk Region, the fascist monsters drove into the fields more than 200 schoolchildren and schoolgirls who had come to the village to harvest, surrounded them and shot them. They took the schoolgirls to their rear "for gentlemen officers." , at the same time, they saw the bloody corpses of their boys and, not having time to comprehend, refusing to believe what had happened, they ended up in a hell created by adults.

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

On December 9, 1941, the corpse of a Finnish officer was found in Krasnaya Polyana. A collection of 37 female buttons was found in a pocket, an account of rape. And in Krasnaya Polyana he raped Margarita K. and also tore off a button from her blouse. "

The killed soldiers often found "trophies" in the form of buttons, stockings, curls of women's hair. They found photographs of scenes of violence, letters and diaries in which they described their "exploits".

“In their letters, the Nazis share their adventures with cynical frankness and boasting. Corporal Felix Kapdels sends a letter to his friend: “Having rummaged in the chests and organized a good supper, we began to have fun. The girl was caught angry, but we organized her too. It doesn't matter that the whole department ... "

Corporal Georg Pfaler does not hesitate to write 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 cupboards have been dug, how many young ladies have been ruined ... Our life is now merry, not like in the trenches ... "

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

With the prisoners who did not manage to get rid of such incriminating documents, the conversation was short: they took them aside and - a bullet in the back of the head.

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

The paramedics who fell into their hands were raped without exception.

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

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

“In Krasnaya Polyana, the wounded soldiers and the wounded nurse were not given 4 days of water and 7 days of food, and then they gave them salt water. The nurse began to agonize. The dying girl was raped by the Nazis in front of the wounded Red Army men. "

The perverse logic of war requires the rapist to exercise FULL power. This means that humiliation of the victim alone is not enough. And then unthinkable mockery is committed over the victim, and in conclusion, her life is taken away, as a manifestation of the SUPERIOR power. Otherwise, what good, she will think that she gave you pleasure! And you can look weak in her eyes, since you did not control your sexual desire. Hence the sadistic treatment and murder.

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

“In the city of Lvov, 32 female workers of a Lviv 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. The old priest V.L. Pomaznev, who, with a cross in his hands, tried to prevent violence against girls, the Nazis beat him, 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 strewn with the corpses of women, old people, and children. The surviving villagers told the Red Army soldiers that the Nazis drove all the girls into the hospital building and raped them. Then they locked the doors and set the building on fire. "

"In the Begoml region, 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 pillars, the Germans wildly outraged them, and then killed them. "

“In the village of Milyutino, the Germans arrested 24 collective farmers and took them to a neighboring village. Among those arrested was thirteen-year-old Anastasia Davydova. Having thrown the peasants into a dark barn, the Nazis began to torture them, demanding information about the partisans. All were silent. Then the Germans took the girl out of the barn and asked in which direction the collective farm cattle were driven. The young patriot refused to answer. Fascist scoundrels the girl was raped and then shot. "

“The Germans have rushed to us! Their officers dragged two 16-year-old girls to the cemetery and abused them. Then the soldiers were ordered to hang them in the trees. The soldiers obeyed the order and hung them upside down. In the same place, the soldiers outraged 9 elderly women. " (Collective farmer Petrova from the collective farm "Plowman".)

“We were in the village of Bolshoye Pankratovo. It was 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, threatened that he would shoot all the inhabitants. Then we came to the house at the hospital. The doctor and the girl were there. He told the girl: “Follow me to the commandant's office, I have to check your documents.” I saw her hiding her passport on her chest. He took her into the garden near the hospital and raped her. Then the girl threw herself into the field, she screamed, it was clear that she had lost her mind. He caught up with her and soon showed me a passport in blood ... "

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

Historical literature has repeatedly noted that “during the investigation of war crimes, many documents and evidence were found about the rape of young pregnant women, who then had their throats cut and their breasts pierced with bayonets. Obviously, the hatred of the female breast is in the blood of the Germans. "

I will cite several such documents and testimonies.

“In the village of Semyonovskoye, Kalinin Region, the Germans raped 25-year-old Olga Tikhonova, the wife of a Red Army soldier, 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 out.

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

(For all my rich imagination, I cannot imagine what an inhuman scream accompanying the torment of women should have stood over this Belarusian place, over this forest. It seems that you hear this even in the distance, and you can't stand it, you plug your ears with both hands and run away because you know it's PEOPLE SCREAMING.)

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

When the Nazis broke into the village, the girl hid 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. A sick Globa ran out to her daughter's cry and hit the rapist with a crutch. Two more bandit officers jumped out of the hut, called the soldiers, seized Galya and her father. The girl was stripped, raped and brutally mocked at her, 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 the left. Then they undressed Timofey Globa, put him on the body of his daughter (!) And beat him with ramrods. And when he, having gathered the rest of his strength, tried to escape, he was overtaken on the road, shot and stabbed with bayonets. "

It was considered to be some special “prowess” to rape and torture women in front of people close to them: husbands, parents, children. Perhaps 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."

“Collective farmer Ivan Gavrilovich Teryokhin walked through the village of Puchki with his wife Polina Borisovna. Several German soldiers grabbed Polina, dragged her aside, pushed her into the snow and, in front of her husband, began to rape her in turn. The woman screamed, resisted with all her might.

Then the fascist rapist shot her point-blank. Polina Terekhova thrashed 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 stuck 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 was trying to prevent the rapists. "

Vasily Vishnichenko from the Generalskoye village showed: “The German soldiers seized me and took me to the headquarters. One of the fascists at this time 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.

Look at the maps of military operations, at the fat arrows of military operations, at the blots of areas where units and subunits are deployed, at the combs of positions and flags of headquarters. Look at thousands of titles settlements... Big and small. In the steppes, mountains, forests, on the shores of lakes and seas. Stretch your inner vision, and you will see how locusts in uniforms fill cities, settle in villages and towns, reach the most remote farmsteads and everywhere leave behind them the tortured bodies and devastated souls of raped women.

Neither army brothels, nor local prostitutes, nor front-line girlfriends are able to replace the soldier's ritual of violence. He does not feel the need for physical love, but the thirst for destruction and unlimited power.

“There are many prostitutes in the fascist carts serving German officers. In the evenings, Hitler's officers drive up to the carts from the front, and drunken orgies begin. Often Nazi thugs bring local women here and rape them ... "

It's hard to say what is going on in a soldier's head when he turns into a rapist. In the minds of things, inexplicable, satanic, terrible things happen.

Only WAR can know about this.

A dark and incomprehensible story is associated with the name of the Chevalier of the Order of Courage Colonel Yu.D. Budanov, who, while fighting in Chechnya, in the village of Tangi-Chu, arrested an 18-year-old girl and during interrogation allegedly raped and strangled her. By at least, they remained alone for more than an hour, after which the Chechen woman was found naked and dead.

The scandal shook the country for almost a whole year and did not leave the pages of newspapers and television screens.

“Budanov asserted during the investigation: he had information that the sniper was the mother of a young Chechen woman, and he wanted to find out where she was hiding. The girl threatened him in response, began to shout, bite, reached for his pistol. In the struggle, he tore apart her jacket and bra. And then he grabbed her by the throat. The colonel was drunk and admitted that he had committed the murder in a state of passion. He denied the fact of rape. "

As the examination showed, the stress disorder was indeed the result of three contusions. Hence the inadequacy of behavior, a twilight state and an inability to control oneself. Therefore, at the time of the crime, the colonel was in a state of passion.

Budanov was carefully examined. In such cases, the person undergoes special testing.

The so-called clinical conversations about his past and past illnesses are held with the subject. Do aggressiveness tests. The patient is shown about 20 pictures of ambiguous content (two are kissing, one is peeping ...). Special devices are also used for diagnostics. For example, nuclear magnetic resonance that identifies the affected brain cells.

The rape charge was eventually dropped.

The opinions of the population in the press were very diverse, ranging from the paradoxical proposal to erect a monument to the colonel and confer the title of Hero of Russia to the bloodthirsty verdict: "He deserves the highest measure!"

But the closest to the truth was, in my opinion, a resident of the Sverdlovsk region Lidia K.: “My son was killed in Chechnya by a sniper. I'm not looking for vengeance. But I consider it a mockery to try a man who was sent to the war and is being judged by the standards of peaceful conditions. "

“Yes, the 'tower' for Dmitritch turned down,” Budanov's subordinates said gloomily.

Throughout human history, women have been subjected to violence during the fighting. “The history of mass rape is both a history of massacres and pogroms. They were raped at all times and in all wars. Men have always satisfied their hatred on the weakest members of human society in order to enjoy the easily accessible triumph of a sense of superiority. "

From ancient times to modern times, victorious soldiers saw rape as their inalienable right, a kind of reward.

The words of the call for an assault, which have become the winged words: "There is wine and women in the fortress!" best of all characterize the attitude towards women in war.

Alas, it was these words (or here the incentive that is embodied in them) that often forced the soldiers who fell in spirit to perform miracles of bravery and heroism. "The body of the dishonored woman became a ceremonial battlefield, a parade for the victors."

Women were simply raped, and raped to death. They raped and then killed. Or first they killed and then raped. Sometimes they were raped during the death throes of the victim.

Soldiers with the Order of the Legion of Honor and St. George's bows, with Iron Crosses and medals "For Courage" were raped.

Already in the Bible (in the Book of Judges) it is told about the abduction of women, which meant mass rape.

During the next civil war the Israelites with the Benjamites, the Israelites, as usual, struck everyone with "the sword, and the people in the city, and cattle, and everything that was not encountered, and all the cities that were on the way burned with fire." And having killed all the women of the Benjamites, the Israelis decided instead to present the defeated compatriots with trophy virgins, and specially for this they dispatched an entire expedition to Jabis Gilead. “And the congregation sent there twelve thousand men, mighty men, and gave them an order, saying: Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead with the sword, and women and children. And this is what you must do: every man and every woman who has come to know the couch of men, put to the spell. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead four hundred maidens, who did not know the couch of men, and they brought them into the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. And the whole congregation sent to speak with the sons of Benjamin, who was in the rock of Rimmon, and declared peace to them. Then the sons of Benjamin returned, and gave them wives, whom they kept alive from among the women of Jabesh Gilead; but it turned out that it was not enough. "

The Israelites then recommended that their former adversaries, on the Feast of the Lord, raid Shiloh, “which is north of Bethel and east of the road from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Levona. And they commanded the sons of Benjamin, and said, Go and sit in the vineyards. And look, when the girls of Shiloh go out to dance in round dances, then go out of the vineyards, and take for yourself every one of the girls of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin. And when their fathers or their brothers come with a complaint to us, we will say to them: “Forgive us for them; for we did not take a wife for each of them in the war, and you did not give them; now they themselves are to blame. "The sons of Benjamin did so, and took wives according to their number from those who were in the round dance, whom they abducted, and went and returned to their inheritance, and built cities and began to live in them."

The oldest literary evidence of rape in war in Europe is in Homer's Iliad. The Greek military leader Agamemnon, who led the siege of Troy, tried to persuade his hero Achilles to continue the struggle with the promise that after the victory he would send all the women of Lesbos and the city of Troy to Achilles' harem, who would be "the most beautiful after Helena."

When the vandals broke into Rome in 455, for fourteen days they not only plundered, set fire to and killed the inhabitants, but also staged the first ever mass hunt for women in order to rape them. Then this practice began to be repeated more and more often. Before the Vandals, "civilized" peoples tried to save the most attractive captives and virgins in order to sell them to slave traders as profitable as possible.

“There is also a scary find in Kiev. Part of the layer of the city's destruction is a potter's semi-dugout, in one half of which there was a workshop, in the other, separated by a stove, there is a residential part.

At the entrance to the dugout there are two people: an average height man with a slight Mongoloid appearance, in a helmet typical of the steppe people, with a curved saber. And tall, without a shell, with an ax. On the floor of the workshop - the skeleton of a young woman, in a crucified position; two daggers are driven into the skeleton's hands, the blades of which go deep into the earthen floor. And on the stove, in another "room" - the skeletons of children of four and five years ... While ... the Mongols killed their father and raped their mother, the children climbed onto the stove ... "

In 1097, a detachment of the Byzantine army joined the army of the crusaders of the First Crusade. Quite a specific squad. The fact is that the Byzantine emperor Alexei I Komnenos, having received a letter from Pope Urban III, began to urge volunteers to stand under the banner of the liberators of the Holy Sepulcher, enticing them with the opportunity to rape conquered women with impunity during the campaign. And the Byzantines willingly went to war.

However, a woman as a prey at all times attracted all kinds of adventurers, pirates, conquistadors, vagabonds and outcasts to war, who were ready to risk their lives, and in return, apart from enrichment as a result of robberies, used the women of the defeated.

For such people, rape became something of a drug, a manic addiction.

The horror after the storming of Constantinople on April 12, 1204 during the Fourth Crusade was indescribable. “The plundering of the city is unparalleled in history,” writes English historian Stephen Rankman. He reports how the Crusaders ravaged the city for three days: "The French and Flemings were seized by a wild rush of destruction and broke away from their occupation only to rape and kill."

However, when the Turks took possession of the city in 1453, the picture repeated itself. Rankman describes attractive young girls and handsome boys trying to find protection in Sophia Cathedral, were sent by the Turks to their military camp.

During the Third period of the Italian Wars 1521-1559. “The army slowly advanced through Namburgh, Coburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg to Augsburg. At the same time, the Spaniards “behaved badly.” Along the entire path along which the emperor (Charles V, who was both the German Kaiser and the Spanish king) traveled, there were many dead bodies. The Spaniards also mistreated women and girls, not sparing any of them From Bamberg they took 400 women with them to Nuremberg and, having dishonored them, drove them away. At the present time it is hardly possible to convey all the horrific details of their atrocities. But Bartholomew Zastrov, the envoy of the Pomeranian dukes under Charles V, narrates about them with great composure. " Isn't this a naughty nation? .. ""

Of course - naughty, if the women were only driven out after the rape, and not chopped into pieces and hung on the branches of roadside trees. It means, nevertheless, women and girls were not treated as badly as those whose bodies were seen by the passing emperor.

And if the details of the atrocities have come down to our time in a very meager presentation, then we will pay attention to another aspect. Why was it necessary to dishonor someone, if the army was followed by whole herds of "corrupt women" who easily served the soldiers literally for a pittance (and the soldiers had money)?

A terrible fate befell women in the Thirty Years' War. In 1631, the troops of the Bavarian Field Marshal and Generalissimo Count Johann Tilly and the cavalry of the Imperial General G.G. Pappenheim captured the Saxon capital of Magdeburg and staged a terrible massacre there. Of the thirty thousand inhabitants of the city, only about ten thousand people survived, mostly women. Most of them were driven by Catholic troops to their military camp for mass rape.

This is a manifestation of the desire for violence, which has nothing to do with the satisfaction of sexual needs.

In the "Charter of the sea" of Peter the Great, in chapter 16 of book five, it is provided the death penalty or a reference to galleys for "female rape". But this was related to the conditions of peacetime. Try to keep the soldiers at war!

And did the Peter's grenadiers and dragoons really stand on ceremony in Noteburg and Narva?

There are descriptions of how, during the assault on Warsaw in 1794, Russian soldiers raped and killed Polish Catholic nuns.

Documents from 1812 tell how "girls of ten years old were raped in the streets." Fleeing from the French, young women smeared their faces with soot, dressed in rags, trying to look as less attractive as possible and thereby save themselves from dishonor. But, as you know, "the female nature cannot be hidden." There are cases when Muscovites threw themselves from bridges to avoid rape.

Arnold Toynbee, later the world famous English historian, published in 1927 two books about the atrocities of German soldiers in Belgium and France at the beginning of World War I. brothels great amount girls and women.

In the 1930s, the Japanese committed atrocities in China. An example is the rape of women unheard of in scale. Chinese city Nanjing in 1936.

Here is the testimony of a Chinese woman, Wong Peng Jie, who was fifteen years old when the Japanese occupied the city:

“Father, sister and I have already been moved to a house located in the refugee zone, which housed more than 500 people. I often saw the Japanese come and look for women. Once a woman was raped right in the yard. It was at night, and we all heard her screaming heart-rendingly. But when the Japanese left, we never found her, apparently they took her with them. None of those whom they took away in trucks returned. Only one managed to get home after being raped by the Japanese. The girl told me that the Japanese rape everyone many times. Once it happened: a woman was raped, and then a Japanese man began to poke cane stalks into her vagina, and she died from this. I hid every time a Japanese approached the house - that's why they didn't catch me. "

During the first month of the occupation of Nanjing alone, Japanese troops brutally raped 20,000 urban women, and in total, before 1945, more than two hundred thousand women were raped here.

The stories of women who were brought against by prosecutors Nuremberg trials, document the numerous rapes in the occupied areas during World War II. There is evidence of the use of sexual violence against Jewish women by security personnel in concentration camps.

July 31st, 2011

Original taken from irwi99 v

Translation of excerpts from Beevor's article:

The Red Army troops even raped Russian women whom they liberated from the camps.

As military historian Anthony Beevor argues in his new book, the orgy of rape in the Red Army during the agony of Nazi Germany was much broader than previously suspected. Mr Beevor, author of the bestselling book Stalingrad, says advancing Soviet forces raped a large number of Russian and Polish women who were prisoners of concentration camps, as well as millions of German women. The scope of the indiscipline and depravity of the Red Army was revealed when the author studied the Soviet archives to write his book "Berlin", which is due to be published in April of this year. by the publishing house "Viking".

Mr Beevor, educated at Sandhurst ( military school Great Britain) and who served in the 11th Prince Albert, the hussars - an elite cavalry unit - states that details of the behavior Soviet soldiers forced him to reconsider his view of human nature. “Whereas in the past I had accepted with a slight irony the idea that most men are potential rapists, now I was forced to conclude that, in the absence of discipline in the army, the majority of men with weapons, who had become violent as a result of two or three years of war, in fact, they become potential rapists, ”he told the publisher of his book.

He admits that he was "deeply shocked" by the discovery that Russian and Polish women and girls released from concentration camps were also subjected to violence. “This completely undermined my idea that the soldiers were using rape as a form of revenge on the Germans,”- he said.

By the time the Russians approached Berlin, the soldiers viewed women almost as "living trophies"; they believed that because they were liberating Europe, they could behave as they liked. This is very disturbing because you begin to realize that civilization is terribly superficial and its façade can be torn down in a very short time. " Mr. Beevor's high reputation as a historian ensures that his claims are taken seriously. Stalingrad was highly acclaimed and earned the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Houthorden Prize. However, his account of the siege of Berlin promises to be more controversial.

"In many ways, the fate of women and girls in Berlin is much worse than the fate of the soldiers who starved and suffered in Stalingrad."
To understand why the rape of Germany was so uniquely horrific, it is important to turn to context. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, marked the beginning of the most genocidal conflict in history. Today it is believed that perhaps 30 million citizens of the Soviet Union died during the war, including more than three million who were deliberately starved to death in German POW camps. The Germans, who showed no mercy, could not even expect it in return. They also suffered heavy casualties. In the Battle of Berlin alone, more than one million German soldiers were killed or later died in captivity, plus at least 100,000 civilians. The Soviet Union lost over 300,000 people.

Against this terrifying backdrop, Stalin and his commanders justified and even encouraged rape, not only against the German nation, but also against their allies, Hungary, Romania and Croatia. When the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas protested to Stalin, the dictator exploded: "How is it that you cannot understand a soldier who has walked thousands of kilometers through blood, fire and death and wants to have fun with a woman or take some trinket?" And when the German communists warned him that rape turned the population away from them, Stalin flared up: "I will not allow anyone to trample the reputation of the Red Army in the mud!"

The rapes began as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944. In many cities and towns, every woman between the ages of 10 and 80 was raped.

Alexander Solzhenitsin, laureate Nobel Prize, at the time a young officer, described this horror in his white-verse poem "Prussian Nights":

"Little daughter on the mattress
Dead. How many of them have been on it
A platoon, or maybe a company? "

But people like Mr. Solzhenitsyn were rare; most of his comrades considered the rape legitimate. When the advancing troops advanced deep into Germany, in the order of their commander, Marshal Zhukov, it was written: “Woe to the land of murderers. We will avenge everything, and our revenge will be terrible. "

By the time the Red Army approached Berlin, its reputation, reinforced by Nazi propaganda, had already intimidated the German population, many of whom had fled. Although hopeless resistance ended in May 1945, ordeals German women did not end there. How many German women have been raped? One can only guess, but they represent a significant percentage of those at least 15 million women who either lived in the Soviet occupation zone or were expelled from the eastern provinces of Germany. The scale of rape can be gauged by the fact that approximately two million women underwent illegal abortions each year between 1945 and 1948. Only in the winter of 1946/47 Soviet authorities, concerned about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, imposed severe punishments on their soldiers in East Germany for fraternizing with the enemy.

Soviet soldiers viewed rape, often carried out in front of a woman's husband and family members, as a suitable way of humiliating the German nation, which considered the Slavs an inferior race, with which sexual contact was not encouraged. Russian patriarchal society and the habit of riotous revelry also played a role, but more important was resentment at the relatively high prosperity of the Germans.

Mr. Bivor's emphasis on the fact that Soviet troops raped not only German women, but also victims of Nazism recently liberated from concentration camps, suggests that sexual violence was often indiscriminate, although far fewer Russian or Polish women were raped when they were freed. native places than the conquered German women. Jewish women were not necessarily viewed by Soviet soldiers as victims of the Nazis.

Soviet commissars requisitioned German concentration camps in order to imprison their own political prisoners, including "class enemies" and Nazi officials, and therefore their attitude towards the former camp inhabitants was, to put it mildly, unsentimental.

As for the millions of Russian prisoners or Slavs driven to Germany for forced labor and who survived the Nazi regime, those who were not executed as traitors and sent to the Gulag could consider themselves lucky. The women who were among them, apparently, were treated no better than the Germans, and maybe worse.

The rape of Germany has left a bitter legacy in its wake. It contributed to the unpopularity of the communist regime in East Germany and the fact that this regime subsequently made its mainstay the secret police of the Stasi. The victims themselves were permanently traumatized: German women of the military generation still refer to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as the "Tomb of the Unknown Rapist."

After the publication of this article in The Daily Telegraph, the Russian ambassador to Great Britain sent there a rather angry letter with the following content: "Sir! As a citizen of Russia and the ambassador of this country to Great Britain, I refuse to believe that an article entitled "The Red Army troops raped even Russian women whom they released from the camps" could receive permission to publish from your authorized colleagues with at least minimal knowledge of history World War II.

I have no desire to enter into discussions about these apparently false statements and insinuations. It is shameful to have anything to do with the blatant slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism.

The fact that this article appeared on the eve of the Holocaust Remembrance Day turned it into an act of blasphemy not only against Russia and my people, but also against all countries and millions of people who suffered from fascism.

I believe that millions of people saved by the Soviet army and heroism Russian soldiers are clear evidence in favor of my words.

Grigory Karasin, Ambassador of the Russian Federation "

At the same time, the British Guardian posted another piece on the same topic:

"The soldiers of the Red Army do not believe in" individual ties "with German women, - wrote the 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 modernity and the Middle Ages: tankers in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses, to whose saddles the loot was tied, Doji and Studebakers received under Lend-Lease, followed by a second echelon of carts. The variety of weapons was fully consistent with the variety of characters of the soldiers themselves, among whom were both outright bandits, drunkards and rapists, as well as idealist communists and representatives of the intelligentsia, who were shocked by the behavior of their comrades.

In Moscow, Beria and Stalin knew very well what was happening from detailed reports, one of which said: "Many Germans believe that all Germans who remained in East Prussia were raped by Red Army soldiers." There were numerous examples of gang rapes "of both minors and old women."

Marshall Rokossovsky issued order # 006 with the aim of directing "the feeling of hatred towards the enemy on the battlefield." It got nowhere. There have been several arbitrary attempts to restore order. The commander of one of the rifle regiments allegedly "personally shot the lieutenant, who was lining up his soldiers in front of a German woman who was knocked to the ground." But in most cases, either the officers themselves participated in the atrocities or the lack of discipline among drunken soldiers armed with machine guns made it impossible to restore order.

Calls to avenge the Homeland, attacked by the Wehrmacht, were understood as permission to be cruel. Even young women, soldiers and paramedics, were not opposed. A 21-year-old girl from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment said:

"Our soldiers behave with Germans, especially German women, absolutely right."

To some, this seemed curious. For example, some German women remember that Soviet women watched as they were raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany.

Natalia Hesse, close friend scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: "Russian soldiers raped all German women between the ages of 8 and 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 drank to such a state that they could not complete intercourse and used bottles - some of the victims were disfigured in this way.

The topic of mass atrocities of the Red Army in Germany was banned in Russia for so long that even now veterans deny that they took place. Only a few spoke about it openly, but without any regrets. He even boasted that "two million of our children were born in Germany."

One can only outline the psychological contradictions. When the raped residents of Konigsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, the Red Army men considered themselves insulted. They answered: “Russian soldiers do not shoot women. Only Germans do this. ” The Red Army has convinced itself that, since it has assumed the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers have every right to behave as they please.

A sense of superiority and humiliation characterized the behavior of most of the soldiers towards women in East Prussia. The victims not only paid for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but also symbolized the 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 frenzy of January 1945, sadism became less and less common. When the Red Army reached Berlin 3 months later, the soldiers were already viewing German women through the prism of the usual "victor's right". The feeling of superiority certainly survived, but it was, perhaps, an indirect consequence of the humiliation that the soldiers themselves endured 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 as part of The communist party, but already in the next decade, Stalin did everything to Soviet society became virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with the puritanical views of the Soviet people - the fact is that love and sex did not fit into the concept of “deindividualization” of the personality. Natural desires had to be suppressed. Freud was banned, divorce and adultery were frowned upon by the CCP. Homosexuality has become a criminal offense. The new doctrine completely prohibited sex education. 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 sex issues and a rude attitude towards women. Thus, the attempts of the Soviet state to suppress the libido of its citizens led to what one Russian writer called "barracks erotica", which was significantly more primitive and brutal than any of the harshest 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 the victims of rape were not only Germans. Among them were Polish women, as well as young Russians, Ukrainian women and Belarusians who ended up in Germany as a displaced labor force. He noted: “The liberated Soviet women often complain that our soldiers are raping them. One girl said to me in tears: "It 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 Central Committee of the Komsomol notified Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov reported: "On the night of February 24, a group of 35 soldiers and the commander of their battalion entered the women's hostel in the village of Grutenberg and raped everyone."

In Berlin, despite Goebbels' propaganda, many women were simply unprepared for the horrors of Russian revenge. Many have tried to convince themselves that although the danger must be great in the countryside, mass rape cannot take place in the city in full view.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunda, abbess of the nunnery, which housed a shelter and 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, it became a custom among the soldiers to choose 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 the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but as spoils of war.

Rape is often defined as violence that has little to do with sexual desire itself. But this definition is from the point of view of the victims. To understand a 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 endless rampage of January and February.

Many women were forced to "surrender" 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 of there by a young soldier Central Asia... He was so turned on by the opportunity to make love to a beautiful young blonde that he came ahead of time. 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).

The women soon learned to hide during their evening hunting hours. Young daughters were hidden in attics for several days. Mothers went out to fetch water only in the early morning, so as not to fall under the arm of Soviet soldiers sleeping off after drinking. Sometimes the greatest danger came from neighbors, who gave away the places where the girls were hiding, thus trying to save their own daughters. Old Berliners still remember screaming at night. It was impossible not to hear them, since all the windows were smashed.

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

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 Sal,- wrote neighbors in a letter shortly after the event. - rushed with his fists at the Russian, who raped his mother right in front of him. All he achieved was to be shot. ”

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

The fourth stage was the strange form of cohabitation of the officers of the Red Army with the German "occupation wives". Soviet officials went berserk when several Soviet officers deserted from the army when it was time to return home to stay with their German mistresses.

The first European country which the Red Army entered in August 1944 was Romania. The notes of the front-line poet B. Slutsky contain the following lines:
"Sudden, almost pushed into the sea, Constanta opens. It almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and about" after the war. "Restaurants. Bathrooms. Beds with clean linen. Stores with reptilian sellers. And - women, smart urban women - girls of Europe - the first tribute we took from the vanquished ... "
Further, he describes his first impressions from abroad: "European hairdressing salons, where they wash with their fingers and do not wash their brushes, the absence of a bath, washing from the basin," where first the dirt remains from the hands, and then the face is washed ", feather beds instead of blankets - out of disgust caused by everyday life , immediate generalizations were made ...
In Constanta we first met brothels ... Our first raptures over the fact of the existence of free love quickly pass away. Not only the fear of infection and the high cost, but also the contempt for the very opportunity to buy a person, affects ... Many were proud of the type: a Romanian husband complains to the commandant's office that our officer did not pay his wife the agreed one and a half thousand lei.
Everyone had a distinct consciousness: "It is impossible for us" ... Probably, our soldiers will remember Romania as a country of syphilitics .... In Romania, this European backwater, our soldier most of all felt his elevation over Europe. "

Another Soviet officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel F. Smolnikov, on September 17, 1944, wrote down his impressions of Bucharest in his diary:
"Hotel Ambassador, restaurant, lower floor. I see the idle audience walking, they have nothing to do, they are waiting. They look at me like a rarity." Russian officer !!! "I am very modestly dressed, more than modest. Let it be. We will still be in Budapest.
This is as true as the fact that I am in Bucharest. First class restaurant. The audience is dressed up, the most beautiful Romanian women look defiantly. We will spend the night in a first-class hotel. The metropolitan street is seething. There is no music, the audience is waiting. Capital, damn it! I will not give in to advertising ... ".

In Hungary, the Soviet army faced not only armed resistance, but also insidious stabs in the back from the population, when they "killed drunken and stragglers in farmsteads" and drowned them in silos.
However, "women, not as depraved as the Romanians, yielded with shameful ease ... A little love, a little dissipation, and most of all, of course, fear helped."
Quoting the words of a Hungarian lawyer "It is very good that Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much," B. Slutsky comments:
"He did not take into account that Hungarian women also loved Russians, that along with the dark fear that pushed the knees of matrons and mothers of families apart, there was the tenderness of the girls and the desperate tenderness of the soldiers who surrendered themselves to the murderers of their husbands."
For the fighters brought up in patriarchal Russian traditions, the local customs, according to which "a girl, before getting married, with the approval of her parents, can experience intimacy with many men, was a cultural shock." “They say here: they don’t buy a cat in a tied sack,” the Hungarians themselves confessed.
+++++++++++++++
Young, healthy men had a natural attraction to women. But the lightness of European morals corrupted some of the Soviet fighters, while others, on the contrary, convinced that the relationship should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant A. Rodin wrote down his impressions of visiting - out of curiosity - a brothel in Budapest, where part of it stood for some time after the end of the war:
"... After leaving, a disgusting, shameful feeling of lies and falsity arose, the picture of an obvious, open pretense of a woman did not go out of my head ... It is interesting that such an unpleasant aftertaste from visiting a brothel remained not only with me, a young man, who was also brought up on principles like not giving a kiss without love, but most of our soldiers, with whom we had to talk ...
Around the same days, I had to talk with a pretty Magyarka (she knew Russian from somewhere). When she asked if I liked Budapest, I replied that I liked it, only brothels are embarrassing.
"But why?" the girl asked. Because it is unnatural, wild, - I explained: - a woman takes money and after that, immediately begins to "love!" The girl thought for a while, then nodded in agreement and said: "You are right: it is ugly to take money forward" ... "
+++++++++++++++++
Poland left other impressions about itself. According to the poet David Samoilov:
"... in Poland they kept us strict. It was difficult to get away from the location. And pranks were severely punished. The only positive thing in Poland is the beauty of Polish women. I can't say that we liked Poland very much, then I didn’t come across anything gentry in it. and knightly.
On the contrary, everything was philistine, farmer - both concepts and interests. Yes, and in eastern Poland they looked at us wary and semi-hostile, trying to rip off the liberators what was possible.
However, the women were comfortingly beautiful and flirtatious, they captivated us with their mannerisms, cooing speech, where everything suddenly became clear, and they themselves were captivated by sometimes rude masculine strength or a soldier's uniform. And their pale, emaciated former admirers, gritting their teeth, went into the shadows for a while ... ".
++++++++++++++
Another front-line soldier, A. Rodin recalled:
“I was struck by the vitality of the Poles who survived the horrors of war and the German occupation. Sunday afternoon in a Polish village. Beautiful, elegant, in silk dresses and stockings, Polka women, who are ordinary peasant women on weekdays, rake dung, barefoot, tirelessly working on the farm. they also look fresh and youthful, although there are black frames around the eyes ...
5 November 1944 Sunday, residents are all dressed up. They are going to visit each other. Men in felt hats, ties, jumpers. Women in silk dresses, bright, unworn stockings.
Rosy-cheeked ladies. Beautifully curled blond hair ... The soldiers in the corner of the hut are also animated. But whoever is empathetic will notice that this is a painful revival. Everyone laughs loudly to show that they are not bothered by this, that it does not even bother them at all and is not enviable at all.
Are we worse than them? The devil knows what happiness it is - a peaceful life! After all, I have not seen her at all in civilian life! "
+++++++++++++++
On the same day, his fellow soldier Sergeant N. Nesterov wrote in his diary:
"Today is a day off, Poles, nicely dressed, gather in the same hut and sit in pairs. It even seems to feel uncomfortable. Wouldn't I be able to sit like this? .."

In Austria, where Soviet troops stormed in the spring of 1945, they faced a "general surrender":
"Whole villages were covered with white rags. Elderly women raised their hands up when they met a man in a Red Army uniform."
It was here, according to B. Slutsky, that the soldiers "got hold of the fair-haired women." At the same time, "the Austrians did not turn out to be overly stubborn": most of the village girls led an intimate life before marriage, and the townspeople were traditionally frivolous and, as the Austrians themselves argued, "gallantry is enough to get everything you want from a wreath."
++++++++++++++++++++
And finally Germany. And the women of the enemy - mothers, wives, daughters, sisters of those who, from 1941 to 1944, scoffed at the civilian population in the occupied territory of the USSR.
The appearance of German women walking in a crowd of refugees is described in V. Bogomolov's diary:
"Women - old and young - in hats, in headscarves with a turban and just a canopy, like our women, in smart coats with fur collars and in ragged clothes of an incomprehensible cut. Many women go in dark glasses so as not to squint from the bright May sun and thus protect the face from wrinkles ... "
++++++++++++++++++++
How did the Germans behave when they met with Soviet troops?
In the report of the deputy. Chief Chief Political governance Shikin's Red Army in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) G.F. Aleksandrov on April 30, 1945, about the attitude of the civilian population of Berlin to the personnel of the Red Army, it was said:
“As soon as our units occupy a particular area of ​​the city, residents gradually begin to take to the streets, almost all of them have white armbands on their sleeves.
When meeting with our servicemen, many women raise their hands up, cry and tremble with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all the same as their fascist propaganda painted them, this fear quickly passes, more and more people take to the streets and offer their services, trying in every possible way to emphasize their loyalty to the Red Army. "
++++++++++++++++++++
The greatest impression on the winners was made by the humility and prudence of the German women. In this regard, it is worth citing the story of the mortarman N.A. Orlov:
"We went to some german city, housed in houses. Frau, 45 years old, appears and asks the commandant's gera ... She declares that she is responsible for the quarter, and gathered 20 German women for the sexual (!!!) service of Russian soldiers ...
The reaction of our officers was angry and abusive. The German woman was driven away, together with her "detachment" ready for service. In general, German obedience stunned us. Expected from the Germans guerrilla warfare, sabotage.
But for this nation, order is paramount. If you are a winner, then they are on their hind legs, and deliberately and not under duress. This is such a psychology ... ".
++++++++++++++++++++
A similar case is cited in his military notes by David Samoilov:
“In Arendsfeld, where we have just settled down, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by a huge mustachioed German woman of about fifty, Frau Friedrich. She declared that she was a representative of the civilian population and asked to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant's office appears.
“It's impossible,” said Frau Friedrich. “There are women and children here. They need to be registered.
The civilian population with screams and tears confirmed her words.
Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they take the basement of the house where we were accommodated. And they calmed down went down to the basement and began to be accommodated there awaiting the authorities.
“Herr Commissioner,” Frau Friedrich told me complacently (I wore a leather jacket). “We understand that soldiers have small needs. They are ready, - continued Frau Friedrich, - to provide them with several younger women for ...
I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich. "
++++++++++++++++++++++
After talking with the inhabitants of Berlin on May 2, 1945, V. Bogomolov wrote in his diary:
"We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock, ask to open it. You can hear whispering in the corridor, talking dully and excitedly. Finally, the door opens. Women without age, huddled together in a tight group, bowed fearfully, low and obsequiously." They are afraid of us, they were told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them ...
Fear and hate on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like to be defeated - their behavior is so helpful, their smiles are so sweet and their words are sweet. These days, there are stories about how our soldier entered a German apartment, asked for a drink, and the German woman, as soon as she saw him, lay down on the sofa and took off her tights. "
+++++++++++++++++++++++
"All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them," - such an opinion was prevalent in the Soviet troops and was supported not only by many illustrative examples, but also by their unpleasant consequences, which were soon discovered by military doctors.

In the European information space, the topic of the "atrocities" of the Red Army on the territory of the Third Reich occupied by it in 1945 is constantly raised. How does this compare with reality - past and present? From historical memory about the Second World War, the main thing is being ousted - the fact that the USSR and the Soviet people saved Europe from the destruction of entire states and peoples, and democracy itself, and at the cost colossal losses and victims, unprecedented suffering and destruction on Soviet soil and incredible exertion of forces. Moreover, in western zones the occupation of Germany, as the documents show, was by no means the idyll the image of which is being inspired today public consciousness... Eisenhower's Radio Message "We Come Winning!" meant both "the right of the victors" and "woe to the vanquished." "Paradise life" in the western sectors sometimes turned out to be such that even refugees frightened by the propaganda about "Russian atrocities" returned to the areas occupied by Soviet troops.

In January-February 1945, Soviet troops entered German soil. The long-awaited day has come.

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

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

On January 19, 1945, Stalin signed a special order "On Conduct on German Territory", which read: “Officers and Red Army men! We are going to the enemy country. Everyone should be self-controlled, everyone should be brave ... The remaining population in the conquered areas, whether German, Czech or Pole, should not be subjected to violence. The perpetrators will be punished according to martial law. In the conquered territory, sexual intercourse with the female sex is not allowed. The perpetrators will be shot for violence and rape. "

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

According to the prescriptions of Dr. Goebbels

One of the most widespread anti-Russian myths in the West today is the topic of mass rapes allegedly committed by the Red Army in 1945 in Europe. It takes its origin from the end of the war - from Goebbels propaganda, and then from the publications of former allies in anti-Hitler coalition, who soon turned into opponents of the USSR in the Cold War.

The 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... It is located on the shores of Lake Ladoga at the mouth of the Kobona (Kobonka) River, at the intersection of it 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 the atrocities that came to us 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 received from Upper Silesia. In some villages and cities, all women from ten to 70 years old were subjected to countless rapes. It seems that this is done by order from above, since an explicit system can be seen in the behavior of the Soviet soldiers. Against this, we will now launch a broad campaign at home and abroad ”1. On March 13, a new entry appears: “The war in the east will now be guided by only one feeling - the feeling of revenge. Now all compatriots already 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 have generated widespread anger and a thirst for revenge."

Later, the assistant to the Reichskommissar Goebbels, Dr. Werner Naumann admitted: "Our propaganda about the Russians and what the population should expect from them in Berlin was so successful that we drove the Berliners to a state of extreme horror," but "overdone - our propaganda ricocheted to us by ourselves "2. The German population has 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.

“In an atmosphere of horror, on the verge of panic, whipped up by the stories of refugees, reality was distorted, and rumors triumphed over facts and common sense... Creepy stories of horrible atrocities crawled through the city. The Russians were described as narrow-eyed Mongols, ruthlessly and without hesitation killing women and children. They said that priests were burned alive with flamethrowers, nuns were raped, and then they were driven naked through the streets. They were afraid that women were being turned into prostitutes, who moved after military units, and men are sent to hard labor in Siberia. It was even reported on the radio that the Russians nailed 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 the Australian war correspondent Osmar White, “Goebbels propaganda<...>drove into the heads of the Germans a paranoid fear of the "hordes from the East." When 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 died ”4. In his diaries, he wrote that “there was nothing new in Russophobia. Troops faced this all the way from the Rhine as they met thousands of people fleeing westward and in panic. Russians are coming! Be that as it may, but you need to run from them! When it was possible to question any of them, it almost always turned out that they knew nothing about the Russians. They were told so. They heard this from a friend, brother, or relative who served in 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 Jews were subhuman, feeding on decaying brains, were lies. But speaking of the Bolsheviks, the Fuhrer was right! " 4

At the same time, the initiative in the propaganda of 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 Bureau of Public Relations (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 among 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 the atrocities of the Russians without a thorough check of their reliability ”4. But it was brewing cold war... And already in 1946, Austin Epp's brochure "The Rape of the Women of Conquered Europe" was published in the USA.

The corpses of Leningraders in a vacant lot near the Volkov cemetery. In the background, airborne balloons are seen lowered to the ground. Spring 1942
In 1947, Ralph Killing published in Chicago the book The Terrible Harvest. 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 of hearings in the American parliament on the actions of the Red Army in post-war Germany.

The rhetoric of the latter is especially indicative: "From the East came the Bolshevized Mongolian and Slavic hordes, who immediately raped women and girls, infecting them with venereal diseases, fertilizing them with the future race of Russian-German half-breeds ..." 5.

The next notable publications on this topic are the books by the German Erich Kube "Russians in Berlin, 1945" and the American Cornelius Ryan " last fight: Storming Berlin through the Eyes of Eyewitnesses "; both came out in the mid-60s. Here, the age range of victims increases even in comparison with Goebbels' statements: in the Red Army's offensive zone, “every woman from eight to eighty years is threatened with rape” 2. Subsequently, it is this figure that will regularly "pop up" in publications Western media already at the beginning of the XXI century. However, wondering “how many women were raped,” and admitting that “no one knows this,” Ryan says that “doctors quote numbers from 20,000 to 100,000” 2. Compared to the figures announced by his followers, these will seem incredibly modest ...

A new surge of interest in "raped Germany" occurs in the early 90s after the collapse of the USSR.

Thus, “in united Germany, they began to print books and make films with haste, stigmatizing the Red Army and the communists for the“ crimes of 1945 ”.

Removal of corpses from the wasteland of the Volkov cemetery in besieged Leningrad. Spring 1942
For example, the famous documentary“Liberators and liberated. War, Violence, Children "(1992), filmed by Helke Zander and Barbara Jor, where video sequences from military 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, which Anthony Beevor would later actively refer to. Among the most famous are Alfred de Zayas' work published in 1994 in New York "Terrible Revenge: Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans, 1944-1950" and in 1995 at Harvard - Norman M. Neimark "Russians in Germany. History of the Soviet zone of occupation. 1945-1949 ".

In our country this topic It was slightly touched upon since the time of perestroika and glasnost in connection with references to it in the works of eminent dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev. But a real information boom began in the mid-2000s, when “a wave of anti-Russian books quickly enough transferred to newspapers of the corresponding orientation, which happily began to reproduce descriptions of the horrors of“ raped Germany ”for various military anniversaries.” 5 The topic became especially fashionable after the publication in 2002 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 publication of the book in Russian, the myth of mass rape began to be actively circulated in the Russian liberal press and on the Russian-language Internet.

It soon became clear that the accusations against the Red Army of crimes against the civilian population of Germany and calls for modern Russia"Realize and repent" signify new stage struggle for the history of World War II and the 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 fell on 2005, the year of the 60th anniversary of the Victory. The Western mass media reacted especially actively to this informational occasion. Thus, Konstantin Eggert of the BBC lamented that “the war remains the only bright spot Soviet period history for the majority of the population of Russia, and therefore declared outside the zone of critical research and discussion. " And, calling on Russia to "rethink the past," he quite openly hinted that "only a deep national crisis can today return Russians to the situation of the late 1980s, when the discussion, interrupted in the 1990s, was in full swing. Soviet history"7.

In a special review by RIA Novosti, prepared on the basis of monitoring the television and radio airtime of 86 foreign radio stations and television companies on April 19, 2005, it was stated: “Information fuss about the historical interpretation of the Great Patriotic War is not complete without an arsenal of horror propaganda. The reliance of journalists on subjective memoir memory, personal experience former participants in the battles and outright conjectures of Goebbels' 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 revive the old foreign policy attitudes. The presence of “ dark side"The liberation feat of the Red Army, which is allegedly hushed up in modern Russia" 8.

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

In this context, the mythology regarding the mass rape of German women by Soviet servicemen, allegedly in the absence of such facts in the zone of offensive of the Western allies, took a special place and was actively discussed by the Western media. In particular, the aforementioned book by Anthony Beevor "The Fall of Berlin, 1945" back in 2002 caused a series of scandalous publications.

So, in the newspaper The Daily Telegraph in an article under the eloquent title "The Red Army troops raped even Russian women whom they released from the camps," it was said: "Soviet soldiers viewed rape, often carried out in front of a woman's husband and family members, as a suitable way of humiliation the German nation, which considered the Slavs an inferior race, sexual contact with which was 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.

Red Army prisoners who died of hunger and cold. The POW camp was located in the village of Bolshaya Rossoshka near Stalingrad. The photo was taken during a survey of the camp by the Soviet military after the defeat of the German troops (footage of the camp, including those with these dead prisoners, is included in the documentary "Battle of Stalingrad" (from the 57th minute). The author's title of the photo is "Faces of War ". January 1943
The article prompted an angry letter to the ambassador's office Russian Federation in Great Britain by Grigory Karasin dated January 25, 2002 10

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

In the monograph of the author of the article, we read what can be indirectly attributed to the issue raised by Mr. Beevor: “Worldview attitudes and the resulting moral and socio-psychological qualities 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 is an essay by a Red Army soldier under the eloquent heading "We have learned to hate." And this righteous hate was one of the dominant feelings in acting 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. So, a new, more complex gamut of feelings began to manifest itself in Soviet soldiers and officers in connection with the transfer of hostilities outside our country, to a foreign, including enemy, territory. Many servicemen believed that as winners they could afford everything, including arbitrariness in relation to the civilian population.

Patients of a Leningrad hospital who died as a result of a German artillery attack. December 28, 1943
Negative phenomena in the liberating army inflicted tangible damage on the prestige of the Soviet Union and its armed forces, 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 harsh orders. The Soviet Union had to show the peoples of Europe that it was not the "horde of Asians" that entered their land, but the army of a civilized state. Therefore, purely criminal offenses in the eyes of the USSR leadership acquired a political connotation. In this regard, on the personal instructions of Stalin, several demonstrative litigation with the imposition of death sentences on the guilty, and the NKVD organs regularly informed the military command about their measures to combat the facts of robbery against the civilian population ”11.

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

Perhaps, Mr. Beevor meant that this is stated in the work of M.I.Semiryagi, to which I refer? But there is nothing of the kind either: not on pages 314-315, not on any others!

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

For example, K. Eggert in his article "Memory and Truth", written in 2005 for the BBC project for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, wrote: Berlin "(now it is translated in Russia by the publishing house AST), Russian ambassador in 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 the liberated Poland, East Prussia and in Berlin itself. Historians from Russian Academy Sciences book "The Fall of Berlin" was condemned almost before the ambassador... Meanwhile, the reference apparatus of Beevor's book all right: incoming and outgoing numbers of reports, folder, shelf and so on. That is, you cannot accuse a writer of lying ”7.

But if such an obvious rigging is allowed in this particular example, where are the guarantees that the other so-called facts given in Mr. Beevor's book are not fabricated by 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 - and find a lot of interesting things. It was with light hand Beevora was launched and subsequently replicated in thousands of publications "accurate statistics" - two million raped German women, 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, heard in houses with broken windows. According to estimates of two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims of rape by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women had been 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 probably much higher when you take into account the million four hundred thousand who were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. It seems that in total, about two million German women were raped, many of whom (if not most) endured this humiliation several times ”6.

In doing so, he refers to the book by Helke Zander and Barbara Jor "Liberators and the Liberated" 12, where calculations are made on the basis of data not from "two main Berlin hospitals", but from one children's clinic 5, 13, i.e. "To add solidity" makes a completely deliberate distortion. Not to mention the fact that these data are highly doubtful, since the calculation system of Barbara Yor, based on an arbitrary extrapolation of the number of children whose fathers the Russians are named, born in 1945 and 1946. and examined in one Berlin clinic, for the total number of the female population of East Germany between the ages of 8 and 80, does not stand up to criticism 41. The result of such a "generalization" of isolated 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 Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation really contains materials from political departments with reports, which contain protocols of Red Army, Komsomol and party meetings describing cases of deviant behavior of servicemen. These are chubby folders, the contents of which are solid crap.

But they were recruited precisely "thematically", as evidenced by their names themselves: "Emergencies 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 extraordinary event requiring decisive measures.

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

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

Soviet women pushing a cart with the bodies of men shot by the Germans. Author's title of the photo: "Shot by the Nazis." 1942 year
In 2006, a book by the German author Joachim Hoffmann was published in Russian “The Stalinist War of Destruction (1941-1945). Planning, Implementation, Documents ”16, which has been widely distributed abroad since the mid-90s and has gone through four editions in Germany alone. At the same time, the preface to the Russian edition says that this work "is one of the best historical research" dark spots"Soviet-German war", and its author - "one of the most prominent representatives of the direction of West German historical science, who defended the postulate that in 1941-1945 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." The atrocities of the Red Army during the advance to German soil "," Woe to you, Germany! " The atrocities are continuing. " The list of literature of this kind, reviving the spirit and letter of Goebbels' propaganda in new historical conditions, can be continued for quite a long time.

Information war in electronic media

A real information war has unfolded in the vastness of the Russian-speaking Internet.

For example, in May 2005, a certain Y. Nesterenko wrote an article entitled “Day of National Shame”, initiating an indefinite action “Antipobeda”, within the framework of which “numerous testimonies of the monstrous crimes of Soviet“ soldiers-liberators ”(often exceeding the worst deeds Nazis) ":" ... Instead of fanning another propaganda hysteria and demanding gratitude from the raped for the pleasure they have received, 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 before all 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, portraying our veterans as pedophile rapists, which received a huge number of comments and hung in the top of Yandex for a long time 19.

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

And the radio station "Echo of Moscow" (2009) in the program "The Price of Victory" twice aired programs 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, in the year of the 65th anniversary of the Victory, another anti-Russian wave arose that swept across Europe and was especially noticeable in Germany.

“Sometimes on the Russian Internet a pitiful thought slips through that the Germans are so poor, tired of repenting,” A. Tyurin writes on Pravaya.ru. “You don’t need to worry, even under the anti-fascist Bundskanzler 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 the German state and commercial information 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 as follows. Americans are humanists, breadwinners ... Russians are robbers and rapists. The topic of the crimes of the Wehrmacht against the civilian population of the USSR is absent. The number of Soviet deaths in the zone of the German-Romanian-Finnish occupation is not given.

A Soviet child crying over the body of his deceased mother. A still from a Soviet war film depicting the crimes of the Nazis. 1942 year
Having taken Berlin, the Russians feed poor Berliners badly, bring them to dystrophy, but drag everything and rape them.

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

Such propaganda clichés, splashed into art, emotionally affect viewers, firmly anchor themselves in the mass consciousness, and form not only a distorted "retrospective" view of the events of World War II, but also the image of modern Russia and Russians.

Moreover, as a result of a powerful information war the very term "liberation mission" is subjected to the most fierce attacks by anti-Russian forces both in the West and within the country. The desire to rewrite the history of World War II comes both from the states of the former socialist camp, which are now members of NATO, and from the former Soviet republics of the USSR, gravitating towards 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 substitute “occupation” for “liberation”, the desire to present the USSR's liberation mission in Europe as a “new enslavement” of countries that have found themselves in the sphere of Soviet influence, accusations not only against the USSR and the Soviet Army, but also against Russia as the legal successor of the Soviet Union in implanting totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, in crimes against the civilian population, demands for her to "repent" and "compensate for the damage."

The boundaries of hate, the boundaries of revenge

However, the morality of war is completely different from the morality of peacetime. And it is possible to evaluate those events only in a general historical context, without dividing and even more so without substituting cause and effect. You cannot equate a victim of aggression with an aggressor, especially one whose purpose was to destroy entire nations. Fascist Germany she put herself outside of morality and outside the law. Should we be surprised at the acts of spontaneous revenge on the part of those whose loved ones she cold-blooded and methodically destroyed for several years in the most sophisticated and savage ways?

Throughout the Great Patriotic War, the theme of retaliation was one of the central themes in agitation and propaganda, as well as in the thoughts and feelings of Soviet people. Long before the army approached the enemy border, passing through the native land tormented by the invaders, seeing tortured women and children, burnt 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 it happened, there were - could not 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, damn Germany!" - wrote on one of the makeshift shields near the burned down house a Russian soldier who was the first to cross the border 22. The long-awaited day has come. And met at every step Soviet soldiers things with our factory brands, plundered by the Nazis; compatriots freed from captivity talked about the horrors and bullying they experienced in German slavery. German inhabitants, who supported Hitler and welcomed the war, shamelessly enjoyed the fruits of the plunder of other peoples, did not expect that the war would return to where it began - to the territory of Germany. And now these "civilian" Germans, frightened and ingratiating, with white armbands on their sleeves, were afraid to look in the eyes, expecting reckoning for everything that their army had done in a foreign land.

Punishers shoot Jewish women and children near the village of Mizoch, Rivne region. Those who still show signs of life are cold-bloodedly finished off. Before being executed, the victims were ordered to take off all their clothes. 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 will I take revenge on the German invaders”, “My personal account of revenge on the enemy”, where the principle “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” Was proclaimed the pinnacle of justice.

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

Political assessment “Hitlers come and go, but the German people, but 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 , pre-war) psychological attitude of Soviet people towards the enemy 23.

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

This is how the front-line writer D. Samoilov recalled this: “The slogan is“ Kill the German! ” solved the old question by the method of King Herod. And all the years of the war there was no doubt. "Clarification" on April 17 (an article by Aleksandrov, the then head of our propaganda, which criticized the position of Ilya Ehrenburg - "Kill the German!" previous look. The army, however, understood the political implications of these statements. Her emotional condition and moral concepts could not accept pardon and amnesty to the people who brought so many misfortunes to Russia ”24.

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

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

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

“I want to tell you something,” he shouted, and there was silence in the train carriage. “Even if you don’t want to listen! Stop whining! We must win this war, we must not lose courage. If others win - the Russians, Poles, French, Czechs - and at least one percent do to our people what we have done with them for six years in a row, then in a few weeks not a single German will survive. This is the one who has been in the occupied countries for six years! ” It became so quiet in the train that you could hear a hairpin fall ”25.

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

Acts of revenge were inevitable.

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

On January 19, 1945, Stalin signed a special order "On Conduct on German Territory" 26.

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

So, coming out on 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, robberies, senseless arson and destruction. The danger of such phenomena for the morale and combat effectiveness of the army was noted.

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

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

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

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

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. It is necessary to wage a decisive struggle against this, explaining that the feeling of hatred is our sacred feeling, that we have never renounced revenge, that it comes not about a twist, but about how to correctly clarify the question.

Of course, the influx of feelings of revenge among our people is enormous, and this influx of feelings led our soldiers to the den of the fascist beast and will lead them further to Germany. But revenge cannot be equated with drunkenness, arson. I burned down the house, and there is nowhere to place the wounded. Is this revenge? I am mindlessly destroying property. This is not an expression of revenge. We must clarify that all property and livestock have been won with the blood of our people, that we must take all this to our place 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, to simply tell him that we have conquered this and must treat what we have won in a businesslike manner. Explain that if you kill some old German woman in the rear, then the death of Germany will not accelerate from this. Here is a German soldier - destroy him, and take the surrendering prisoner to the rear. To direct the feeling of hatred of people to exterminate the enemy on the battlefield. And our people understand this. One said that I was ashamed of what I thought earlier - I would burn down the house and with this I would take revenge.

Our Soviet people are organized and they will understand the essence of the question. Now there is a GKO decree that all able-bodied German men from 17 to 55 years old should be mobilized into workers' battalions and sent with our officers to Ukraine and Belarus for reconstruction work. When we really instill in the soldier a feeling of hatred for the Germans, then the soldier will not climb on the German woman, because he will be disgusted. Here we will need to correct the shortcomings, to direct the feeling of hatred towards the enemy in the right direction ”29.

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

“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 an employee of the 1st Guards headquarters in the spring of 1945 tank army E. S. Katukova. - To tell the truth, many of our fighters 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 will, perhaps, even go to visit the Germans to look at the current battlefields. But much before that should burn out and boil over in the soul, everything that we have experienced from the Nazis, all these horrors is still too close. "

All sorts of "emergencies and immoral phenomena" in the units of the advancing Red Army were carefully recorded by special departments, military prosecutors, political workers, and were, if possible, suppressed and severely punished. However, it was mainly the logisticians and transport workers who carried out excesses. The combat units were simply not up to it - they fought. Their hatred spilled out on the armed and resisting enemy. And with women and old people "fought" those who tried to stay away from the front line.

Recalling the battles in East Prussia, Lev Kopelev, a former political worker, later a writer and dissident, said: “I don’t know the statistics: I don’t know how many villains, marauders, rapists there were among our soldiers. 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 robbery and violence. The harsh sentences of military tribunals also contributed to their suppression. According to the military prosecutor's office, “in the first months of 1945, 4148 officers and a large number of privates were convicted by military tribunals for the atrocities committed against the local population. Several show trials of servicemen ended with the imposition of death sentences 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 the German troops to the civilian population and Soviet prisoners of war.

As one of the many examples of policy statements by the German leadership, let us quote Hitler's Decree as Supreme Commander-in-Chief the Wehrmacht of May 13, 1941 on military proceedings in the war with The Soviet Union: “There will be no compulsory prosecution for actions against enemy civilians committed by Wehrmacht servicemen and civilians, even if the act is a war crime or misdemeanor ... discipline or the emergence of a threat to the security of troops "33.

Or recall the famous "Memorandum of a German Soldier" (which became one of the documents of the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials), where such "humane" calls were heard: "Remember and do: 1) ... No nerves, heart, pity - you are made of German iron ... 2) ... Destroy pity and compassion in yourself, kill every Russian, do not stop if you have 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 on your way ... Tomorrow the whole world will be on its knees before you ”34.

This was the policy of the fascist leadership of Germany in relation to the "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 about isolated (especially in comparison with the actions of the German side) violations of international law in the conduct of the war. Moreover, all these phenomena were spontaneous, and not organized, and were suppressed with all severity by the Soviet army command. And yet, as the German historian Reinhard Rurup noted, in defeated Germany “fear and horror towards Soviet troops was much more widespread than towards the British or Americans. Indeed, in the early days of the arrival of the Red Army, its fighters allowed significant excesses, robberies, and violence.

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

Many Germans more or less definitely knew exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, and therefore feared revenge or retribution in the same coin. The German people can in fact consider themselves happy - justice has not befallen them ”35.

Speaking about the scale of rape in the zone of responsibility of the Soviet troops, one should cite an excerpt from the report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front on the implementation of the directive of the Supreme Command Headquarters No. 11072 and the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front No. 00384 on changing attitudes towards the German population as of May 5 1945: “Following the instructions of the Front Military Council, the front military prosecutor's office systematically monitors the implementation of the directives of the Supreme Command Headquarters and the Front Military Council on changing attitudes towards the German population. We have to state that the facts of robberies, violence and other illegal actions by our servicemen 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 cite figures characterizing this situation in 7 armies of our front: the total number of atrocities by the military against the local population recorded in 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 on 7 armies of the front that was 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 irrecoverable 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, went down, the figure of 100 thousand Berlin residents who were "outraged by the Soviet barbarians", to put it mildly, does not dance. Not to mention two million.

At the same time, according to Osmar White, the actions of the Soviet administration to improve the life 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 the first day of my stay in Berlin,” he wrote in his diary, “I was sure that the city was dead. Human beings could not live in this terrifying rubbish heap.

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

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

Thanks to the Russians, who have 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 in those days did more to keep Berlin alive than the Anglo-Americans could have done in their place.

Russian methods of maintaining order and achieving results in the most essential did not have such a deterrent as good-heartedness. They understood the psychology of the masses and knew that the sooner Berliners get inspired by the idea of ​​helping themselves, the better it will be for everyone. A few days after the surrender, they supported the idea of ​​publishing newspapers. Then radio broadcasting was restored, entertainment was allowed, and it was 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, which lay in its den under the mountains of rubble. But Berliners did not see the world the way the Russians would have liked. Whispers were heard everywhere: “Thank God that you - British and Americans - have come here. Russians are animals, they took everything that was from me ... 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: “Nobody in the minbat killed civilian Germans. Our special officer was a "Germanophile". If this happened, the reaction of the punitive authorities to such an excess would be quick. About violence against German women. It seems to me that some, talking about such a phenomenon, "exaggerate" a little. I remember an example of a different kind.

We went into some German city, settled in houses. Frau, about 45, appears and asks "Herr Commandant". They brought her to Marchenko. She claims to be in charge of the quarter, and has gathered 20 German women to sexually (!!!) serve Russian soldiers. Marchenko German I understood, and to the deputy political officer Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me, I translated the meaning of what the German woman said. The reaction of our officers was angry and abusive. The German woman was driven away, together with her "detachment" ready for service.

In general, German obedience 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 such a psychology.

I say it again, I don’t remember that someone from my company raped a German woman. There are not many people in the Ministry of Defense, 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 not to be special ... ”38.

Continuing the theme of "German obedience", a few more documents should be cited.

In the report of the Deputy Head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army Shikin to the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) G.F. Aleksandrov on April 30, 1945 about the attitude of the civilian population of Berlin to the personnel of the Red Army troops, it was said: , residents gradually begin to take to the streets, almost all of them have white armbands on their sleeves. When meeting with our servicemen, many women raise their hands up, cry and tremble with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all the same as their fascist propaganda painted them, 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 loyalty to the Red Army ”39.

Practical Germans were most worried about the issue of food supply, for the sake of it they were ready for literally anything.

One official in a conversation with another said: "The Russians did not start very well, they took my watch off, but if the norms are given, then we will live without a watch."

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

On June 4, 1945, I. Serov reported to L. Beria: “On May 28, in the Prenzlaunsberg region, a shot was fired from one house at a Red Army commander on duty. A part of the inhabitants of this house thrown into place was taken to the commandant's office, in connection with which there was a rumor that the Red Army would stop distributing food to the population. After that, several delegations from the district came to the commandant's office with a request to publicly shoot 30-40 hostages in the square, but not to stop the distribution of food. The population of this area was asked to find the culprit and take him to the commandant's office ”40.

Allied behavior: "women as prey"

In the West, the thesis of the "atrocities" of the Red Army on the territory of Germany occupied by it is constantly being discussed. Meanwhile, the documents show that in the western zones of occupation there was by no means that idyll, the image of which is being instilled in the German, and indeed the entire Western, consciousness today. Eisenhower's Radio Message "We Come Winning!" quite clearly meant both "the right of the winners" and "woe to the vanquished."

In the report of the 7th branch of the Political Department of the 61st Army of the 1st Belorussian Front on May 11, 1945 “On the work American army and the military authorities among the German population "it was reported:" American soldiers and officers are prohibited from communicating with the local population. This prohibition, however, is violated. Per recent times there were up to 100 cases of rape, although rape results in execution ”42.

The Negro units especially distinguished themselves.

Negroes also served in the Wehrmacht
At the end of April 1945, the German communist Hans Endretsky, freed from prison by the Western allies, reported on the situation in the German zone occupied by American troops: “ Most of the occupation forces in the Erlangen area to Bamberg and in Bamberg itself were Negro units. These Negro units were located mainly in those places where there was great resistance. I was told about such atrocities of these blacks as robbery of apartments, the confiscation of jewelry, the destruction of living quarters and attacks on children.

In Bamberg, in front of the school building where these Negroes were quartered, there were three shot Negroes who had been shot by a military police patrol a few years ago for having attacked children. But also the white regular American troops carried out 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 behavior American soldiers in defeated Germany. The book was written back in 1945, but then the publishers refused to publish it because of its criticism of the Allied occupation policies. She saw the light only at the end of the XX century.

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

"On one sector of the front, one fairly well-deserved commander wittily remarked:" Copulation without conversation is not fraternization! " Another officer somehow dryly remarked about the order on the inadmissibility of fraternization: "This is definitely the first time in history that a serious effort is made to deprive soldiers of the right to women in a defeated country."