Memoirs of a Soviet veteran - raped mute. Crimes of Soviet soldiers on German territory, or how the Red Army differed from the Wehrmacht

O. Kazarinov "Unknown faces of war". Chapter 5. Violence begets violence (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the testimony of Lydia N., Rostov:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will provide several such documents and evidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O. Kazarinov "Unknown faces of war". Chapter 5. Violence begets violence (end)

Look at the maps of military operations, at the bold arrows of military operations, at the blots of areas of deployment of units and subunits, at the combs of positions and flags of headquarters. Take a look at thousands of titles settlements. Big and small. In the steppes, mountains, forests, on the coasts of lakes and seas. Strain your inner vision, and you will see how locusts in uniforms fill cities, settle in villages and hamlets, reach the most remote villages and everywhere leave behind the tortured bodies and devastated souls of raped women.

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

“There are many prostitutes in the fascist convoys serving German officers. In the evenings, Nazi officers from the front arrive at the convoys, and drunken orgies begin. Often Hitler’s thugs bring local women here and rape them...”

It's hard to say what goes on in a soldier's head when he turns into a rapist. Inexplicable, satanic, terrible things happen in the mind.

Only WAR can know about this.

A dark and incomprehensible story is connected with the name of the holder of the Order of Courage, Colonel Yu.D. Budanov, who, while fighting in Chechnya, arrested an 18-year-old girl in the village of Tangi-Chu and during interrogation allegedly raped and strangled her. 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 stated 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 screaming, biting, and reached for his gun. In the struggle, he tore her jacket and bra. And then he grabbed her by the throat. The colonel was drunk and admitted that he committed the murder in a state of passion. He denied the rape."

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

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

So-called clinical conversations are held with the subject about his past, about past illnesses. They do tests for aggressiveness. 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, which identifies affected brain cells.

The rape charge was eventually dropped.

Feedback from the population in the press was very diverse, ranging from the paradoxical proposal to erect a monument to the colonel and award the title of Hero of Russia to the bloodthirsty verdict: “He deserves capital punishment!”

But, in my opinion, a resident of the Sverdlovsk region, Lydia K., was closest to the truth: “My son was killed by a sniper in Chechnya. I don't want revenge. But I consider it a mockery to try a man who was sent to war, but is judged by the standards of peaceful conditions.”

“Yes, Dmitrich’s “tower” has collapsed,” Budanov’s subordinates said gloomily. “Sit here for six months, look at the heads shot by the same snipers - you’ll climb like a cow!”

Throughout human history, women have been subjected to violence during combat. “The history of mass rape is at the same time the history of massacres and pogroms. They raped people at all times and in all wars. Men have always gratified 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 considered rape to be their inalienable right, something of a reward.

The words of the call for an assault that have become popular: “There is wine and women in the fortress!” best characterizes the attitude towards women in war.

Alas, it was precisely these words (or the stimulus that was embodied in them) that often forced discouraged soldiers to perform miracles of courage and heroism. “The body of a dishonored woman became a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the parade of victors.”

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

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

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

During the next civil war Israelites with the Benjamites, the Israelites, as was their custom, struck everyone “with the sword, both the people in the city, and the cattle, and everything that was encountered, and they burned all the cities that were on the way with fire.” And having killed all the Benjamite women, the Israelites decided in return to gift their defeated compatriots with trophy virgins and sent an entire expedition to Jabesh-gilead specifically for this purpose. “And the congregation sent there twelve thousand men, mighty men, and gave them command, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the sword, both the women and the children. And this is what you do: consign every man and every woman who has known a man’s bed to the curse. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabez-gilead four hundred virgins who had not known a man's bed, and they brought them to 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 which they had left alive from the women of Jabesh-gilead; but it turned out that this was not enough.”

The Israelites then recommended to their former enemies that on the Feast of the Lord they should raid Shiloh, “which is north of Bethel and east of the road leading from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebhonah. And they commanded the children of Benjamin and said, Go and sit in the vineyards. And see, when the maidens of Shiloh come out to dance in round dances, then come out of the vineyards, and each of you take a wife from the maidens 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, neither did you give them one; Now it’s their own fault.” The sons of Benjamin did so, and took wives according to their number from those who were in the dance, whom they kidnapped, and they went and returned to their inheritance, and built cities, and began to live in them.”

The oldest literary evidence in Europe about rape in war is in Homer's Iliad. The Greek commander Agamemnon, who led the siege of Troy, tried to convince his hero Achilles to continue the fight with the promise that after victory he would send to Achilles’ harem all the women of the island of Lesbos and the city of Troy, who would be “the most beautiful after Helen.”

When the Vandals burst into Rome in 455, for fourteen days they not only robbed, set fire and killed the inhabitants, but also staged the first mass hunt in history for women with the aim of raping 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 profitably as possible.

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

There are two people lying at the entrance to the dugout: a man of average height with a slight Mongoloid appearance, wearing a helmet typical of steppe dwellers, with a crooked saber. And tall, without armor, with an axe. On the floor of the workshop is the skeleton of a young woman in a crucified position; Two daggers are driven into the hands of the skeleton, the blades of which go deep into the earthen floor. And on the stove, in another “room” - the skeletons of children four and five years old... While... the Mongols were killing their father and raping their mother, the children climbed onto the stove...”

In 1097, to the army of the First Crusaders crusade a detachment of Byzantine troops joined. Quite a special squad. The fact is that the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Komnenos, having received a letter from Pope Urban III, began to call for volunteers to stand under the banners of the liberators of the Holy Sepulcher, luring 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, in addition to enrichment as a result of robberies, they took advantage of the women of the vanquished.

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

The horror after the storming of Constantinople on April 12, 1204 during the Fourth Crusade was indescribable. “The sack of the city has no parallel in history,” writes the English historian Stephen Rankman. He reports how the crusaders rampaged through the city for three days: “The French and Flemings were seized by a wild impulse of destruction and broke away from their occupation only to rape and kill.”

However, when the Turks captured the city in 1453, the picture repeated itself. Rankman describes how attractive young girls and handsome boys who sought protection in the St. 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 Namburg, Coburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg to Augsburg. At the same time, the Spaniards “managed things badly.” Along the entire route along which the emperor (Charles V, who was both the German Kaiser and the Spanish king) passed, lay many dead bodies. The Spaniards treated women and girls just as poorly, sparing none of them. From Bamberg they took 400 women with them to Nuremberg and, having dishonored them, drove them away. At present it is hardly possible to convey everything horrifying details their atrocities. But Bartholomew Zastrow, the envoy of the Pomeranian dukes under Charles V, talks about them with great composure. “Isn’t this a naughty nation?...”

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

And if the details of the atrocities have reached our time in a very meager presentation, then let us pay attention to another aspect. Why was there a need to dishonor someone if the army was followed by whole herds of “corrupt women” who easily served the soldiers for literally pennies (and the soldiers had money)?

A terrible fate befell women in 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 carried out a terrible massacre there. Of the thirty thousand inhabitants of the city, only about ten thousand people, mostly women, survived. Most of them were driven into a military camp by Catholic troops for mass rape.

This is a manifestation of the thirst 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 the fifth book, the death penalty or exile to the galleys is provided for those who “rape the female sex.” But this applied to peacetime conditions. Try to keep the soldiers in the war!

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

Descriptions have been preserved of how, during the storming of Warsaw in 1794, Russian soldiers raped and killed Polish Catholic nuns.

Documents from 1812 tell of how “girls as young as ten were raped in the streets.” Fleeing from the French, young women smeared their faces with soot and dressed in rags, trying to look as unattractive as possible and thereby save themselves from dishonor. But, as you know, “feminine nature cannot be hidden.” There are known cases of Muscovites throwing themselves from bridges to avoid rape.

Arnold Toynbee, later a world-famous English historian, published two books in 1927 about the atrocities of German soldiers in Belgium and France at the beginning of the First World War: apparently with the approval of their officers, although without their orders, German soldiers were raped and placed in front-line or prison camps. Brothels have a huge number of girls and women.

In the 1930s, the Japanese committed atrocities in China. An example is the unprecedented rape of women in the Chinese city of 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:

“My father, sister and I had already been relocated to a house located in a refugee zone in which there were more than 500 people. I often saw Japanese men coming and looking 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 they took away on 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 the Japanese began to poke reed stalks into her vagina, and she died from this. I hid every time a Japanese approached the house - that’s the only reason they didn’t catch me.”

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

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

However, the allies managed to take “revenge.”

Thus, in early 1945, French soldiers raped thousands of German women upon entering Baden-Württemberg.

The US Army recorded 971 rape convictions during World War II. “There is no doubt that many rapes went unreported because no official investigation was carried out into the misconduct of the Allied armies.”

I think that two more zeros can be safely added to the number 971.

Although the US military criminal code carries harsh penalties, rape was for the most part tolerated by commanders. In Vietnam, the American command also turned a blind eye to “incidents with Viet Cong women.”

One of the US Marines explained the motives for rape during the Vietnam War: “When we searched people, the women had to take off all their clothes, and under the pretext that it was necessary to make sure that they did not hide anything else.” where, men used their penises. It was rape."

Do not rush to be indignant at this “naive” explanation of the Marine: “... you need to make sure... the men used...” Better listen to the memories of one of our “Afghans.”

“When leaving Jalalabad, in the town of Samarkhel, a truck was fired at from the window of a small shop. With machine guns at the ready, they jumped into this lousy little shop and in the back room, behind the counter, they found an Afghan girl and a door to the courtyard. In the courtyard were a kebab seller and a Hazara water-carrier. They paid in full for the murdered man. It turns out that a person can fit twenty-two kebabs, but the last one needs to be pushed in with a skewer, and only then does the person with the kebab in his throat die. But the water-carrier was lucky; he was immediately killed by machine-gun fire. But it was a girl who shot, she had a pistol, it was so beautiful, she hid it in her panties, she was a bitch...”

It is not difficult to imagine the fate of this Afghan woman, if the search was carried out in her underpants. Perhaps there was no sexual intercourse as such at that moment. Fury already gave me an excess of adrenaline. But kebabs can be rammed into a person’s throat not only...

At the same time, I involuntarily recall one document from the times of the Great Patriotic War. His friend Ebalt writes to the German lieutenant:

“It was much easier in Paris. Do you remember those honey days? The Russians turned out to be devils. I have to tie it up. At first I liked this fuss, but now that I’m all bitten and scratched, I do it easier - a gun to my head, this cools the ardor. Recently, a Russian girl blew herself and Chief Lieutenant Gross up with a grenade. Now we strip them naked, search them, and then... After all that, they disappear without a trace.”

The occupiers immediately noticed that “the Russians turned out to be devils.”

“Among the reasons for the defeat of fascist troops on the territory of our country (along with severe frosts), German historians seriously name the virginity of Soviet girls. The invaders were amazed that almost all of them turned out to be innocent. For the fascists, this was an indicator of the high moral principles of society.

The Germans had already walked all over Europe (where many pliable women easily satisfied the sexual desire of the invaders) and understood: it would not be so easy to conquer people with a core, morally strong.”

I don’t know how the German command obtained statistics about the victims’ virginity. Either it obliged the soldiers to report, or this was done by the censorship of military field mail, which “combed” soldiers’ letters, after which, with German accuracy, they compiled a classification of those raped for the higher authorities of the Imperial Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. Perhaps these were special teams engaged in studying the virginity and temperament of future slaves of the Reich (which is quite possible after the creation by the fascists of the magical society "Thule" and the whole system of research institutes "Ananerbe", breeding a special breed of Aryan bees, sending expeditions around the world to searches for amulets and pagan artifacts, etc.).

In any case, it's disgusting.

But the story of mass rape in war did not end with World War II. Wherever another armed conflict flared up, be it in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, military violence gave rise to violence against women.

In 1971, the most notorious was the widespread rape that took place during the Pakistani invasion of Bangladesh. During this armed conflict Punjabis raped between 200,000 and 300,000 women!

In the late 80s - early 90s of the 20th century, a civil war broke out in Sudan. The black Nubian population was attacked by the Muslim Arabs of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The Sudanese government called it counter-insurgency.

African Rights co-chairman Alex de Waal said at the time: “What the Nubians endure is remarkably similar to the brutal treatment of black slaves in 19th-century America: forced labor, broken families, sexual coercion.”

Most likely, Mr. de Waal expressed himself quite softly and diplomatically. This “sexual coercion” can be seen in the case of its victim, Abuk Maru Kir, a resident of Nyamlell village in South Sudan. “Leaving behind 80 corpses, the soldiers herded the surviving residents into a column. Abuk was then horrified to hear the screams of her sister and other women as they were dragged into the bushes. Soon they took her too. After she was raped by a third person, Abuk lost consciousness.”

Government soldiers turned black women and girls into concubines. Any child born from such a “marriage” was considered an Arab. One 17-year-old Nubian girl who escaped slavery told an investigator from African Rights that she was raped for a hundred nights (!) in a row.

Women were treated mercilessly in Kuwait and by Iraqis during the 1990 Gulf War. It is estimated that more than five thousand women were raped here. Most of the victims were then kicked out of the house by their husbands.

It is documented that mercenaries from the Middle East and Afghanistan raped women in Chechnya, since the local population was alien to them.

The soldiers raped not only spontaneously, satisfying their ferocity. In the 20th century, rape began to be resorted to as a means of terrorizing civilians.

A terrible mark was left behind by the troops of General Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 in Shanghai. They received orders not only to deal with the soldiers of the communist army, but also to rape and kill their women.

A French prosecutor presented materials in Nuremberg about mass rapes that were used as retribution for the operations of the French Resistance. This proves that in some cases rape was used to achieve military-political goals.

And on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, “German troops systematically carried out mass executions of civilians, women were raped, and their naked, mutilated bodies were exposed to surviving townspeople.” To intimidate.

When approaching Stalingrad, German planes, along with bombs, bombarded the city with leaflets: “Stalingrad ladies, get your dimples ready!”

At the end of the war, Soviet troops were able to unleash their hatred on Germany.

As Viktor Suvorov wrote in his acclaimed “Icebreaker”:

“The battalion drinks bitter vodka before entering battle. Good news: they were allowed to take trophies, they were allowed to rob. The commissioner shouts. Hoarse. Ilya Ehrenburg quotes: Let's break the pride of the arrogant German people!

The black peacoats laugh: how are we going to break our pride, by total rape?

Didn't all this happen? (...)

No, it happened! True, not in forty-one - in forty-five. Then they allowed the Soviet soldier to rob, calling it “taking trophies.” And they ordered to “break German pride...”

I know that many people treat V. Suvorov’s books with a fair amount of skepticism, and therefore I do not overuse his quotation. But there are numerous testimonies attacks Soviet soldiers in 1945 on women in areas of East Germany, and especially in Berlin, which became the “city of women.”

You don't have to trust the fascists. But it’s hard not to believe eyewitnesses from among the liberators.

“...The headquarters has its own worries, the battle continues. But the city corrupts the soldiers: trophies, women, drinking bouts.

We are told that the division commander, Colonel Smirnov, personally shot one lieutenant, who from among his soldiers had formed a line towards one German woman who was lying in the gateway...” (Description of the situation in Allenstein (East Prussia) after the entry Soviet Army at the end of January 1945, made by Lev Kopelev.)

Whatever they say, the female part fascist Germany fully tried on the fate of the conquered nation.

Another veteran who went through the war from Kursk Bulge to Berlin, admits: “...Under fire, during attacks, I had no thought about it. (...) But in Germany our brother did not stand on ceremony. By the way, the German women did not resist at all.”

Cherepovets historian Valery Veprinsky noted:

“When our troops entered German territory, at first the command secretly allowed the soldiers to “satisfy their sexual hunger” - the winners are not judged. One acquaintance admitted to me that he and a friend passed through an empty German village, went into the house to take something valuable and, finding an old woman there, raped her. But soon an order for looting came out. “The peaceful German population is not our enemy,” the command carried out explanatory work. And a certain Cherepovka resident, the liberator of Europe from the brown plague, thundered in “Magadan, the second Sochi” after the German Frau reported violence to the commandant’s office...”

After the order for looting, emboldened German women began to come with allegations of rape. There were many of these statements.

This led to new tragedies. Even in peacetime, it is not easy to prove the fact of rape: surveys, examinations, evidence. And what can we talk about during the war!

Perhaps many of the revenge brought false accusations against our soldiers.

But for me personally, the most truthful are the diaries of German girls, exhausted by fear and already far from any ideology and propaganda.

Diary entries of 17-year-old Berlin resident Lily G. about the capture of Berlin from 15.04. to 05/10/1945

“28.04. The fourth shell hit our house.

29.04. Our house has already been hit about 20 times. Cooking is very difficult due to the constant danger to life if you leave the basement.

30.04. When the bomb hit, I was with Frau Behrendt upstairs on the stairs in the basement. The Russians are already here. They are completely drunk. They rape you at night. I'm gone, mom is gone. Some 5–20 times.

1.05. Russians come and go. All the watches are gone. The horses lie in the yard on our beds. The basement collapsed. We are hiding at Stubenrauchstrasse 33.

2.05. The first night is quiet. After hell we found ourselves in heaven. They cried when they found lilacs blooming in the yard. All radios must be returned.

3.05. Still on Stubenrauchstrasse. I can’t go near the windows so the Russians don’t see me! There are rapes all around, they say.

4.05. No news from my father on Derfflingerstrasse.

5.05. Back to the Kaiserallee. Mess!

6.05. Our house was hit 21 times. We spent the whole day cleaning up and packing. Storm at night. Out of fear that the Russians would come, I crawled under the bed. But the house was shaking so much from the holes.”

But the worst thing seems to be the fate of women in civil wars. In the fight against an external enemy, at least some clarity is maintained: there are strangers, it is better not to fall into their hands, here there are our own, who will protect and will not offend. In a civil war, a woman, as a rule, becomes prey to both sides.

In 1917, the Bolsheviks, intoxicated by freedom, having misinterpreted it, clearly went too far with their projects of nationalization (or “socialization”) of women.

Here is a document drawn up on June 25, 1919 in the city of Ekaterinodar, after the White Guard units entered it.

“In the city of Ekaterinodar, in the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks issued a decree, published in Izvestia Soveta and posted on poles, according to which girls aged 16 to 25 years were subject to “socialization,” and those wishing to take advantage of this decree had to apply to the appropriate revolutionary institutions. The initiator of this “socialization” was the Commissioner for internal affairs- Bronstein. He also issued “mandates” for this “socialization”. The same mandates were issued by the subordinate commander of the Bolshevik cavalry detachment Kobzyrev, the commander-in-chief Ivashchev, as well as others Soviet authorities, and the mandates were stamped with the headquarters stamp “ revolutionary troops North Caucasian Soviet Republic." Mandates were issued both in the name of the Red Army soldiers and in the name of Soviet commanders, for example, in the name of Karaseev, the commandant of the palace in which Bronstein lived: under this mandate the right to “socialize” 10 girls was granted. Sample mandate:

Mandate. The bearer of this, Comrade Karaseev, is given the right to socialize in the city of Yekaterinodar 10 souls of girls aged from 16 to 20 years, whom Comrade Karaseev points out.
(Commander-in-Chief Ivashchev.)

On the basis of such mandates, the Red Army captured more than 60 girls - young and beautiful, mainly from the bourgeoisie and students of local educational institutions. Some of them were captured during a raid organized by the Red Army in the City Garden, and four of them were raped there, in one of the houses. Others, about 25 souls, were taken to the Palace of the Military Ataman to Bronstein, and the rest to the Old Commercial Hotel to Kobzyrev and to the Bristol Hotel to the sailors, where they were raped. Some of those arrested were then released - this is how a girl was released, raped by the head of the Bolshevik criminal investigation police, Prokofiev, while others were taken away by the departing detachments of Red Army soldiers, and their fate remained unclear. Finally, some, after various kinds cruel tortures, were killed and thrown into the Kuban and Karasun rivers. So, for example, a 5th grade student in one of the Ekaterinodar gymnasiums was raped for twelve days by a whole group of Red Army soldiers, then the Bolsheviks tied her to a tree and burned her with fire, and finally shot her.

This material was obtained by a Special Commission in compliance with the requirements of the Charter of Criminal Procedure.”

However, the “White Guard” did not lag behind the Bolsheviks in this regard.

To paraphrase a well-known saying, one could say: “the reds will come and rape, the whites will come and also rape.” (For example, young girls from cities and nearby villages were usually brought to the train of the ataman-general Annenkov standing at the railway station, raped, and then immediately shot.)

Another form of rape in war was the sexual exploitation of women for the army or in the sex industry.

Roy Escapa, author of The Shadow Side of Sex, wrote about how Pakistani soldiers kidnapped Bengali girls and brought them to army headquarters in 1971. school age, they were stripped naked so that they could not escape. They were also used to film pornographic films.

“During the military operations in Kosovo (1999), women were caught and forcibly kept in underground dens. They were used by American soldiers and former fighters " Liberation Army Kosovo,” and then the concubines were killed and sent “to the organs.” They killed carefully so that these same organs were not damaged. And “they didn’t put me on needles, and they didn’t give me a lot of alcohol, so as not to damage the liver and other organs,” says Vera K, a girl who miraculously escaped. During police raids, such slave brothels were raided. In the rays of police lights appears scary picture: in completely inhuman conditions - two at a time on narrow beds and on stale linen, or even just on pushed chairs, in tiny shabby rooms behind curtains - “girls” are kept, who have long been different from girls. Drunk, smoke-stained, exhausted, unwashed, with empty eyes, afraid of everything - they are no longer even fit for organs. Such people work out their tasks and disappear without a trace. Having finally realized that they can now be released, one of them says: “Why?” Where should I go now? It will only get worse... It’s better to die here.” The voice with which she says this is already dead.”

During World War II, forced consignment of women to brothels was commonplace. "War feeds war." In this case, she fed herself with women's bodies.

“In Vitebsk, for example, the field commandant ordered girls aged 14 to 25 to report to the commandant’s office, ostensibly to be assigned to work. In fact, the youngest and most attractive of them were sent by force of arms to brothels.”

“In the city of Smolensk, the German command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels, into which hundreds of girls and women were driven; they were dragged by the arms, by the hair, mercilessly dragged along the pavement.”

A teacher in the village of Rozhdestveno, Trofimova, says: “All our women were driven to school and a brothel was set up there. Officers came there and raped women and girls at gunpoint. 5 officers collectively raped the collective farmer T. in the presence of her two daughters.”

Brest resident G.Ya. Pestruzhitskaya spoke about the events at the Spartak stadium, where the local population was herded: “Every night drunken fascists burst into the stadium and forcibly took away young women. Over two nights, German soldiers took away more than 70 women, who then disappeared without a trace..."

“In the Ukrainian village of Borodaevka, Dnepropetrovsk region, the Nazis raped all the women and girls. In the village of Berezovka, Smolensk region, drunken German soldiers raped and took away all the women and girls aged 16 to 30.”

“The 15-year-old girl Maria Shch., the daughter of a collective farmer from the village of Bely Rast, was stripped naked by the Nazis and taken along the street, entering all the houses where German soldiers were located.”

Brothels for guard soldiers existed at concentration camps. Women were recruited only from among prisoners.

And although the living conditions there were somewhat better, in fact it was just a continuation of the torture. The soldiers, maddened by daily executions, took out their mental disorders on the silent, foreign-language prisoners. And there were no bouncers and “mothers”, usual for such establishments, ready to stand up for the tortured woman. Such brothels turned into testing grounds for all kinds of vices, perversions and manifestations of complexes.

Contraception methods were not used, as in brothels with German staff. Prisoners were cheap material. “When pregnancy was discovered, the women were immediately destroyed.” They were replaced with new ones.

One of the worst brothels was at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. The average "service life" was three weeks. It was believed that during this time a woman would neither get sick nor become pregnant. And then - the gas chamber. During the four years of Ravensbrück's existence, more than 4 thousand women were killed in this way.

I would like to end this chapter with a quote from E. Remarque’s book “The Spark of Life.”

“We can’t think about the past, Ruth,” he said with a slight hint of impatience in his voice. - Otherwise, how will we be able to live at all?

I don't even think about the past.

Why are you crying then?

Ruth Holland wiped the tears from her eyes with her fists.

Do you want to know why I wasn't sent to the gas chamber? - she suddenly asked.

Bucher vaguely felt that something would now be revealed that it would be better for him not to know about at all.

“You don’t have to tell me about this,” he said hastily. - But you can say it if you want. It doesn't change anything anyway.

This changes something. I was seventeen. And then I wasn’t as scary as I am now. That's why they left me alive.

Yes,” said Bucher, still not understanding anything.

He looked at her. For the first time, he suddenly noticed that her eyes were gray and somehow very clean and transparent. He had never seen such a look from her before.

Don't you understand what this means? - she asked.

They kept me alive because they needed women. Young women for the soldiers. And for the Ukrainians too, who fought alongside the Germans. Do you understand now?

Bucher sat as if stunned. Ruth didn't take her eyes off him.

And they did this to you? - he asked finally. He didn't look at her.

Yes. They did this to me. - She didn't cry anymore.

This is not true.

This is true.

That's not what I mean. I mean, you didn't want this.

A bitter laugh escaped her throat.

There's no difference.

Now Bucher raised his eyes to her. It seemed that all expression had faded from her face, but that is why it turned into such a mask of pain that he suddenly felt and understood what he had only heard before: she told the truth. And he felt that the truth was tearing his insides with its claws, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it yet, in that first second he wanted only one thing: that there wouldn’t be such torment in that face.

This is not true, he said. - You didn't want this. You weren't there. You didn't do this.

Her gaze returned from the void.

This is true. And this cannot be forgotten.

None of us are given the ability to know what can be forgotten and what cannot be forgotten. We have a lot to forget. And to many..."

In my opinion, this is the best answer to the question of whether a monument to raped women is needed.

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

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

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

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

Given numerous examples gang rapes of “both minors and old women.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________________________

Special archive InoSMI.Ru

(The Daily Telegraph, UK)

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively from foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

May 6th, 2002

(Antony Beevor) " " , UK.

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

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

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

Issued order No. 006 with the goal of directing “feelings to the battlefield.” It didn't lead to anything. There were several arbitrary attempts to restore order. The commander of one of the rifle regiments allegedly “personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up his soldiers in front of a German woman who had been knocked to the ground.” But in most cases, either the officers themselves participated in the outrages or the lack of discipline among drunken soldiers armed with machine guns made it impossible to restore order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if the feminist definition of rape as solely an act of violence seems simplistic, there is no excuse for male complacency. The events of 1945 clearly show us how thin the veneer of civilization can be if there is no fear of retaliation. They also remind us that there is a dark side to male sexuality that we prefer not to acknowledge.
____________________________________
(Daily Mail, UK)
("Pravda", USSR)
("The New York Times", USA)
(The Guardian, UK)
("The New York Times", USA)
("The New York Times", USA)
(The Sunday Times, UK)
(The Daily Telegraph, UK)
(The Times, UK)

Posts from This Journal by “fascist atrocities” Tag

A monstrous order from Hitler's command

"Pravda" No. 15, January 15, 1942 Blood and unheard of suffering of Soviet people, destruction and outrage against our historical...
Following in the footsteps of the retreating enemy

A. Leontyev || "Pravda" No. 27, January 27, 1942 The heroic Red Army broke the enemy onslaught on Moscow, drove back Nazis...
A terrible indictment

"Pravda" No. 8, January 8, 1942 Brutal gangs of German invaders rob the civilian population of the Soviet villages and cities they captured, torture...
Death to the German monsters!

"Pravda" No. 312, December 20, 1943 TODAY IN THE ISSUE: Towards the stay of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, Mr. Ed. Benes, in Moscow (1 page). From…
Alexey Tolstoy. Retribution

A. Tolstoy || "Pravda" No. 312, December 20, 1943 TODAY IN THE ISSUE: On the visit of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, Mr. Ed. Benes, to Moscow...

During the occupation of German territory, Soviet troops committed mass rape of local women.

“According to estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women were raped in Berlin alone. Moreover, about ten thousand of them died mainly as a result of suicide.”

Senyavskaya Elena Spartakovna

The last months of the war were tragic for Germany. The story of the last defenders of the Reich, killed by Russian avengers, is very sad, but sadder is the fate of German women who fell into the hands of victorious Russian soldiers. Mass rapes took place methodically...with hatred and cruelty. On this topic rarely said because it is a stain on the heroic image of the heroes of the saviors of the Second World War.

Catherine Merridale

And here is what the famous Soviet playwright Zakhar Agranenko, who was serving as an officer at that time, writes in his diary Marine Corps in East Prussia:

“I don’t believe in individual intimate relationships between soldiers and German women... Nine, ten... twelve people at the same time, it had the nature of gang rape...”

A 21-year-old girl from the reconnaissance detachment Agranenko said: “Our soldiers behave with the Germans, especially with German women, absolutely correctly.” Some people found this interesting. Thus, some German women recall that Soviet women watched them being raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalya Hesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: “Russian soldiers raped all German women aged from 8 to 80. It was an army of rapists.”

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

On January 3, my son came back from the front on leave. He served in SS units. My son told me several times that SS units in Russia did incredible things. If the Russians come here, they will not “douse you with rose oil.” It turned out differently... When the Russians came, I decided to open the veins of my children and commit suicide. But I felt sorry for the children, I hid in the basement, where we sat hungry for several days. Unexpectedly, four Red Army soldiers walked in there. They didn’t touch us, and they even gave little Werner a piece of bread and a packet of cookies. I couldn't believe my eyes. After that we decided to go outside. Nobody touched us and the children...

Elisabeth Schmeer

Well, at least someone wasn't touched.)))

Of course, there were no millions of victims, I personally don’t believe in it... But when we went to visit home for the first time... one of my veteran grandfathers was still alive... and to my question: did they rape German women in 1945? replied: Well, they’re all sorts of women... while stating that he had plenty of his own pretty nurses... Considering that in 1945 he was 23 years old and with a height of 185, broad shoulders... he was also handsome.. I believe that the nurses did not refuse. But someone was refused... and someone simply took revenge... anything is possible. But MASSIVE...that's too much.

Do you even believe what this person says? Somehow I have big doubts.