Trophies from Germany - what it was and how. Who raped German women and how life was in occupied Germany

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. This topic is rarely discussed 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 at that time as a marine officer in East Prussia, writes in his diary:

“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. 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.”

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.

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.”

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.).

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 pack 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.

Today Tatyana Tolstaya (the mother of one blogger and supposedly a writer) patriotically remarked:

“I’m thinking: if Russian soldiers raped millions of German women, as we are told here, then these German women, we must assume - well, maybe not all, but half, let’s say - gave birth to children. This means that the population of Germany in the conquered territories is now Russian , and not German?

People are already indignant about this, but, it seems to me, Tatyana’s best answer would be Soviet veteran Leonid Rabichev. Below are excerpts from his book of memoirs, “The War Will Write Off Everything”:

Women, mothers and their daughters, lie left and right along the highway, and in front of each is a cackling armada of men with their pants down.

Those bleeding and losing consciousness are dragged aside, and children rushing to their aid are shot. Cackling, growling, laughing, screaming and moaning. And their commanders, their majors and colonels stand on the highway, some chuckle, and some conduct, no, rather regulate. This is so that all their soldiers, without exception, participate.

No, this hellish deadly group sex is not mutual responsibility and not revenge on the damned occupiers.

Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and the cruel logic of a maddened crowd.

Shocked, I sat in the cab of the semi, my driver Demidov was standing in line, and I was imagining Flaubert’s Carthage, and I understood that the war would not write off everything. The colonel, the one who had just conducted, can’t stand it and takes the turn himself, and the major shoots off the witnesses, children and old people fighting in hysterics.

Stop it! By car!

And behind us is the next unit.

And again there’s a stop, and I can’t hold back my signalmen, who are also already joining new lines. Nausea rises in my throat.

To the horizon, between the mountains of rags and overturned carts, the corpses of women, old people, and children. The highway is cleared for traffic. It's getting dark.

My control platoon and I get a farm two kilometers from the highway.

In all the rooms there are corpses of children, old people, raped and shot women.

We are so tired that, not paying attention to them, we lie down on the floor between them and fall asleep.

In the morning we deploy the radio and contact the front via SSR. We receive instructions to establish communication lines. The advanced units finally collided with the German corps and divisions that had taken up defensive positions.

The Germans are no longer retreating, they are dying, but they are not giving up. Their aircraft appears in the air. I’m afraid I’ll be wrong, it seems to me that in terms of cruelty, uncompromisingness and the number of losses on both sides, these battles can be compared with the battles at Stalingrad. It's all around and ahead.

I don't leave my phones. I receive orders, I give orders. Only during the day is there time to take the corpses out into the yard.

I don’t remember where we took them out.

In the outbuildings? I can’t remember where, I know that we never buried them.

There were funeral teams, it seems, but they were far in the rear.

So, I help carry out the corpses. I freeze at the wall of the house.

Spring, the first green grass on earth, bright hot sun. Our house is peaked, with weather vanes, in the Gothic style, covered with red tiles, probably two hundred years old, a courtyard paved with stone slabs that are five hundred years old.

We are in Europe, in Europe!

I was daydreaming, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls walked through the open gate. There is no fear in the eyes, but terrible anxiety.

They saw me, ran up and, interrupting each other, tried to explain something to me in German. Although I don’t know the language, I hear the words “muter”, “vater”, “bruder”.

It becomes clear to me that in the panicked flight they lost their family somewhere.

I feel terribly sorry for them, I understand that they need to run away from our headquarters yard as fast as they can, and I tell them:

Mutter, Vater, Brooder - niht! - and point my finger at the second far gate - there, they say. And I push them.

Then they understand me, quickly leave, disappear from sight, and I sigh with relief - at least I saved two girls, and I head to the second floor to my phones, carefully monitor the movement of the units, but not even twenty minutes pass before I Some shouts, screams, laughter, swearing can be heard from the yard.

I rush to the window.

Major A. is standing on the steps of the house, and two sergeants twisted their arms, bent those same two girls into three deaths, and on the contrary - the entire headquarters staff - drivers, orderlies, clerks, messengers.

Nikolaev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov... - Major A commands. - Take the girls by the arms and legs, down with their skirts and blouses! Form into two lines! Unfasten your belts, lower your pants and underpants! Right and left, one at a time, start!

A. commands, and my signalmen and my platoon run up the stairs from the house and line up in ranks. And the two girls “saved” by me are lying on ancient stone slabs, their hands are in a vice, their mouths are stuffed with scarves, their legs are spread - they are no longer trying to escape from the hands of four sergeants, and the fifth is tearing and tearing their blouses, bras, skirts, and panties to pieces.

My telephone operators ran out of the house - laughing and swearing.

the ranks do not decrease, some rise, others descend, and there are already pools of blood around the martyrs, and there is no end to the ranks, cackling and swearing.
The girls are already unconscious, and the orgy continues.

Major A is in command, proudly akimbo. But then the last one rises, and the executioner-sergeants pounce on the two half-corpses.

Major A. pulls out a revolver from his holster and shoots into the bloody mouths of the martyrs, and the sergeants drag their mutilated bodies into the pigsty, and the hungry pigs begin to tear off their ears, noses, chests, and after a few minutes only two skulls, bones, and vertebrae remain. .

I'm scared, disgusted.

Suddenly nausea creeps up my throat and I feel like I'm throwing up inside out.

Major A. - God, what a scoundrel!

I can’t work, I run out of the house without clearing the way, I go somewhere, I come back, I can’t, I have to look into the pigsty.

In front of me are bloodshot pig eyes, and among the straw and pig droppings are two skulls, a jaw, several vertebrae and bones and two gold crosses - two girls “saved” by me.

The city commandant, a senior colonel, tried to organize a perimeter defense, but half-drunk soldiers pulled women and girls out of their apartments. In a critical situation, the commandant decides to get ahead of the soldiers who have lost control of themselves. On his instructions, the liaison officer gives me the order to set up a military guard of eight of my machine gunners around the church, and a specially created team recaptures the women they have captured from the victorious soldiers who have lost control of themselves.

Another team returns to their units the soldiers and officers who have scattered around the city in search of “pleasure” and explains to them that the city and region are surrounded. Has difficulty creating a perimeter defense.

At this time, about two hundred and fifty women and girls are driven into the church, but after about forty minutes several tanks drive up to the church. The tankers push my machine gunners away from the entrance, break into the temple, knock me down and start raping the women.

There's nothing I can do. A young German woman seeks my protection, another kneels.

Herr Lieutenant, Herr Lieutenant!

Hoping for something, they surrounded me. Everyone is saying something.

And the news is already sweeping through the city, and a line has already formed, and again this damned cackle, and the line, and my soldiers.

Back, f... your mother! - I scream and don’t know what to do with myself and how to protect those lying around my feet, and the tragedy is rapidly growing.

The moans of dying women. And now they drag up the stairs (why? why?) up to the landing, bloody, half-naked, unconscious, and through broken windows they throw them onto the stone slabs of the pavement.

They grab you, strip you, kill you. There is no one left around me. Neither I nor any of my soldiers have seen anything like this before. Strange hour.

The tankers left. Silence. Night. A terrible mountain of corpses. Unable to stay, we leave the church. And we can't sleep either.

So the Soviet veteran Leonid Nikolaevich Rabichev responded to the writer Tatyana Tolstoy. German women, of course, gave birth - but only those who were not killed. And the dead, Tanya, don’t give birth.

In 1944, the Soviet army crossed the border with Germany, how did the soldiers communicate with German women? Let's listen to the veterans. Starting with who could write a book about that war. And then we’ll move on to those who haven’t written books.

...Now the war has taken another unexpected turn for me. It seemed that everything had been tested: death, hunger, shelling, backbreaking work, cold. But no! There was also something very terrible that almost crushed me. On the eve of the transition to the territory of the Reich, agitators arrived among the troops. Some are in high ranks.

- Death for death!!! Blood for blood!!! Let's not forget!!! We won't forgive!!! Let's take revenge!!! - and so on...

Before this, Ehrenburg, whose crackling, biting articles everyone read: “Dad, kill the German!” And it turned out to be Nazism in reverse. True, they were outrageous according to plan: a network of ghettos, a network of camps. Accounting and compilation of lists of loot. A register of punishments, planned executions, etc. Everything went spontaneously, in the Slavic way. Hit, guys, burn, jam! Spoil their women!

Moreover, before the offensive, the troops were abundantly supplied with vodka. And it went, and it went! As always, innocent people suffered. The bosses, as always, ran away... They burned houses indiscriminately, killed some random old women, and aimlessly shot herds of cows. A joke made up by someone was very popular: “Ivan is sitting near a burning house. “What are you doing?” they ask him. “Well, the little footcloths needed to be dried, I lit a fire.”

Corpses, corpses, corpses. The Germans, of course, are scum, but why be like them? The army has humiliated itself. The nation has humiliated itself. It was the worst thing in the war. Corpses, corpses... Several trains with German refugees arrived at the station of the city of Allenstein, which the valiant cavalry of General Oslikovsky captured unexpectedly for the enemy. They thought they were going to their rear, but they ended up... I saw the results of the reception they received. The station platforms were covered with heaps of gutted suitcases, bundles, and trunks. There are clothes everywhere, children's things, torn pillows. All this in pools of blood...

After all, it is obvious that what is written is simply the truth. It may not be the whole truth, it may be a little glossed over, but it is the truth.

And here is another fragment across the page that shows how non-trivial this was. How mass or not mass rape is - judge for yourself:

East Prussia amazed, on the contrary, with its prosperity, contentment and order, well-appointed farmsteads with agricultural machinery, everything electrified, rich Bauer houses, which always had a piano and good furniture, and next to it a barn with hutches and bunks for Eastern workers. The pigsties and cowsheds are full of well-fed cattle. Yes, they lived here, they didn’t bother... And the cities are rich, clean, well built. In Allenstein we found a lot of junk and food taken out from the USSR and stored in reserve. In another warehouse there were canned goods from Holland, Belgium and France. True, they were slightly burned in the fire, but they were still edible. The soldiers got into the habit of drinking alcohol, washing it down with condensed cream... I remember that in one empty house, on the windowsill lay a dozen and a half gold coins of the Kaiser’s mintage. For a long time no one took them; the soldiers did not expect to live to see the end of the war and did not want to burden themselves with unnecessary burdens.

In many houses we found all sorts of military regalia: orders, uniforms, SS daggers with the inscription: “blood and honor,” shoulder straps, aiguillettes and other tinsel. Indeed, East Prussia was a nest of militarism. But the military, fascist activists and other authorities managed to escape.

Mostly ordinary people remained - women, old people, children. They had to deal with the consequences of defeat. Soon they began to line them up in columns and send them to the railway station - as they said, to Siberia.

In our house, at the very top, in the attic, lived a woman of about thirty-five with two children. Her husband died at the front, it was difficult for her to escape - you can’t run far with a baby, so she stayed. The soldiers found out that she was a good dressmaker, they carried the material and forced her to sew breeches. Many people wanted to look fashionable, and they wore themselves out thoroughly over the winter. From morning until evening, a German woman scribbled on a typewriter. For this they gave her lunch, bread, and sometimes sugar. At night, many soldiers went up to the attic to make love. And the German woman was afraid to refuse this, she worked until dawn, without closing her eyes... Where can you go? There was always a queue at the door to the attic, which there was no way to disperse.

Later in Berlin:

These days, here in Berlin, I did an act that I am still proud of, but I am surprised at my own adventurism... On a rainy evening, I was sent somewhere. I protected myself from the rain with a rubberized and shiny trophy officer's cape. She covered her head with a hood, and her whole body down to her toes; the soldier looked like a general in it. Taking the machine gun, I hit the road. Near the neighboring house, I was stopped by desperate female screams: some senior lieutenant, judging by the color of his shoulder straps - a quartermaster, was dragging a young pretty German woman into the entrance. He pulled off her blouse and tore her underwear. I immediately ran closer, clanged the bolt of the machine gun and loudly barked in a commanding voice (where did that come from): “Smir-r-r-na!!! - and introduced himself. - Commander of the SMERSH unit, number 12-13, Major Potapov!!! I order you to immediately report to headquarters and report to your superiors about your disgraceful behavior!.. I’ll check!.. Crr-r-r-ug!.. March!.. Run!..
Oh, that fatal word SMERSH. It worked flawlessly. We all froze in fear when we heard him.
The quartermaster ran away, dousing me with the disgusting stench of wine fumes...

But there were also mistakes:

"We also had more cultural fun. Performances began in the theater. I was at Madama Butterfly, but the performances and scenery turned out to be provincially mediocre. The hall was filled with our soldiers. They laughed in the most inappropriate places. For some reason, the tragic scene of the heroine’s suicide was accompanied by friendly laughter... After the performance, walking along the stalls, I noticed that the Germans were diligently walking around one place, averting their eyes to the side. The major was sitting there, dead drunk, with his head resting on the back of the front seat. A huge puddle of vomit spread under his feet.

Military girls attacked foreign junk. I'm tired of wearing a uniform, but there are such beautiful things all around! But it wasn't always safe to dress up. One day the signalmen put on bright dresses, high-heeled shoes and walked down the street, happy and beaming. Towards a group of drunken soldiers:
- Yeah! Fravas!! Com! - and dragged the girls into the gateway.
- Yes, we are Russians, ours, ah! Ay!
- We don’t give a damn! good stuff!!!
The soldiers did not understand who they were dealing with, and the girls drank the cup that fell to many German women. "

Semyon Isakovich Simkin:

Civilian Germans were killed extremely rarely, although if I remember, I saw them a couple of times scary picture... After the infantry you go, and there are Germans, entire families lying dead, a woman’s hem is pulled down and a pitchfork is stuck there. Even we, artillerymen, had a case when several civilians were killed, without reason or investigation. (...)

And if one of the front-line soldiers who served on the front line in the infantry or in tank units says that in his unit, in Germany, there were no cases of violence and looting, he simply either does not say anything or hides the truth. Be it “in small things” or “in big ways” - all this happened. I will say one thing, this whole mess stopped in May of '45. Another sore subject is violence against women... Both young girls and fifty-year-old aunts were raped. All our animal instincts in Germany came out. And it’s not even about our low culture. The psychology of a victorious soldier plus a fierce hatred of the Germans. It was then that we became generous and indulgent...

I spoke German, so I was a “delegate” from the platoon for peace negotiations with the German girls. You go up to a German woman and say, “Kom shpatziren,” and she already knows what she’s talking about. Some of them came to the soldiers themselves! But I also witnessed wild gang rapes. I was disdainful of being tenth in line, but I saw everything. Nobody betrayed anyone, there was a group guarantee. The commanders could not do anything with us, and they themselves “had” German women without a twinge of conscience. What happened, happened.

Rape in Germany and Poland led to an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, which was only managed by the end of the 40s. From Nikulin's book:

Faced with an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, doctors were at first confused. There are few medicines, and even fewer specialists. Tripper was treated in a barbaric way: several cubes of milk were injected into the patient’s buttock, an abscess formed, and the temperature rose above forty degrees. The bacillus, as you know, cannot tolerate such heat. Then the abscess was treated. Sometimes it helped. It was worse with syphilitics. I was told that they were gathered in the city of Neyrupin in a special camp and were kept behind barbed wire for some time, waiting for medicines that did not yet exist.

Looking ahead, it should be said that after two or three years our medicine brilliantly coped with this unexpected and difficult task. By the end of the forties, venereal diseases had practically disappeared, crippling, of course, the body and soul of those who went through them, and often their family... I saw a kind of beginning of the struggle of doctors against this scourge in Germany.

One day at dawn in the vicinity of Schwerin I met a huge column of young women. Crying and wailing were heard in the air. There was despair on the faces of the German women. The words sounded:

- Nah Zibir! Nah Zibir!

Indifferent soldiers urged on those lagging behind.
- What is this? — I asked the old guard in horror. -Where are they, poor guy?
- Why are they yelling in vain, fools, it’s good for them! We are taking you by order of the commandant for a preventative examination!..
I was delighted with our humanism! The soldiers chanted:

Varum you didn't come, der abend was
And a fine wasser drizzled from the sky...

Romanov Efim Mikhailovich:

G.K. - Relations with the local population in Eastern Europe were not always good?
E.R. - There were serious problems with the local population only in Hungary.
The Magyars hated us, and, to be honest, sometimes there was a reason for it.

And ours, by the way, “reciprocated” them. I myself heard a couple of times from infantrymen “stories” of how our soldiers rape Magyars. For example, they said something like this. They will put up a “combat guard”, so to speak, “at the attack”, and the whole platoon will advance, and a single officer will not get involved with a drunken crowd and will not climb with a pistol in his hand to “protect the local population”, since he will easily be shot in the back by his own same.

Fedotov Nikolay Stepanovich:

- You met with Wehrmacht veterans. Tell us how the communication went?
- The first major meeting with the Germans took place in 1993, about a hundred of them came to Volgograd. (...)
And at the meeting the Germans said that our soldiers raped their women, their wives. I answered them, and not only me, those who were in Germany also said: “Take our soldier whose whole family was hanged, burned, how should he treat you?” I said that I knew such guys, they did not take prisoners, they did not spare civilians, the only thing was that they did not raise a hand against children. “And why should we protect the honor of your women?” I say to the German: “Put yourself in his place, what would you do?” - “Yavol, ferstein.” Here are some examples.
(...) I was at a conference in Moscow, and there one German said that 100,000 German women were raped in Germany. Has anyone here calculated such a figure? It was, of course, to be honest, and to be honest, this figure may be underestimated.

We had an incident during the fighting in Berlin. The high-rise building had a basement below, and everyone was hiding there. We never shot civilians, except for those who took revenge; there was a hospital in that basement. We burst in and fired a burst of machine gun fire into the ceiling; some were wounded, some raised their arms, some raised their legs. The infantry ran after us, and there was a nurse there, a German woman, in a white robe and cap, with a red cross. The infantryman grabbed her by the hand, with a machine gun in the other hand, dragged her somewhere into a corner and raped her, right there.
Halfway to Berlin, orders began to be read out, for looting, for rape - a tribunal. They began to shoot, demote, they removed orders, even Gold Stars. But you still can’t keep track of everyone.

Barakov Vasily Alexandrovich:

- What was the hooliganism?
- (laughs) German women were raped. Certainly. We were warned not to let this happen. How will you keep the soldiers? But everyone is running. In passing. They are clean. Ours are “peat” after all. In sweatshirts, scarves, etc. And the German young ladies. Neat. But that’s how it was there. Not one at a time.

XIII. About the pistol grip.
We broke into the South Station. And the population fled from the city past the station into the gap between us and the Germans. And so we wander around the station. Someone found beer in the basement. There was a restaurant there after all. The storage rooms are broken. All sorts of junk is lying around. Suitcases inside out. Soldiers walk, they are thrown, abandoned. And then a couple runs in. Germans. Man and woman. And then there’s reconnaissance and all sorts of other things. Everyone is on the prowl. Yes, tipsy. At first everyone froze. Come to your senses, grab this German woman. The husband intervened: “Mein Frau, mein Frau.” One officer hit him in the forehead with a handle. Bach. Blood flowed. They tore her away from him and dragged her into the room. Closed. The rest of the brethren are standing in line. People came running. Well. War! Some party organizer rolled up. How he started to make noise. Everyone ran away. The party organizer left. Everyone lined up again. Like rats from holes. The German woman is crying.

One day, after the war, my daughter read an article by a German officer in a magazine. He described how the soldiers committed outrages during the storming of Koenigsberg. There was no such thing in the press then. She asked: "Dad, is this true?" - Is it true.

But when they came to us, they also did this. Well. And even worse. There were atrocities, needless to say. During the assault, we run past the store with the division chief of staff. The windows are broken, the door is broken. Someone is shouting from there. We're right inside. There the soldiers grabbed the German woman. Clothes are torn. She's wearing glasses. So tall. Her eyes widened. Vicious. We've arrived. She saw the chief of staff and shouted: “Schweine. Russishe shweine.” (Pigs. Russian pigs. - German. Note by S.S.). He took out the gun and shot. They all jumped away. During war, a person becomes callous, cruel, and merciless.

Or Pillau was stormed. They caught a German woman in the basement. She squirms and squeals something. I say: “At least ask what she’s squealing.” He asked. “Ten people have already passed. How many can you?” They let me go.

Polubanov Gennady Borisovich

G.K. - Did the local German civilian population also suffer?
G.P. - Only at first... When the city of Gleiwitz was captured, we were given a rest for three days, in other words - do what you want. And in the city, every street is full of shops untouched by the war, stocked with food and alcohol.
So those who did not have any “moral brakes” began to rob and rape German women. We had such a senior sergeant, commander of the communications department Bogachev, so in every city we captured, he raped women. The political officer, in front of whose eyes the sergeant was raping another German woman, decided to intervene and told Bogachev: “Stop it!”, but the division commander Khlopov stopped the political officer: “You, captain, mind your own business. This is his well-deserved trophy!”...

Koryakin Yuri Ivanovich

Before crossing the border with Germany in the Bromberg area (Bydgoszcz), the company political officer came to a meeting and said the following: “We are entering German territory. We know that the Germans have brought untold troubles to our land, so we are entering their territory to punish the Germans I ask you not to come into contact with the local population, so that you don’t get into trouble and don’t go alone. Well, as for the women’s issue, you can deal with German women quite freely, but it doesn’t look organized. 1-2 people went, did what was necessary (he said: “What is necessary.”), returned and that’s it. Any causeless harm to Germans and German women is unacceptable and will be punished.” From this conversation, we felt that he himself did not know exactly what standards of behavior he should adhere to.

Of course, we were all under the influence of propaganda, which at that time did not distinguish between Germans and Nazis. The attitude towards German women (we almost never saw German men) was free, even rather vindictive. I know a lot of cases where German women were raped, but not killed. In our regiment, the sergeant major started almost a whole harem. He had food resources. So German women lived with him, whom he took advantage of and treated others to. A couple of times, entering houses, I saw murdered old people. Once, when we entered the house, we saw someone lying under the blanket on the bed. Throwing back the blanket I saw a German woman with a bayonet in her chest.

Leonid Nikolaevich Rabichev From the book "War will write off everything. Memoirs of a signal officer of the 31st Army. 1941-1945"

I was daydreaming, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls walked through the open gate. There is no fear in the eyes, but terrible anxiety. They saw me, ran up and, interrupting each other, tried to explain something to me in German. Although I don’t know the language, I hear the words “muter”, “vater”, “bruder”....

Major A. is standing on the steps of the house, and two sergeants twisted their arms, bent those same two girls into three deaths, and on the contrary - the entire headquarters staff - drivers, orderlies, clerks, messengers.
- Nikolaev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov... - Major A commands. - Take the girls by the arms and legs, down with their skirts and blouses! Form into two lines! Unfasten your belts, lower your pants and underpants! Right and left, one at a time, start!

A. commands, and my signalmen and my platoon run up the stairs from the house and line up in ranks. And the two girls “saved” by me are lying on ancient stone slabs, their hands are in a vice, their mouths are stuffed with scarves, their legs are spread - they are no longer trying to escape from the hands of four sergeants, and the fifth is tearing and tearing their blouses, bras, skirts, and panties to pieces. My telephone operators ran out of the house - laughing and swearing.

But the ranks do not decrease, some rise, others descend, and there are already pools of blood around the martyrs, and there is no end to the ranks, cackling and swearing. The girls are already unconscious, and the orgy continues.

Major A is in command, proudly akimbo. But then the last one rises, and the executioner-sergeants pounce on the two half-corpses.
Major A. pulls out a revolver from his holster and shoots into the bloody mouths of the martyrs, and the sergeants drag their mutilated bodies into the pigsty, and the hungry pigs begin to tear off their ears, noses, chests, and after a few minutes only two skulls, bones, and vertebrae remain. . I'm scared, disgusted.

And here are the results of German investigations:

The Soviet 91st Guards Rifle Division, which broke through Tirenberg into the Krattlau-Germau area, was surrounded and partially defeated on February 7, 1945. heavy battles. Captured by her populated areas were installed gross violations international law. In Tierenberg, 21 German soldiers were killed, driven there from a shelter for military invalids near Sorgenau.

Elisabeth Homfeld was raped and, along with her son-in-law, shot in the head, as was Minna Kottke, who tried to resist the rape, and the son of the tenant of the priest's estate, Ernst Trunz. A grenade thrown into a barn killed three women and a man locked there, and seriously injured several people.

At the same time, Soviet officers and soldiers later admitted in captivity that they continuously and “brutally” raped women and even young girls. In Krattlau, soldiers of the 275th Guards rifle regiment The 91st Guards Rifle Division killed 6 men and two German soldiers with bayonets or shots to the head. All women and girls, including 13-year-olds, were raped continuously; some women were “sexually assaulted by 6-8 soldiers, 5-8 times a day.” 3-4 of the youngest women were left to the officers, who, after the completion of the criminal violence, handed them over to their subordinates. In Annenthal, German liberators found the corpses of two women, who were desecrated (one on a dung heap) and then strangled.

Detailed investigations were carried out in Germau, where, after all, the headquarters of the 91st Guards Rifle Division and the headquarters with units of the 275th Guards Rifle Regiment were located. In Germau, the corpses of 21 murdered men, women and children were discovered. 11 people could not bear the monstrous torture and committed suicide. 15 German wounded were killed by smashing their heads, and one of them had a harmonica forced into his mouth. According to the report of Medical Captain Dr. Toltsien, one female body had the following injuries: a through shot to the head, crushing of the left shin, a wide open cut wound on the inside of the left shin, a large open wound on the outside of the left thigh, inflicted with a knife. The other woman, like the naked young girl, had the back of her head crushed. A married couple, the Retkovskys, a married couple, the Sprengels, with 3 children, a young woman with 2 children, and an unknown Pole were found killed. In the common grave lay the bodies of an unknown refugee, Rosa Til, née Witte, and a 21-year-old Polish girl - all three were brutally murdered after rape, then the bodies of two local artisans, one of whom, the miller Magun, was shot because he was trying to protect rape of his young daughter.

Two girls were found near the Germau-Palmnikken road [now Yantarny, Russia], near the 5-kilometer sign. Both were shot in the head at close range, one had her eyes gouged out. The female population of Germau, about 400 women and girls, by order of the commander of the 91st Guards Rifle Division, Colonel Koshanov, was locked in the church, supposedly (so, in any case, the prisoner of war Major Kostikov claimed) to protect them from atrocities. However, Soviet officers and soldiers broke into the church and carried out “mass rape” in the choir. And in the surrounding houses in the following days, women were continuously raped, mostly by officers, young girls - up to 22 times a night; An officer and several Red Army soldiers raped 13-year-old Eva Link 8 times in a church bell tower in front of her desperate mother, who then suffered the same fate.

* * * *

Why is it now being told that none of this happened? Although it is obvious that it happened, that it could not have happened any other way?

Because our country has since become holy. It propelled us to mass holiness, to world-historical significance precisely because of holiness.

Even when bombs fall on Syria, not a single civilian is killed. All other countries are killing civilians, although they carry out targeted and drone strikes. And ours are dropping high-explosive bombs from 6,000 meters in height, carpet bombing cities, and at least one civilian will be hurt.

We don’t even treat anyone with polonium-210, although they are very happy that the traitor died such a painful death. He himself died, of course, without our help. The traitor probably poured polonium-210 into his own tea.

Our Holy Country, led by the Saint, His Eminence, a model of holiness from the Malyshevo organized crime group. Never a single crime, from 1917 to 2016. All the ideals of humanity, chastity, and humanism.

What kind of rape can happen at 44-45? We are not even familiar with the word “rape”. Just like the word “theft,” however.

*Memories of veterans from here

Rape during armed conflicts always has military-psychological significance as a means of intimidation and demoralization of the enemy. At the same time, violence against women acted as a manifestation of sexist (i.e. purely male) and racist syndromes, especially strong in large-scale stressful situations.

War violence is different from rape committed in peacetime. Sexual violence during war or armed conflict can have a double meaning if it occurs on a large scale. It serves not only to humiliate the individual who experiences it, but also to demonstrate to the people of the enemy state that its political leaders and army are unable to protect them. Therefore, such acts of violence, unlike those carried out in everyday life, occur not secretly, but publicly, often even with the forced presence of other people.

In general, there are three features that distinguish military sexual violence from rape committed in peacetime. The first is a public act.. The enemy must see what is happening to his “property,” which is why rapists often rape women in front of their own home. This is an act against the husband (symbolically the father of the nation or the leader of the enemy), and not an act against the woman. The second is gang rape.. Comrades in arms do it in one agreement: everyone must be like the others. This reflects the constant group need to strengthen and reproduce solidarity. In other words, drink together, hang out together, rape together. The third is the murder of a woman after sexual assault.

Documents available to researchers indicate mass violence against women in the occupied territories by Wehrmacht soldiers. However, it is difficult to determine the real scale of sexual crime during the war caused by the occupiers on the territory of the USSR: primarily due to the lack of generalizing sources. In addition, in Soviet era This problem was not emphasized and no records were kept of such victims. Certain statistical data could be provided by women's visits to doctors, but they did not seek help from doctors, fearing the condemnation of society.

Back in January 1942, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Molotov noted: “There are no boundaries to the people’s anger and indignation, which are caused in the Soviet population and in the Red Army by countless facts of vile violence, vile mockery of women’s honor and mass murders of Soviet citizens and women, which are committed by fascist German officers and soldiers... Everywhere, brutal German bandits break into houses, rape women and girls in front of their relatives and their children, mock the raped...".

On the Eastern Front, group sexual violence against women was quite common among Wehrmacht soldiers. But not only German soldiers did this during the years of occupation; their allies did not disdain such behavior. The Hungarian military especially “distinguished itself” in this, according to witnesses of the occupation. The Soviet partisans did not remain aloof from such crimes.

In Lvov in 1941, 32 garment factory workers were raped and then killed by German stormtroopers. Drunk soldiers dragged Lviv girls and young women into the park named after. Kosciuszko was raped. Jewish women had to endure terrible scenes of sexual humiliation during the pogrom on July 1, 1941 in Lvov. The angry crowd stopped at nothing; women and girls were stripped and driven in their underwear through the streets of the city, which, of course, humiliated their dignity and caused, in addition to physical, psychological trauma. For example, eyewitnesses recounted the following incident: participants in the pogroms stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish girl, stuck a baton in her vagina, and forced her to march past the post office to the prison on Lontskogo Street, where “prison work” was being carried out at that time.

The mass rape of women and girls in the villages of Galicia is mentioned in the report of the Ukrainian rebels for October 1943: “ On October 21, 1943, pacification began in the Dolynshchina. The pacification is carried out by the Sondereinsat SD department of 100 people, composed exclusively of Uzbeks under the leadership of the security police officer in the Valley, the Pole Jarosz. The Uzbek department arrived at about 16:00 in the evening in the village of Pogorilets and started a terrible shooting and wanted to catch people. People began to run wherever they could. All the men ran into the forest. The Uzbeks rushed to the farms and began to shoot and catch chickens and geese, and search from house to house for butter, cheese, eggs, meat and, first of all, moonshine, then they forced the women to cook and bring food to them. After eating well and drinking moonshine, they caught the girls. They raped them where they caught them. There were several cases of rape in the presence of relatives, who were forced to stand in the corners, and their brutal instincts were poured out on their daughters in the most refined way. It is impossible to know the number of rape cases, since everyone is embarrassed to confess. Similar pacification was carried out in the villages: Ilemnya, Grabov and Lopyanka" The reasons for such actions were cited by the rebels as the small number of people willing to go to Germany from these villages and the actions of partisans in the region.

No less horrific scenes of sexual violence were carried out in Western Ukraine by Soviet partisans. This is evidenced by many reports of UPA detachments, however, to illustrate the rape of women by Red partisans, it is still worth citing Soviet sources - they are reliable and, most importantly, objective, because UPA reports and the memories of witnesses to a certain extent could “bend” in this aspect. Documents of the “Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement” indicate sexual violence over the civilian population by the “people's avengers.” An interesting point: in the reports of partisan formations stationed in the Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kiev regions there are few references to the rape of women; they begin to appear with rare frequency during raids in Western Ukraine. This is explained by the attitude of Soviet partisans towards this politically “unreliable” region and the unfriendly perception of the Soviets on the part of the local population. The vast majority of Galicians considered them enemies and supported the Ukrainian rebels. One should not discount the fact that the partisans during the raid were not too worried about their reputation; they understood that, apparently, they would not soon return to the scenes of their crimes. Being in the same territory, it is worth thinking about establishing normal relations with the population in order to be able to receive food or clothing from them. During the raid, all this could have been taken by force.

Sexual violence is described quite thoroughly in a report by former partisans of the formation named after. Budyonny V. Buslaev and N. Sidorenko addressed to the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR S. Savchenko. The document states, in particular: “ In the village of Dubovki, near Tarnopol, a woman aged 40-45 was raped by partisans Gardonov, Panasyuk, Mezentsev, detachment commander Bubnov and others. The victim's last name is unknown. In the village of Verkhobuzh, near Brody, sergeant-major Mezentsev tried to rape a 65-year-old girl and her mother, took her out into the street at night and demanded consent at gunpoint. He put him against the wall and fired a machine gun over their heads, after which he raped him... In one village, I don’t remember the name, near Snyatin, foreman Mezentsev, getting drunk, pulled out a pistol and tried to rape a girl who ran away, then he raped her grandmother, who was 60 -65 years old... The platoon commander Pavel Bublik personally incited the soldiers to do this, was engaged in selling horses for vodka, which he took back before leaving... He systematically drank, carried out illegal searches on his own and demanded vodka from the population. He always did this with weapons in his hands, shooting in apartments, intimidating the population. In the village of Biskov (in the Carpathian Mountains) in the apartment of the formation headquarters, the headquarters cook shot through the windows, kitchen utensils and the ceiling because he wanted to rape the owner, but she ran away. After which he made his need on the table... The robberies were carried out, of course, during searches under the pretext of whether there were “spies” or “Banderaites”, and searches, as a rule, were carried out in places where there could be watches and other valuables. Things like watches, razors, rings, and expensive suits were simply taken away without appeal. The population usually knew about the approach of our partisan formation 30-40 km away. And in last days one could come across villages left with only grandfathers, or even empty houses».

Of course, the leadership of the NKVD demanded an explanation from the command of the Budennovsky formation. In the report, the commander of the “For Kyiv” detachment, Captain Makarov, explained everything simply. He denies all the facts, and accuses the partisans who wrote the note of treason (the complainants left the detachment and went to the rear of the Red Army) and connections with Bandera. By the way, this is a fairly common type of response from commanders of partisan detachments if they are accused of looting, drunkenness or sexual violence. (It’s a paradox - it turned out that Makarov did not suspect that there were two Banderaites in his detachment, and “he saw the light” only when they wrote a memo about violations in the unit). The matter was probably hushed up. At least, it was not possible to trace its further course due to the lack of documents indicating the punishments imposed on the defendants.

As we see, during the war, women often became victims of rape by soldiers of the opposing sides. In the post-war period, it was very difficult for them to return to a full life. After all, in the USSR they did not receive proper medical care; in cases of pregnancy, they could not get rid of the fetus - in the Soviet Union, abortion was prohibited by law. Many, unable to bear it, committed suicide; some moved to another place of residence, thus trying to protect themselves from gossip or people’s sympathy and try to forget what they had experienced.

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

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

Long before the army approached the enemy border, passing along the tormented occupiers native land, seeing tortured women and children, burned 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 enemy territory. And when this happened, there were - could not help but be - psychological breakdowns, especially among those who lost their relatives and their homes.

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

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

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

According to the recipes of Dr. Goebbels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, K. Eggert, in the article “Memory and Truth,” written in 2005 for the BBC project for the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, wrote: “When Anthony Beevor’s book “The Fall” was first published in London in 2002 Berlin" (now translated in Russia by AST publishing house), 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 liberated Poland, East Prussia and in Berlin itself. Historians from the Russian Academy of Sciences condemned the book “The Fall of Berlin” almost before the ambassador. Meanwhile, the reference apparatus of Beevor's book in in perfect order: incoming and outgoing report numbers, folder, shelf, and so on. That is, you cannot accuse a writer of lying." 7

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

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

The bodies of Soviet citizens hanged by the Germans during the occupation of Volokolamsk. Moscow region, winter 1941
In his book, he writes: “Berliners remember the piercing screams at night that were heard in houses with broken windows. According to estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women were raped in Berlin alone. Moreover, about ten thousand of them died mainly as a result of suicide.

The number of deaths throughout East Germany is apparently much higher if one takes into account the one million four hundred thousand raped people in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. It appears that about two million German women were raped, many of whom (if not most) suffered this humiliation several times.”6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information war in electronic media

A real information war has unfolded on the Russian-language Internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of hatred, the limits of revenge

However, the morality of war is completely different from the morality of peacetime. And those events can only be assessed in a general historical context, without separating, and certainly not replacing, cause and effect. One cannot equate the victim of aggression with the aggressor, especially one whose goal was the destruction of entire nations. Fascist Germany itself placed itself outside morality and outside the law. Is it any wonder at the acts of spontaneous revenge on the part of those whose loved ones she coldly and methodically destroyed over the course of several years in the most sophisticated and savage ways?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acts of revenge were inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As one of numerous examples policy statements of the German leadership, we quote the Decree of Hitler as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht of May 13, 1941 on military proceedings in the war with Soviet Union: “Actions against enemy civilians committed by members of the Wehrmacht and civilians will not be subject to mandatory prosecution, even if the act constitutes a war crime or misdemeanor... A judge orders military prosecution of acts against local residents only when it comes to non-compliance with military regulations. discipline or the emergence of a threat to the safety of troops” 33.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to the Russians who have great experience combating similar problems in their own devastated cities, the spread of epidemics was brought under control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the report of the Deputy Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army Shikin to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to G.F. Alexandrov dated April 30, 1945, about the attitude of the civilian population of Berlin towards the personnel of the Red Army troops it was said: “As soon as our units occupy one or another area of ​​the city , residents begin to gradually take to the streets, almost all of them have white bands on their sleeves. When meeting our military personnel, many women raise their hands up, cry and shake with fear, but as soon as they are convinced that the soldiers and officers of the Red Army are not at all what their fascist propaganda portrayed them to be, this fear quickly passes, more and more more population goes out onto the streets and offers his services, trying in every possible way to emphasize his loyal attitude to the Red Army” 39.

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

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

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

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

Ally behavior: “women as prey”

In the West, the thesis about the “atrocities” of the Red Army in the territory it occupied in Germany is constantly being discussed. Meanwhile, documents show that in the western zones of occupation there was by no means that idyll, the image of which is now instilled in the German and indeed the entire Western consciousness. Eisenhower's radio message "We Come Victorious!" quite clearly implied both “the right of the victors” and “woe to the vanquished.”

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

The black units especially distinguished themselves.

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

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

Interesting evidence was left by the Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944-1945. was in Europe in the ranks of the 3rd American Army under the command of George Paton. His diaries and newspaper articles formed the basis of the book "Conquerors" Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945, which contains many unflattering characteristics of the behavior of American soldiers in defeated Germany. The book was written back in 1945 g., but then the publishers refused to publish it because of its criticism of the Allied occupation policy. It was published only at the end of the 20th century.

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

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