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I'm a specialist on china, and no expert on European history. but wonder how you think.

Red Army rapists exposed

By Chris Summers

BBC News Online

Red Army soldiers raped two million German women, and thousands of

Soviet women in occupied Eastern Europe, says a book published on

Monday. (...)

The author of Berlin: The Downfall 1945, the acclaimed military

historian Antony Beevor, also suggests that after brutalisation in

extreme war situations almost all men are tempted to become rapists.

But the book has been condemned as an "act of blasphemy" by the

Russian ambassador to the UK and its conclusions have also been

rejected by a prominent Russian military historian.

Mr Beevor, whose previous book Stalingrad became a best-seller, says

in Berlin alone it was estimated up to 130,000 women were raped, of

whom up to 10,000 committed suicide.

Altogether two million German women are believed to have been raped

and almost half of those suffered gang rape.

One woman was raped by 23 soldiers.

...

The professor said 4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were

"punished" for committing atrocities.

Professor Evan Mawdsley, a historian from Glasgow University, said it

was not the first time women had become "carnal booty" in time of war.

Professor Richard Overy, a historian from King's College London, said

the Russians had never faced up to the atrocities committed by the

Red Army.

He said: "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was

justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and

partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... world.html

It was not until the winter of 1946-47 that the Soviet authorities, concerned by the spread of disease, imposed serious penalties on their forces in East Germany for fraternising with the enemy.

Soviet soldiers saw rape, often carried out in front of a woman's husband and family, as an appropriate way of humiliating the Germans, who had treated Slavs as an inferior race with whom sexual relations were discouraged. Russia's patriarchal society and the habit of binge-drinking were also factors, but more important was resentment at the discovery of Germany's comparative wealth.

The fact, highlighted by Beevor, that Soviet troops raped not only Germans but also their victims, recently liberated from concentration camps, suggests that the sexual violence was often indiscriminate, although far fewer Russian or Polish women were raped when their areas were liberated compared to the conquered Germans.

Jews, however, were not necessarily regarded by Soviet troops as fellow victims of the Nazis. The Soviet commissars had commandeered German concentration camps in order to incarcerate their own political prisoners, who included "class enemies" as well as Nazi officials, and their attitude towards the previous inmates was, to say the least, unsentimental.

As for the millions of Russian prisoners or slave workers who survived the Nazis: those who were not executed as traitors or sent to the Gulag could count themselves lucky. The women among them were probably treated no better than the Germans, perhaps worse.

The rape of Germany left a bitter legacy. It contributed to the unpopularity of the East German communist regime and its consequent reliance on the Stasi secret police. The victims themselves were permanently traumatised: women of the wartime generation still refer to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as "the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist".

http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs9512d.html

As the Red Army advanced toward her in 1945, the city of Berlin had become a city virtually without men. Out of a civilian population of 2,700,000, 2,000,000 were women. It is small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Doctors were besieged by patients seeking information on the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.

In Berlin stood a charity institution, the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital, and foundling home. Soviet soldiers entered the home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth. This was not an isolated incident. No one will ever know how many women were raped, but doctors' estimates run as high as 100,000 for the city of Berlin alone, their ages ranging from 10 to 70.

On March 24, 1945, our "noble Soviet allies" entered Danzig. A 50-year-old Danzig teacher reported that her niece, 15, was raped seven times, and her other niece, 22, was raped fifteen times. A Soviet officer told a group of women to seek safety in the Cathedral. Once they were securely locked inside, the beasts of Bolshevism entered, and ringing the bells and playing the organ, "celebrated" a foul orgy through the night, raping all the women, some more than thirty times. A Catholic pastor in Danzig declared, "They violated even eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers."

The Most Reverend Bernard Griffin, British Archbishop, made a tour of Europe to study conditions there, and reported, "In Vienna alone they raped 100,000 women, not once but many times, including girls not yet in their teens, and aged women."

A Lutheran pastor in Germany, in a letter of August 7, 1945, to the Bishop of Chichester, England, describes how a fellow pastor's "two daughters and a grandchild (ten years of age) suffer from gonorrhea, [as a] result of rape" and how "Mrs. N. was killed when she resisted an attempt to rape her," while her daughter was "raped and deported, allegedly to Omsk, Siberia, for indoctrination."

The day after our noble Soviet allies conquered Neisse, Silesia, 182 Catholic nuns were raped. In the diocese of Kattowitz 66 pregnant nuns were counted. In one convent when the Mother Superior and her assistant tried to protect the younger nuns with outstretched arms, they were shot down. A priest reported in Nord Amerika magazine for November 1, 1945, that he knew "several villages where all the women, even the aged and girls as young as twelve, were violated daily for weeks by the Russians."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,36 ... 35,00.html

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight."

One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.

25 million Russian people were killed by the Nazis in WW2.

How about the rape by the invading Nazis, rape of a nation. How about the actions of the Japanese in their invasion of China?

Atrocities in war are a fact of life. Rape is commonplace. Wrong, but commonplace. What is NOT so common is the behaviour of the Japanese in their invasion of China, a country populated by their idea of ‘untermenschen’. As an ‘expert’ on China maybe you would care to comment on that?

If anything it is the moderation shown by the invading Russian troops after what had been done by the Nazis and was so obvious as the Russian troops advanced through their decimated towns and villages is what is really worth recognition.

Then of course the Allies have such clean hands don’t they.

Maybe not.

“The [American] army's policy was to starve [German] prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy college in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that "it is our policy that these men not be fed." The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, "If you do that again, you'll be shot." Brech saw bodies go out of the camp "by the truckload" but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.”

Check out ‘Rhine Meadow Camps’ (Rheinwiesenlager) especially Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, , Heidesheim, Rheinberg, Wickrathberg, Büderich and off course Remagen-Sinzig, they were the most infamous German POW killing fields.

The Maschke Commission estimated some 5,000 deaths had taken place of German POW’s through either neglect or deliberate acts by allied forces, especially the Americans, though there is very good and oft repeated anecdotal evidence that the number may exceed 50,000 as a result of ill treatment BY THE ALLIES at these camps of German POW’s. Eisenhower’s orders were well executed.

Now I more than most have no love of Nazis and so have no fish to fry, but this bit of history along with what the Russian people suffered under the Nazi attacks should be added to balance and maybe put into perspective rapes (including the numbers claimed) and other attacks on civilians made by advancing Russian troops.

Japanese atrocities and inhumane mass rapes in china are much already advertized and documented. I believe it is not my task to demonstrate, because there are thousands of people who are eager to expose the crimes. But if you like, I can cite one exmaple. During Nanking rapes, 20000 women are estimated to be raped for six weeks, and almost all of them are said to be killed after the rapes.

I don't how you came up the figure of 25 million death tolls by Nazi German. Figures I got mostly mentioned about 20 million died. I'd appreciate if you can post some extracts on German atrocities in former USSR territory, because I couldn't find one.

There’s many sources available even on the Web – here’s one that quotes 25,568,000 soviet war dead.

http://www.threeworldwars.com/world-war-overview.htm

and again ---

http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/casualty.html

whereas

http://www.world-war-2.info/statistics/

shows 29,000,000 killed.

Look around and you’ll find some that quote far more by including deaths internal to the USSR as a result of secondary effects etc that push the grand total as far as 40,000,000 plus, but these figures are in my opinion somewhat speculative whereas the 25,000,000 is entirely believable not least for the number of sources that show the same.

I wonder for example how many people realise that 80% of the male Russians born in 1923 didn’t even survive WW2, or that the Russians destroyed over 500 German aircraft by ramming them in midair or that they sometimes cleared minefields by deliberately and knowingly marching over them.

Possibly of greater significance than the obscenely huge number of dead is the manner in which so many died. The contemporary reports from Stalingrad are quite literally horrifying. The brutality, there is no other word for it, of the Germans set the agenda for the Russian response more than anything and in the end the German sixth army was destroyed with total casualties from both sides amounting to 2 000,000 souls.

And that was just one city.

Then there were the towns, the villages, the farms, in short the whole country populated as it was by ‘Untermenshen’. You want German atrocities? We got plenty. The wonder is not that there was retribution taken by advancing Russian soldiers, the wonder is that there were any Germans left after the advance.

All of these atrocities were part of the evil design of the 20th century counter reformation.

Please read the blog:

"continuing counter reformation"