Legacy of Rape

RED ARMY TROOPS RAPED EVEN RUSSIAN WOMEN AS THEY FREED THEM
FROM CAMPS
By Daniel Johnson
The Telegraph
January 24, 2002

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/2
4/wbeev24.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/24/ixworld.html

The Red Army's orgy of rape in the dying days of Nazi Germany
was conducted on a much greater scale than previously
suspected, according to a new book by the military historian
Anthony Beevor.

Beevor, the author of the best-selling Stalingrad, says
advancing Soviet troops raped large numbers of Russian and
Polish women held in concentration camps, as well as millions
of Germans.

The extent of the Red Army's indiscipline and depravity
emerged as the author studied Soviet archives for his
forthcoming book Berlin, to be published in April by Viking.

Beevor - who was educated at Sandhurst and served in the 11th
Hussars (Prince Albert's Own), an elite cavalry regiment -
says details of the Soviet soldiers' behaviour have forced him
to revise his view of human nature.

"Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that
most men are potential rapists, I had to come to the
conclusion that if there is a lack of army discipline, most
men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three
years of war, do become potential rapists," he told The
Bookseller.

He appears to echo the American feminist Marilyn French's
notorious claim that "in their relations with women, all men
are rapists, and that's all they are".

Any such resemblance is, however, superficial. Beevor is
careful to qualify any suggestion that what happened from 1944
onwards is in any way typical of male behaviour in peacetime.
But he admits that he was "shaken to the core" to discover
that Russian and Polish women and girls liberated from
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concentration camps were also violated.
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"That completely undermined the notion that the soldiers were
using rape as a form of revenge against the Germans," he said.

"By the time the Russians reached Berlin, soldiers were
regarding women almost as carnal booty; they felt because they
were liberating Europe they could behave as they pleased. That
is very frightening, because one starts to realise that
civilisation is terribly superficial and the facade can be
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stripped away in a very short time."
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Beevor's high reputation as a historian ensures that his
claims will be taken seriously. Stalingrad was widely praised
and awarded the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson
Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize.

...

Against this horrific background, Stalin and his commanders
condoned or even justified rape, not only against Germans but
also their allies in Hungary, Romania and Croatia. When the
Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas protested to Stalin, the
dictator exploded: "Can't he understand it if a soldier who
has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and
death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"

And when German Communists warned him that the rapes were
turning the population against them, Stalin fumed: "I will not
allow anyone to drag the reputation of the Red Army in the
mud."

The rapes had begun as soon as the Red Army entered East
Prussia and Silesia in 1944. In many towns and villages every
female, aged from 10 to 80, was raped. Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
the Nobel laureate who was then a young officer, described the
horror in his narrative poem Prussian Nights: "The little
daughter's on the mattress,/Dead. How many have been on it/A
platoon, a company perhaps?"

[etc - article continues at length]