Освободители Германии

20 January 2015

THE LIBERATORS OF GERMANY

The myth that millions of German women were raped by Red Army soldiers is spread by liars, argues Oleg Nazarov, a member of the Zinoviev Club.

© Photo: from the archive of the Alexander Zinoviev Biographical Institute
Oleg Nazarov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, member of the Zinoviev Club of the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency

Seventy years ago, in January 1945, Red Army soldiers crossed the German border. If Western propaganda is to be believed, the moment they found themselves on German soil they began robbing and killing civilians. According to the British historian Antony Beevor, in a claim presented as firmly established fact, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers raped two million German women.

From Goebbels to Beevor

Beevor was unable to support his accusation with reliable documents and testimony, replacing them with an emotional flourish: “Berliners remember the piercing screams at night coming from houses with broken windows. According to estimates from two of Berlin's main hospitals, the number of victims raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand. One doctor concluded that in Berlin alone approximately one hundred thousand women had been raped... It appears that altogether around two million German women were raped, many of them — if not most — suffering this humiliation several times.”

Such a large-scale falsification of history would have delighted Joseph Goebbels, whose seeds of falsehood continue to yield rich harvests. Red Army soldiers had barely crossed into Germany when the Third Reich's chief propagandist accused them of mass rapes that he claimed had already taken place: “In individual villages and towns all women from ten to seventy years old were subjected to countless rapes.”

Goebbels's assistant Werner Naumann later admitted that the panic which seized the population had not been caused by the conduct of Red Army soldiers. He stated that “propaganda about the Russians and what the population should expect from them in Berlin was so successful that we brought Berliners to a state of extreme terror.” In that state German women killed themselves and their children. By then Goebbels no longer pitied them either.

The scale of the falsification is striking. Since more than 2.5 million Soviet soldiers and officers operated in the Berlin direction, the British historian attempted to cast suspicion on all of them at once.

Beevor's “calculations” appear convincing only to those who already share his views. Historian Elena Senyavskaya pointed out that Beevor “refers to Helke Sander and Barbara Johr's book Liberators and Liberated, in which the calculations are based not on data from ‘two of Berlin's main hospitals’ but from a single children's clinic; that is, to ‘add solidity’ he commits a quite deliberate distortion. Not to mention that these data themselves are highly doubtful, since Barbara Johr's method is based on an arbitrary extrapolation from the number of children whose fathers were identified as Russians, born in 1945 and 1946 and examined in one Berlin clinic, to the total female population of East Germany...”

One should also take into account that in March 1945 the Nazis lifted the ban on abortions — but not completely: abortions were permitted only if a German woman declared that she had been raped by a foreign soldier.

Assessing Beevor's scholarly methods, military historian Oleg Rzheshevsky noted that they were constructed “as a rule, from general phrases (‘Berliners remember,’ ‘one doctor calculated’) or are given with reference to ‘the experience of raped women.’ Such a method is far removed from the scholarly research to which Beevor lays claim.”

That is putting it mildly. And the figure of two million appears to be one of Beevor's favorites. Just as unsupportedly, he claimed that in 1939–1941 around two million Poles “were deported... to Gulag camps.”

“We will spread our legs”

Alongside the testimony of “one doctor” or “one German woman,” which Beevor cites as if it were the final truth, testimony has survived from people whose names are well known. For the author of this article, the most important and reliable source is the recollection of Alexander Zinoviev, who took part in the liberation of Germany:

“Germany stunned us with its fabulous wealth — fabulous in comparison with our Russian poverty...

“Germany also astonished us with the abundance of readily available women. Practically everyone was available, from twelve-year-old girls to old women.

“Today I sometimes hear that the Soviet army raped German women. To the extent that I knew the actual situation, I can say that this claim is absurd. When we entered Germany, German women had already almost all been raped, if they had resisted at all. And almost all were infected with venereal diseases...

“In one village we were assigned to houses for the night. The owner of the house, an old man, came out to us and offered us his daughter and granddaughter. In his hands was a sheet of paper on which those who had made use of his ‘hospitality’ signed their names. The Germans felt themselves to be accomplices of Hitler and guilty of what the German army had done in the Soviet Union. They expected something similar from the Soviet army and were ready to serve us with anything, first and foremost with the female body.”

Testimony also survives from the enemy camp. Even in old age SS veteran Manfred Diener was indignant that “a Viennese woman, when asked ‘What will you do when the Russians come?’ said: ‘Well, we will spread our legs.’”

There were, the article argues, plenty of Austrian and German women willing to do so. The front-line poet David Samoilov gave the following account:

“In Arendsfeld, where we had just settled in, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by an enormous moustached German woman of about fifty — Frau Friedrich. She announced that she represented the civilian population and asked that the remaining inhabitants be registered. We answered that this could be done once the commandant's office appeared.

“‘That is impossible,’ Frau Friedrich said. ‘There are women and children here. They must be registered.’

“The civilian population confirmed her words with shouting and tears.

“Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they occupy the cellar of the house in which we had settled. Reassured, they went down into the cellar and began arranging themselves there while waiting for the authorities.

“‘Herr Commissar,’ Frau Friedrich said good-naturedly to me — I was wearing a leather jacket — ‘we understand that soldiers have certain small needs. They are ready,’ Frau Friedrich continued, ‘to provide several younger women for...’

“I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich.”

German women, the article continues, also entered into this kind of “cooperation” with soldiers and officers of the Soviet, British, American and French occupation forces for material reasons. Confirmation can even be found in Beevor's book: “At the beginning of May the Brandenburg Gate became the principal center of Berlin's black market... Ursula von Kardorff saw many women there trading their bodies. They offered themselves in exchange for food or cigarettes...”

Other German women preferred close relations with one serviceman — preferably an officer. Such arrangements suited not only the women themselves but also their relatives. The writer Vladimir Gelfand, describing in his diary his courtship of a young German woman, added: “The girl's mother was pleased with me. Of course! On the altar of trust and good will from the family I had laid sweets and butter, sausage and expensive German cigarettes. Even half of these foods is enough to give one the fullest basis and right to do whatever one likes with the daughter before her mother's eyes, and the mother will say nothing against it. For food today is worth more than life itself, even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the tender beauty Margot.”

The behavior of German women, the article concludes, made violence unnecessary...

“It is difficult to write everything we endured”

The soldiers who entered Germany had seen the catastrophic consequences of Nazi occupation. They had traveled from the Volga to the Oder across devastated land, constantly encountering ruined cities, burned villages and wells filled with corpses. Eight kilometers from liberated Kerch, 245 children's bodies were discovered in a ditch. This revealed the fate of missing children whom the German commandant's office had ordered their parents to send to school, from which they never returned. Representatives of Western civilization, the article says, had buried them alive.

The occupiers did not suffer from excessive love of children. Another example is a letter received by Red Army soldier Sidorov from his sisters Zina and Vera in the Smolensk region and published by Krasnaya Zvezda on 9 August 1942 (No. 186 [5250]) under the headline “Child Murderers”:

“Kolya, it is difficult to write everything we endured. You know the village-soviet secretary Valya Ivanova and her daughter Nina and son Grisha well. Hitler's officers, wishing to obtain information from her about our partisans, decided to influence her by torturing her children. After tying Valya's hands, those savage beasts cut off Nina's and Grisha's right ears before her eyes, then gouged out the boy's left eye and cut off all five fingers on the girl's right hand. Valya could not endure these savage tortures and died of heart failure. The fascist executioners took the tortured children into the forest and threw them into the snow. We buried their bodies in the same grave as Valya.

“The executioners treated the daughter of the teacher Maria Nikolayevna with equal savagery. Knowing that her husband was in a partisan detachment, the savages began torturing her daughter Vera. They pierced the palms, arms and ears of the six-year-old girl with red-hot needles. Then, after extracting nothing from Maria Nikolayevna, they poisoned Vera. Maria Nikolayevna herself was subjected to inhuman torture. For thirty or forty minutes at a time the German bandits forced her to stand barefoot in the snow, poured gasoline into her mouth, twisted her arms and pierced her entire body. Dying under torture, Maria Nikolayevna did not say a single word about the partisans.

“In the neighboring village of Maloye Petrovo, Hitler's cannibals drove the entire able-bodied adult population into forced labor and exterminated all the children and old people. They herded eighty people into a barn, poured gasoline over it and set it on fire. An hour later only a heap of charred corpses remained.”

The article states that this horrific picture was typical of the occupied territories of the USSR, and argues that even those who seek to equate Soviet liberators with Nazi killers cannot accuse Red Army soldiers of crimes of this kind.

“Germany was spared by the natural humanism of the Russian soldier...”

Samoilov argued that “the people of Germany might have suffered even more had it not been for the Russian national character — lack of spite, absence of vindictiveness, love of children, warm-heartedness, absence of a sense of superiority, and remnants of religious and internationalist consciousness within the mass of soldiers themselves. Germany in 1945 was spared by the natural humanism of the Russian soldier...”

Soviet education also played a role, according to the article. Historian Anatoly Utkin wrote in his book The Second World War: “It is impossible to imagine a Soviet teacher proclaiming the organic superiority of the Soviet people over others. Whatever one's attitude toward socialism, one cannot deny the fact that it did not proclaim national exclusivity, did not place neighboring peoples on a lower level, did not appeal to dark instincts of blood, and did not generate arrogant conceit. During the desperate struggle to save the country from the invading enemy, German thinkers and poets were published in Russia. Today one can try to put an equals sign between two polar systems of values only by betraying historical truth for the sake of the political malice of the day.”

As in any war, cases of rape did occur. They were also recorded in areas of Germany entered by Americans, British and French forces. American historian Charles MacDonald described Allied conduct as follows: “Looting ranged from petty theft to the stealing of objects of exceptional value. Crimes such as desertion, disgraceful behavior on the battlefield, murder and rape also occurred. When military operations took on the character of pursuit of the enemy, the number of rapes rose sharply.”

The harshest measures against rapists, up to execution, were applied by the Soviet command, the article states. It accuses Beevor of lying when he claims that Soviet soldiers were not punished “for the very acts of rape they committed. Punishment followed only when soldiers contracted some venereal disease from German women.”

German women really did experience shock, however. Berlin resident Elisabeth Schmeer recalled: “On 3 January my son came home on leave from the front. He served in the SS. Several times my son told me that SS units had done unbelievable things in Russia. If the Russians came here, he said, they would not ‘sprinkle us with rose oil.’ It turned out completely differently: the victors give the defeated people, whose army caused Russia so much misfortune, more food than our former government gave us. It is difficult for us to understand. Apparently only Russians are capable of such humanism.”

Life itself, the article says, forced Germans to change their attitude toward Red Army soldiers. Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky wrote in A Soldier's Duty: “We are in Germany. Around us are the wives and children, fathers and mothers of those soldiers who only yesterday came against us with weapons in their hands. Not long ago these people fled in panic when they heard that Soviet troops were approaching. Now no one runs. Everyone has become convinced of the falsity of fascist propaganda. Everyone has understood that there is nothing to fear from the Soviet soldier. He will not offend them. On the contrary, he will protect the weak and help the destitute. Fascism brought the people disgrace, misfortune and moral degradation in the eyes of all humanity. But the Soviet soldier is humane and noble. He extended a helping hand to everyone who had been blinded and deceived. And the Germans understood this very quickly. As soon as the troops stopped to rest, hungry German children gathered around the field kitchens. Then adults approached too. They knew that Soviet soldiers would share everything they had, share it with Russian generosity and with the compassion of people who had endured much and learned to understand and value life.”

American military historian Albert Axell called Beevor's book “shameful,” filled with “wild accusations and insults.” Yet it continues to be promoted. The reason, according to the article, is clear: Beevor's account, which portrays liberators as rapists, serves what the author describes as a Western-promoted myth of equal Soviet and German responsibility for unleashing the war and for crimes committed during it. Through such falsehoods, the article concludes, the West hopes to revise the geopolitical results of the Second World War entirely in its own favor.