What Did Red Army Soldiers Do to Captured German Girls? The Whole Truth About the "Millions of German Victims"

One of the most persistent myths of the Second World War is the story of the "millions of German women raped by the Red Army." In the West it has been used for decades as proof of the "atrocities of Soviet soldiers," and in the post-Soviet sphere as an instrument of anti-Soviet propaganda. But what actually happened? This video examines where the myth of "millions of victims" came from; how the diary of Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand became a basis for sensational claims; what actual documents and military-tribunal statistics say; why the myth took root so easily in the mass consciousness; and how the story is used today in politics and the media. The truth is often much more complicated than sensational headlines.

This is one of the most frightening and stubbornly persistent legends of the Second World War: millions of German women raped by the Red Army. It is a number that sounds like a verdict on an entire people. But is it true? Where did this horrifying story come from, why was it so readily adopted in the West, and why is it still repeated today? Behind the loud words lies a very different picture, and one far more complicated than sensational headlines suggest.

The Second World War ended for Germany not only in military defeat and territorial losses, but also in a profound crisis of national self-understanding. A country that had regarded itself as the center of European civilization suddenly found itself in ruins and under the authority of the victors. In the midst of this catastrophe there arose a need to explain what had happened not only through defeat on the battlefield, but also through the personal tragedies of millions of German women and men. It was here that one of the most enduring postwar myths took shape: the idea that the Red Army had supposedly engaged almost universally in violence against German women.

The myth survived for decades. In the Western press it regularly resurfaced as proof of the barbarity of the Soviet regime. In post-Soviet journalism it was used to discredit Stalin and the entire Soviet project, while some modern researchers cited astronomical figures - two million victims, and at times even tens of millions. Yet the evidence presented was often not archival documentation but memoirs, rumors and literary texts.

Vladimir Gelfand and the diary as evidence

One of the most important sources used by supporters of this version of events became the diary of Soviet officer Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand. The paradox is obvious: an officer who was a convinced Stalinist and who fought through the war from beginning to end became a man whose notes were later used to support anti-Soviet arguments.

Who was Vladimir Gelfand? Born in Dnipropetrovsk and Jewish by nationality, he joined the Red Army in 1942 with the rank of sergeant. At first he served as the commander of a mortar squad and later as deputy platoon commander for political affairs. He fought around Stalingrad, survived encirclement and heavy combat, joined the Communist Party and remained loyal to Stalin throughout the war.

Gelfand kept a detailed frontline diary in which he recorded his impressions without censorship. These notes survived and were published in Russia, Germany and Sweden. Their frankness made the diary a valuable source for historians. It contains sketches of everyday military life, descriptions of combat and emotional reactions to events.

Yet that very lack of filtering had a double effect. Gelfand's notes contain references to violence against German women. He often records what other people told him rather than events he personally witnessed, but he writes down what he heard with interest and sometimes even with approval. For example, he recorded Sergeant Andreyev's story about a supposed women's battalion that had been captured and about captured girls being divided among beds. Such episodes became a gift to those who wanted to prove the thesis of mass sexual violence: after all, here was a Soviet officer putting stories of this kind on paper.

What is often left out, however, is that he was not an eyewitness to most of the episodes. He was recording stories he heard - the kind of rumors and soldiers' tales that circulated by the dozen in both the Soviet and German armies.

To understand why Gelfand's notes became so important to mythmaking, one must understand how rumors are born in wartime. Under frontline conditions, where soldiers endure enormous stress, a special kind of folklore develops. One such motif consisted of stories about women's battalions, the "Amazons" of the Third Reich, or, conversely, about German women who had supposedly all been raped. Such stories fulfilled several functions: they helped justify the hardships of war, added drama to events and sometimes provided an explanation for the undisciplined behavior of individual soldiers.

Frontline rumors accumulated details and, once written into diaries or memoirs, began to be perceived as documentary testimony. That, the text argues, is what happened with Gelfand's notes. His diary is not a protocol; it is a personal perception of war. Yet many researchers, especially in Germany, treated it as direct evidence of mass violence, even though the episodes themselves often resemble retellings of frontline folklore more than a strict chronicle.

Why did the myth prove so durable?

Several factors are emphasized. First was Germany's psychological trauma: the country had suffered military defeat, destroyed cities and millions of dead. In such circumstances it was easier to imagine oneself not only as an aggressor but also as a victim. Second came the political context of the Cold War, when the theme of "Red Army atrocities" became a convenient propaganda instrument in the confrontation between the USSR and the West. Third was the lack of broad access to Soviet archives: until the end of the twentieth century, exact information about Red Army disciplinary practices and punishments for crimes was largely unknown, which allowed almost any figure to circulate. Finally, private testimony - diaries, memoirs and oral accounts - was easy to quote as documentary proof even when the usual historical criticism of sources had not been applied.

Gelfand's diary fitted this pattern perfectly. On the one hand it is authentic; on the other, it contains emotional and unverified episodes. The result is paradoxical. A Soviet officer who repeatedly expressed sincere love for Stalin and loyalty to the Party became an involuntary witness for the prosecution against the very army of which he was proud. His words were removed from context and quoted in the Western press as proof of atrocities, although the author himself could hardly have intended that use.

According to the text, the modern version of the myth about "millions of raped German women" begins with this use of Gelfand's diary. The next question is which diary episodes became the foundation for mythmaking, and what remains when fact is separated from rumor and retelling.

The stories about German women's battalions

Among Gelfand's entries, researchers paid particular attention to episodes in which he mentions clashes between Soviet units and supposed women's battalions of the Wehrmacht. These stories occupy a noticeable place in his diary and became the basis for a series of publications claiming that the Red Army really did capture hundreds of German women who were then treated as trophies. But a close examination, the text says, shows that these episodes are more likely frontline rumors than real events.

In February 1945 Gelfand wrote that a women's battalion had operated on the left flank of his unit. According to Soviet soldiers, the captured women called themselves "avengers" for husbands killed at the front. Yet there is no reliable evidence that combat women's battalions existed in the Wehrmacht. Germany did have so-called Wehrmacht auxiliaries, but they served as signalers, radio operators, telephone operators and clerks. Their weapons were generally limited to personal pistols for self-defense. Anti-aircraft units were an exception, because women could serve gun crews, but there were no full-scale "death battalions" of women advancing with submachine guns.

Thus even the first story in Gelfand raises doubts. He himself admits: "I do not know what they did with them." In other words, he did not even see the prisoners with his own eyes. He merely recorded someone else's account and added an emotional comment that the women ought to have been executed mercilessly.

A second, more colorful and frequently quoted story is dated March 1945. Gelfand records Sergeant Andreyev's account of a fight near Bernlicht. According to Andreyev, Soviet airborne troops dug in and waited for an attack. To their surprise, lines of German women carrying automatic weapons appeared in front of them, followed by men. The women allegedly advanced boldly and even opened fire on the Soviet positions. At some point an order was given and the Red Army soldiers fired on the attackers. The women faltered, ran and were captured. They were divided into groups. Russian girls were allegedly shot, officers' wives were punished, and young unmarried women were taken to beds for several days. Andreyev, Gelfand writes, even selected a girl for himself and "persuaded" her by pointing a pistol at her.

Why does the text consider this story doubtful? First, there is a lack of sources: neither Soviet nor German documents record women's battalions operating at the front. Second, the military logic is questionable. In 1945, when Germany had few combat-capable units left, it is hard to imagine the command sending untrained women into an assault with automatic weapons. Even the Volkssturm was formed from boys and elderly men rather than from armed female assault battalions. Third, memoirs by German women who were actually drawn into service convey a very different psychology: fear, reluctance to kill and an absence of combat enthusiasm. Elisabeth Zimmerer, for example, recalled: "I had the enemy in my sights, but I could not pull the trigger." This contrasts sharply with the image of fearless female assault troops.

The conclusion drawn is that the story of the "women's battalion" belonged to the genre of wartime folklore. Gelfand honestly recorded what he had heard, but later readers began to treat the story as an established fact.

Complaints that belonged to reality

Although the stories about women's battalions are presented as frontline myths, Gelfand's diary also contains other entries concerning the behavior of Soviet soldiers in Germany. These passages are more important because they relate to real abuses. Violence did occur, and it was documented not only in private recollections but also in official Soviet military records.

In February and April 1945 Gelfand several times mentions encounters with German women who complained of abuse by soldiers. In Berlin he recorded a conversation with a group of women who said they had been victims of mass sexual violence. It is important, the text says, that Gelfand again does not describe events he personally witnessed; he records other people's words. But unlike the stories about women's battalions, these passages contain no obvious fantasy. Women did complain, and soldiers did commit crimes.

These diary lines became one basis for Western researchers who argued that violence had been "mass" in character. Yet context matters. Gelfand gives no figures, no exact details and no attempt to verify what he heard. For him these are sketches from life, emotional impressions rather than statistics.

Critics of the Red Army, the text continues, often omit that violence against civilians was explicitly prohibited by the Soviet command. It cites Order No. 229, signed by Stalin, as saying that the remaining population in conquered areas, whether German, Czech or Polish, was not to be subjected to violence; the guilty were to be punished under wartime law, and those guilty of violence and rape were to be shot.

The text says this was not merely a declaration. Military-tribunal verdicts survive in the archives in which soldiers and officers were sentenced, including to execution, for robbery and rape. On that basis it rejects the idea that Soviet command simply ignored such crimes.

In May 1945, military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front Major General of Justice Lev Yachenin submitted a report on crimes against civilians. According to the figures quoted in the article, during two weeks from 22 April to 5 May, on territory controlled by seven Soviet armies, 124 crimes against Germans were recorded: 72 rapes, 38 robberies, three murders and eleven other violations. Thus, violence did occur during the reporting period, but the article stresses that the report dealt with dozens of cases rather than hundreds of thousands.

It further states that historians later calculated that military tribunals convicted about 4,148 officers for various forms of violence and robbery, along with a large number of enlisted men. The text argues that these numbers are significant but do not support the claim of two million victims.

The figure of two million

One of the most frequently cited arguments for massive sexual violence is associated with the German researcher Barbara Johr, who produced an estimate of two million raped women. The text describes the methodology as follows: researchers counted children born in Berlin and other regions in the first postwar years to Soviet fathers and automatically classified the mothers as victims of rape. A multiplier was then applied because not every rape results in pregnancy, and the resulting estimate was extrapolated across Germany.

The article calls this sensational but unreliable. It argues that many German women entered relationships with Soviet soldiers voluntarily; amid destruction and hunger, such relationships could be a means of survival, and there were also genuine romances. Some women married Red Army soldiers, moved with them to the USSR and formed families. Treating all such cases as sexual violence, it says, is historically incorrect.

The text insists that actual violence must not be denied and sometimes took extremely brutal forms. But it argues that the real scale differed sharply from propaganda figures. Combining military-tribunal data and prosecutors' reports, it claims, produces a scale of several thousand documented cases in which specific perpetrators were punished, whereas some Western estimates speak of two, ten or even twenty million victims.

Why, then, did the myth take hold? The answer offered is that statistics are less compelling to the mass imagination. Dozens or hundreds of assaults are horrifying, but they do not create an image of all-encompassing terror. Millions do. Individual diary entries by Gelfand, complaints by German women and prosecutors' reports about dozens of cases were therefore transformed in the press into proof of a national catastrophe.

How the postwar narrative developed

The story of "millions of raped German women," the text continues, was not merely a distorted perception of individual cases but a full historical myth sustained for decades by the press, politicians and part of the academic world. To understand its durability, one must follow its evolution.

Germany in 1945-46 was a society in catastrophe: millions of refugees, hunger, ruined cities and profound demoralization. A new national narrative began to emerge in which Germans saw themselves not only as the authors of aggression but also as victims. Stories of sexual violence became one convenient element of that self-understanding. Women did suffer, and many experienced terrifying episodes, but in everyday discussion even consensual relationships with Soviet soldiers were often interpreted as violence. Such rhetoric helped soften a sense of guilt: "we too were victims of the war."

From the late 1940s, the theme of Red Army atrocities became part of Western propaganda. Books and articles in the United States and Britain claimed that Soviet troops had raped German women indiscriminately. Film and literature fixed the image of the Russian barbarian breaking into a German home. German émigrés actively spread stories about "millions of raped women" to emphasize Soviet barbarism and, in some cases, to portray collaboration with the Nazis as a supposed defense against a Bolshevik threat.

Barbara Johr's estimate of two million is placed by the source in this broader development. The text also says that some feminist organizations in the 1980s began citing ten to fifteen million victims and that still more fantastic figures - as high as twenty million - appeared in the press. It argues that none of these numbers rests on a documentary base and that Soviet military archives were closed at the time, making verification impossible.

After the collapse of the USSR, new sources were published in Russia and the West. Gelfand's diary became one of the most prominent. In Germany it was published as testimony "from inside" by a Soviet officer. Journalists and historians began quoting passages about "women's battalions" and "trophies," often without noting that Gelfand had not witnessed the events himself. As a result, the diary came to be treated as proof of mass sexual violence even though it contains no statistics and many stories are retellings of other people's words.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Russia and Ukraine also began reassessing the Soviet past. Some journalists and new historians used the subject of sexual violence as an argument against Stalinism. Media headlines spoke of "millions of German women - victims of the Red Army," referring either to Gelfand's diary or to Western studies with disputed statistical methods. In mass consciousness this created a double image: the memory of heroic sacrifice on one side and guilt for atrocity on the other.

The myth, the text says, survives today because of political demand, because international and feminist discussions of wartime sexual violence sometimes repeat very large numbers without dwelling on source criticism, and because sensational headlines work more powerfully than dry archival reporting. The path from a real crime to a myth therefore passes through distortion and exaggeration reinforced by political interests.

Comparison with other armies

When violence against civilians during the Second World War is discussed, attention is often concentrated on the Red Army. The source argues that the Western press and part of the historiography pay much less attention to the fact that similar crimes were committed by all armies, and that the historical picture becomes clearer only through comparison.

It begins with the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. On the territory of the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries, violence was mass and systematic. Women were raped not only by individual soldiers but, according to the text, by entire units; sexual violence was sometimes part of a policy of terror against the population. Punitive detachments and SS units are described as particularly brutal, with documented cases in which women were raped before civilians were executed. The article argues that the German occupation system normalized sexual violence as an instrument of domination and genocide.

It next turns to American and British troops. American archives, it says, contain documentation of thousands of rapes by US soldiers in France, Italy and Germany. Numerous complaints came from France in 1944 as General Patton's forces moved through Normandy. Local residents complained about looting, robbery and sexual violence. The British Army faced fewer accusations but also recorded hundreds of crimes.

American military courts often imposed death sentences, especially when the defendants were Black soldiers. The article argues that race affected military justice: white American soldiers were more often acquitted or given lighter punishment, while African American soldiers were disproportionately executed.

The text also mentions the Moroccan Goumiers of French colonial formations in Italy. After the breakthrough of the Gustav Line in the spring of 1944, these units were accused of a wave of mass sexual violence against local civilians. Italian testimony describes thousands of women, men and adolescents as victims. The events became known as the marocchinate. France later minimized this history, the article says, while its memory remained vivid in Italy.

Against these examples, the source presents the Red Army in a dual light. Violence did occur; diaries, local complaints and Soviet prosecutorial documents confirm it. But the text insists that such violence was not official policy. Unlike the Wehrmacht, where it says violence could form part of a strategy of occupation, the Red Army formally prohibited it and punished offenders through military tribunals.

The source claims that archival evidence points to thousands of cases. It contrasts this with estimates of tens of thousands of rapes by American troops in France and Germany and asks why the accusations became concentrated on the USSR. Its explanation is political: Cold War propaganda benefited from an image of Soviet barbarity, Western allies had little interest in emphasizing their own crimes, German society preferred to remember suffering at Soviet hands rather than crimes committed by Germans in the USSR and the Balkans, and Western publication of memoirs and diaries occurred while Soviet archives remained inaccessible.

Why myths outlive evidence

Sexual violence during the Second World War, the text says, was a universal wartime tragedy. It was committed by Germans, Americans, French, British and Soviet soldiers. The difference it draws is that in the Third Reich violence formed part of the occupation system, while among the Western Allies and in the Red Army it resulted from failures of discipline and was formally punishable. Yet it was the USSR that became the center of the later myth. The reason, the source argues, lies not only in facts but in politics.

After 1945 Germany faced an enormous moral crisis. Millions of Germans had been involved in or supported the Nazi regime; cities lay in ruins, millions of soldiers were dead or prisoners, and the world learned the full scale of the Holocaust, mass executions and concentration camps. In such circumstances, it was psychologically easier for society also to speak of itself as a victim. Stories of sexual violence by Soviet soldiers helped Germans see not only their guilt but also their own pain: "yes, we were aggressors, but we suffered too."

Sexual violence is one of the strongest taboos in any culture and provokes an emotional response more powerful than statistics about bombing or hunger. A ruined city can be explained as a military necessity; the rape of a woman is perceived as absolute evil. Even isolated cases therefore become deeply fixed in memory, acquire new details and can grow into large collective legends.

The source also points to an older Western stereotype of the "wild Russian." Nineteenth-century European newspapers wrote about Cossacks drinking champagne from boots; during the First World War people spoke of "Russian hordes." The Second World War reinforced the image. Soviet soldiers were perceived as outsiders from a supposedly barbaric East, making stories of mass sexual violence easier for German and Western European audiences to believe.

Soviet soldiers themselves had their own frontline folklore. Stories about German women as "trophies" or about Hitler's "Amazons" circulated in the trenches. They could release tension, display masculinity or simply serve as boasting. Once such stories entered diaries such as Gelfand's, later readers could mistake them for documentary descriptions of real events.

Social psychologists, the text says, describe rumor as a snowball. A real core - several documented cases - is surrounded by speculation, exaggeration and new details. Every retelling makes the story appear more credible until the myth grows to enormous proportions. In this interpretation, several thousand cases found in archival records became millions of victims in public memory.

The myth was politically convenient to different groups: for the West during the Cold War, it proved Soviet barbarity; for Germans, it supported a narrative in which they too were victims; for post-Soviet critics of Stalinism, it became a tool for attacking the Soviet past. Each group had an interest in keeping the narrative alive.

In the twenty-first century, cinema, literature and the internet continue to reproduce it. Films and books centered on women in wartime Berlin make sexual violence a central theme, while media headlines speak of "millions of Red Army victims." Online, numbers migrate from publication to publication without source checking. Sensation travels farther than dry statistics.

Historical method

The Second World War is one of the most intensely researched subjects in historical scholarship, yet it is also surrounded by myths and distortions because the war is part of the politics of memory and therefore always a battlefield of interpretations.

Historians work between two imperfect kinds of evidence. Diaries and memoirs are valuable personal testimony but are always subjective: people record emotions and rumors and may embellish or dramatize. Gelfand's diary is one example. Official documents - orders, reports and military-tribunal records - are stricter and more precise but are also incomplete because war is chaotic and not every crime entered a protocol.

To distinguish fact from myth, professional historians compare sources, search for the same episode in independent documents, place stories in the context in which they arose, test statistical claims against archival and demographic data, and compare the behavior of different armies under similar conditions. These methods, the source says, make it possible to reject obvious exaggerations and build a more realistic picture.

It cites Russian historians such as Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky as pointing to several thousand recorded cases and thousands of people convicted by military tribunals. It also says that German historians have increasingly questioned the figure of millions and that specialists studying wartime sexual violence acknowledge real Red Army crimes while rejecting the largest propaganda estimates.

Conclusion

The source concludes that the task of historians is not to excuse or condemn the Red Army as a whole, but to restore proportion. Violence occurred, it was documented, and it was a tragic page of the war. At the same time, the text insists that the scale should be measured in thousands rather than millions; that similar crimes were committed by other armies; and that historical myths grow from propaganda, trauma and rumor as well as from actual events.

Fighting myths about the Second World War therefore means working not only with archives but also with mass consciousness. The historian must compete with journalists and politicians for whom effect may matter more than accuracy. Step by step, the source says, scholarly criticism can push sensational figures aside.

The history of the myth about "millions of raped German women" is thus presented not only as part of the memory of the Second World War but as an example of how historical myths are born and survive. It combines real acts of violence, rumor, human trauma and political interests.

The text states that violence did occur. The Red Army, like other armies under conditions of war and occupation, did not avoid crimes against civilians. Official policy prohibited such violence, Stalin's orders demanded protection of civilians, and rape and robbery could be punished severely. Documents record thousands of cases and convictions. In the source's interpretation, the tragedy is measured in thousands, not millions.

Why did the myth emerge? Diaries and rumors turned frontline stories into documentary-looking evidence. Defeated German society found a way to speak of itself as a victim. Cold War propaganda had an interest in portraying the USSR as barbaric. Sensational numbers circulated without a documentary foundation but worked well in headlines.

Why does the myth survive? It appeals to powerful emotions, answers a psychological need for victimhood, serves political and media interests, and is simple. The image of millions of victims is easier to absorb than complicated archival data.

The source also argues that the German army systematically used violence as an instrument of terror and that American, British and French troops likewise left behind documented sexual crimes. In this framing, the Red Army was not unique, although its soldiers did commit crimes. The article's key distinction is that such crimes were not official Soviet policy and were punishable by military tribunals.

The story, the text concludes, teaches several lessons: sources must be read critically; diaries and memoirs are valuable but subjective; statistics must not be replaced by sensation; myths can live longer than facts; and history is continually used in politics, making it essential to distinguish scholarly analysis from propaganda.

Vladimir Gelfand, a loyal Stalinist and combat officer, kept his diary without imagining that decades later his words would become part of a Western accusatory narrative. His stories about women's battalions and German women as "trophies" were removed from context and turned into evidence for a wider myth. Violence existed and individual women were victims. But, according to the source, transforming these tragedies into an image of millions of raped women means replacing history with propaganda.

Reality, it concludes, is more complicated: real crimes, punishments imposed by military authorities, the defeated German desire to see itself as a victim, Cold War sensationalism, and myths that are easier to absorb than uncomfortable, complex evidence. The task of the historian - and of any thinking person - is therefore to keep a sober view: not to deny tragedy, but also not to surrender to manipulation. Only in that way can the memory of actual victims be respected while the truth about the war is protected.

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