'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed book about the
fall of Berlin, on a massive war crime committed by the
victorious Red Army.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate who was then a young Soviet 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?"
"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual
liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright
Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an
officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine,
ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a
collective basis."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate who was then a young Soviet 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?"
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."
"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."
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers".
Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.
How many German women were raped? One can only guess, but a high proportion of at least 15 million women who either lived in the Soviet Union zone or were expelled from the eastern provinces. The scale of rape is suggested by the fact that about two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers".
Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.
How many German women were raped? One can only guess, but a high proportion of at least 15 million women who either lived in the Soviet Union zone or were expelled from the eastern provinces. The scale of rape is suggested by the fact that about two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.
After a visit to ruined Berlin, American General George Patton wrote his wife on July 21, 1945:
Reply"Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what could have been a good race, and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages.
And all Europe will be communist. It's said that for the first week after they took it (Berlin), all women who ran were shot and those who did not were raped.
I could have taken it (instead of the Soviets) had I been allowed."
from The Patton Papers, Pattons Diary and some letters published in 1974 by the Houghton Mifflin Company.
Also see: Patton On Communism And The Khazar JewsGeneral Patton's Warning
Edited by Raquel Baranow