Examples of violence against girls in wartime. Sexual violence in World War II. War in Yugoslavia - atrocities against women

Image copyright BBC World Service

A remarkable book goes on sale in Russia - the diary of an officer of the Soviet Army Vladimir Gelfand, in which the bloody everyday life of the Great Patriotic War is described without embellishment and cuts.

Some believe that a critical approach to the past is unethical or simply unacceptable, given the heroic sacrifices and deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens.

Others believe that future generations should know the true horrors of war and deserve to see the unvarnished picture.

BBC correspondent Lucy Ash tried to understand some little-known pages of the history of the last world war.

Some of the facts and circumstances outlined in her article may not be appropriate for children.

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Twilight is gathering in Treptow Park on the outskirts of Berlin. I look at the monument to the warrior-liberator towering above me against the backdrop of the sunset sky.

A 12-meter-high soldier standing on the ruins of a swastika holds a sword in one hand, and a little German girl sits on his other hand.

Five thousand of the 80 thousand Soviet soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin from April 16 to May 2, 1945 are buried here.

The colossal proportions of this monument reflect the scale of the victims. At the top of the pedestal, where a long staircase leads, you can see the entrance to the memorial hall, lit up like a religious shrine.

My attention was drawn to an inscription reminding that the Soviet people saved European civilization from fascism.

But for some in Germany, this memorial is an occasion for different memories.

Soviet soldiers raped countless women on their way to Berlin, but this was rarely talked about after the war, either in East or West Germany. And in Russia today, few people talk about it.

Diary of Vladimir Gelfand

Many Russian media regularly dismiss the rape stories as a myth concocted in the West, but one of the many sources that told us what happened is the diary of a Soviet officer.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption Vladimir Gelfand wrote his diary with amazing sincerity at a time when it was deadly

Lieutenant Volodymyr Gelfand, a young Jew originally from Ukraine, from 1941 until the end of the war kept his notes with unusual sincerity, despite the then-existing ban on keeping diaries in the Soviet army.

His son Vitaly, who allowed me to read the manuscript, found the diary while sorting through his father's papers after his death. The diary was available online, but is now being published in Russia for the first time in book form. Two abridged editions of the diary were published in Germany and Sweden.

The diary tells of the lack of order and discipline in the regular troops: meager rations, lice, routine anti-Semitism and endless theft. As he says, the soldiers even stole the boots of their comrades.

In February 1945, Gelfand's military unit was based near the Oder River, preparing for an attack on Berlin. He recalls how his comrades surrounded and captured a German women's battalion.

“The day before yesterday, a women’s battalion was operating on the left flank. It was utterly defeated, and the captured German cats declared themselves avengers for their husbands who died at the front. I don’t know what they did to them, but it would be necessary to execute the scoundrels mercilessly,” Vladimir Gelfand wrote.

One of Helphand's most revealing stories relates to April 25, when he was already in Berlin. There Gelfand rode a bicycle for the first time in his life. Driving along the banks of the Spree, he saw a group of women dragging their suitcases and bundles somewhere.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption In February 1945, the military unit of Gelfand was based near the Oder River, preparing for an attack on Berlin.

"I asked the German women where they live, in broken German, and wondered why they left their home, and they spoke with horror about the grief that the front line workers had caused them on the first night of the Red Army's arrival here," writes the author of the diary. .

“They poked here,” the beautiful German woman explained, lifting up her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a girl,” she sighed and cried. “They ruined my youth. I was poked by everyone. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes, and burst into tears."

“They raped my daughter in my presence,” the poor mother put in, “they can still come and rape my girl again.” From this again everyone was horrified, and bitter sobbing swept from corner to corner of the basement where the owners had brought me. here, - the girl suddenly rushed to me, - you will sleep with me. You can do whatever you want with me, but you are the only one!" writes Gelfand in his diary.

"The hour of revenge has struck!"

German soldiers by that time had stained themselves on Soviet territory with the heinous crimes they committed for nearly four years.

Vladimir Gelfand came across evidence of these crimes as his unit fought its way towards Germany.

“When every day they are killed, every day they are injured, when they pass through the villages destroyed by the Nazis ... Dad has a lot of descriptions where villages were destroyed, down to children, small children of Jewish nationality were destroyed ... Even one-year-olds, two-year-olds ... And this is not for some time, these are years. People walked and saw it. And they walked with one goal - to take revenge and kill, "says the son of Vladimir Gelfand Vitaly.

Vitaly Gelfand discovered this diary after his father's death.

The Wehrmacht, as the ideologists of Nazism assumed, was a well-organized force of the Aryans, who would not stoop to sexual contact with "untermenschs" ("subhumans").

But this ban was ignored, says Oleg Budnitsky, a historian at the Higher School of Economics.

The German command was so concerned about the spread of venereal diseases among the troops that they organized a network of army brothels in the occupied territories.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption Vitaly Gelfand hopes to publish his father's diary in Russia

It is difficult to find direct evidence of how German soldiers treated Russian women. Many of the victims simply did not survive.

But at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, its director Jörg Morre showed me a photograph taken in the Crimea from a German soldier's personal album.

The photo shows the body of a woman, sprawled on the ground.

"It looks like she was killed during or after being raped. Her skirt is pulled up and her hands are covering her face," says the director of the museum.

“This is a shocking photo. We had a debate in the museum about whether such photographs should be exhibited. This is war, this is sexual violence in the Soviet Union under the Germans. We show the war. We don’t talk about the war, we show it,” says Jörg Morre .

When the Red Army entered the "lair of the fascist beast," as the Soviet press called Berlin at the time, the posters encouraged the fury of the soldiers: "Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!"

The political department of the 19th Army, advancing on Berlin along the coast of the Baltic Sea, announced that a real Soviet soldier is so full of hatred that the thought of sexual contact with German women would be disgusting to him. But this time, too, the soldiers proved that their ideologists were wrong.

Historian Anthony Beevor, doing research for his book "Berlin: The Fall", published in 2002, found reports in the Russian state archive about the epidemic of sexual violence in Germany. These reports at the end of 1944 were sent by the NKVD officers to Lavrenty Beria.

"They were given to Stalin," says Beevor. "You can see from the marks whether they were read or not. They report mass rapes in East Prussia and how German women tried to kill themselves and their children to avoid this fate."

"Inhabitants of the Dungeon"

Another wartime diary kept by the bride of a German soldier tells how some women adapted to this horrific situation in an attempt to survive.

Since April 20, 1945, the woman, whose name has not been named, has left on paper observations that are ruthless in their honesty, insightful and sometimes flavored with the humor of the gallows.

Among her neighbors are "a young man in gray trousers and thick-rimmed glasses, who on closer inspection turns out to be a woman," as well as three elderly sisters, she writes, "all three dressmakers huddled together in one big black pudding."

Image copyright BBC World Service

While waiting for the approaching units of the Red Army, the women joked: “Better a Russian on me than a Yankee on me,” meaning that it is better to be raped than to die in a carpet bombing by American aircraft.

But when the soldiers entered their basement and tried to drag the women out, they begged the diary's author to use her knowledge of the Russian language to complain to the Soviet command.

On the ruined streets, she manages to find a Soviet officer. He shrugs. Despite Stalin's decree banning violence against civilians, he says, "it still happens."

Nevertheless, the officer goes down with her to the basement and chastises the soldiers. But one of them is beside himself with anger. “What are you talking about? Look what the Germans did to our women!” he shouts. “They took my sister and…” The officer calms him down and leads the soldiers out into the street.

But when the diarist goes out into the corridor to check whether they have left or not, she is seized by waiting soldiers and brutally raped, almost strangling her. Horrified neighbors, or "dungeon dwellers" as she calls them, hide in the basement, locking the door behind them.

“Finally, two iron bolts opened. Everyone stared at me,” she writes. “My stockings are down, my hands are holding the remnants of the belt. I start screaming:“ You pigs! I've been raped here twice in a row, and you leave me lying here like a piece of dirt!"

She finds an officer from Leningrad with whom she shares a bed. Gradually, the relationship between the aggressor and the victim becomes less violent, more mutual and ambiguous. The German woman and the Soviet officer even discuss literature and the meaning of life.

“There is no way to say that the major is raping me,” she writes. “Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? major, and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person."

Many of her neighbors made similar deals with the winners of defeated Berlin.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption Some German women have found a way to adapt to this terrible situation.

When the diary was published in Germany in 1959 under the title "Woman in Berlin", this candid account caused a wave of accusations that he had tarnished the honor of German women. Not surprisingly, the author, anticipating this, demanded that the diary not be published again until her death.

Eisenhower: shoot on the spot

Rape was not only a problem for the Red Army.

Bob Lilly, a historian at Northern Kentucky University, was able to access the archives of US military courts.

His book (Taken by Force) caused so much controversy that at first no American publisher dared to publish it, and the first edition appeared in France.

According to Lilly's rough estimate, about 14,000 rapes were committed by American soldiers in England, France and Germany from 1942 to 1945.

"There were very few cases of rape in England, but as soon as the American soldiers crossed the English Channel, their number increased dramatically," says Lilly.

According to him, rape has become a problem not only of the image, but also of army discipline. "Eisenhower said to shoot soldiers at the scene of the crime and report executions in military newspapers like the Stars and Stripes. Germany was at its peak," he says.

Were soldiers executed for rape?

But not in Germany?

No. Not a single soldier was executed for raping or killing German citizens, Lilly admits.

Today, historians continue to investigate the facts of sexual crimes committed by the Allied forces in Germany.

For many years, the topic of sexual violence by allied forces - American, British, French and Soviet soldiers - in Germany was officially hushed up. Few reported it, and even fewer were willing to listen to it all.

Silence

It is not easy to talk about such things in society in general. In addition, in East Germany it was considered almost blasphemy to criticize the Soviet heroes who defeated fascism.

And in West Germany, the guilt felt by the Germans for the crimes of Nazism overshadowed the subject of the suffering of this people.

But in 2008, in Germany, based on the diary of a Berliner, the film "Nameless - One Woman in Berlin" was released with actress Nina Hoss in the title role.

This film was a revelation for the Germans and prompted many women to talk about what happened to them. Among these women is Ingeborg Bullert.

Now 90-year-old Ingeborg lives in Hamburg in an apartment full of photos of cats and books about the theater. In 1945, she was 20. She dreamed of becoming an actress and lived with her mother on a rather fashionable street in Berlin's Charlottenburg district.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption "I thought they were going to kill me," says Ingeborg Bullurt

When the Soviet offensive began on the city, she hid in the basement of her house, as did the author of the diary "Woman in Berlin".

“Suddenly, tanks appeared on our street, bodies of Russian and German soldiers lay everywhere,” she recalls. “I remember the terrifying twang of falling Russian bombs. We called them Stalinorgels (“Stalin’s organs”).”

One day, between bombings, Ingeborg climbed out of the basement and ran upstairs for a rope, which she adapted for a lamp wick.

“Suddenly, I saw two Russians pointing guns at me,” she says. “One of them forced me to undress and raped me. Then they switched places and another raped me. I thought I was going to die, that they would kill me.”

Then Ingeborg did not tell about what happened to her. She kept quiet about it for decades because it would be too hard to talk about it. "My mother used to brag about the fact that her daughter had not been touched," she recalls.

Wave of abortions

But many women in Berlin were raped. Ingeborg recalls that immediately after the war, women between the ages of 15 and 55 were ordered to be tested for venereal diseases.

"To get food cards, you needed a medical certificate, and I remember that all the doctors who issued them had waiting rooms full of women," she recalls.

What was the real scale of the rapes? The most commonly quoted figures are 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany. These figures, hotly disputed, were extrapolated from the meager medical records that have survived to this day.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption These medical documents from 1945 miraculously survived Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption In just one district of Berlin, 995 abortion requests were approved in six months.

At the former military factory, where the state archive is now kept, his employee Martin Luchterhand shows me a stack of blue cardboard folders.

In Germany at the time, abortion was banned under article 218 of the penal code. But Luchterhand says there was a short period of time after the war when women were allowed to terminate their pregnancies. A special situation was connected with the mass rapes in 1945.

Between June 1945 and 1946, 995 abortion requests were approved in this area of ​​Berlin alone. The folders contain over a thousand pages of different colors and sizes. One of the girls writes in round, childish handwriting that she was raped at home, in the living room, in front of her parents.

Bread instead of revenge

For some soldiers, as soon as they got drunk, women became the same trophies as watches or bicycles. But others behaved quite differently. In Moscow, I met 92-year-old veteran Yuri Lyashenko, who remembers how, instead of taking revenge, the soldiers handed out bread to the Germans.

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption Yuri Lyashenko says Soviet soldiers behaved differently in Berlin

“Of course, we couldn’t feed everyone, right? And what we had, we shared with the children. Small children are so intimidated, their eyes are so scary ... I feel sorry for the children," he recalls.

In a jacket hung with orders and medals, Yuri Lyashenko invites me to his small apartment on the top floor of a multi-storey building and treats me to cognac and boiled eggs.

He tells me that he wanted to become an engineer, but was drafted into the army and, like Vladimir Gelfand, went through the entire war to Berlin.

Pouring cognac into glasses, he proposes a toast to the world. Toasts to the world often sound learned, but here one feels that the words come from the heart.

We are talking about the beginning of the war, when he almost had his leg amputated, and how he felt when he saw the red flag over the Reichstag. After a while, I decide to ask him about the rapes.

“I don’t know, our unit didn’t have that… Of course, obviously, such cases depended on the person himself, on the people,” the war veteran says. it is not written, you do not know it."

Look back to the past

We will probably never know the true extent of rape. The materials of the Soviet military tribunals and many other documents remain classified. Recently, the State Duma approved a law "on encroachment on historical memory", according to which anyone who belittles the contribution of the USSR to the victory over fascism can earn a fine and up to five years in prison.

Vera Dubina, a young historian at the Humanitarian University in Moscow, says she didn't know anything about the rapes until she received a scholarship to study in Berlin. After studying in Germany, she wrote a paper on the subject, but was unable to publish it.

"The Russian media reacted very aggressively," she says. "People only want to know about our glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War, and now it's getting harder and harder to do serious research."

Image copyright BBC World Service Image caption Soviet field kitchens distributed food to the inhabitants of Berlin

History is often rewritten to suit the conjuncture. That is why eyewitness accounts are so important. The testimonies of those who dared to speak on this topic now, in old age, and the stories of the then young people who wrote down their testimonies about what was happening during the war years.

“If people don’t want to know the truth, they want to be mistaken and want to talk about how beautiful and noble everything was, this is stupid, this is self-deception,” he recalls. “The whole world understands this, and Russia understands this. And even those who stand behind these laws of distorting the past, they also understand. We cannot move into the future until we deal with the past."

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Note.On September 25 and 28, 2015, this material was modified. We removed the captions for two of the photos, as well as the Twitter posts based on them. They do not meet BBC editorial standards and we understand that many have found them offensive. We offer our sincere apologies.

Today, Tatyana Tolstaya (mother of a blogger and apparently a writer) patriotically remarked:

"I'm thinking: if Russian soldiers raped millions of German women, as we are told here, then these German women, presumably - well, maybe not all, but half, say, - gave birth to children. This means that the population of Germany in the conquered territories is now Russian and not German?

The people have already been outraged about this, but, it seems to me, the best answer to Tatyana is the Soviet veteran Leonid Rabichev. Below is an excerpt from his book of memoirs "War will write everything off":

Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and left along the highway, and in front of each stands a cackling armada of men with their trousers down.

Those who are bleeding and losing consciousness are dragged aside, children who rush to help them are shot. Cackle, growl, laughter, cries and groans. And their commanders, their majors and colonels stand on the highway, who laughs, and who conducts, no, rather regulates. This is so that all their soldiers, without exception, participate.

No, not mutual responsibility and not at all revenge on the damned occupiers, this hellish deadly group sex.

Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and cruel logic of the distraught crowd.

Shocked, I sat in the cab of a lorry, my driver Demidov stood in line, and I imagined Flaubert's Carthage, and I understood that the war would not write off everything. The colonel, the one who had just conducted, could not stand it and took the queue himself, and the major shot the witnesses, the hysterical children and the elderly.

Cum! By cars!

And behind is the next unit.

And again a stop, and I can not keep my signalmen, who are also already getting into new queues. I have nausea in my throat.

To the horizon between the mountains of rags, overturned wagons are the corpses of women, old people, children. The highway is cleared for traffic. It's getting dark.

Me and my control platoon get a farm two kilometers from the highway.

In all rooms there are corpses of children, old people, raped and shot women.

We are so tired that, paying no attention to them, we lie down on the floor between them and fall asleep.

In the morning we deploy the walkie-talkie, we communicate with the front via SSR. We are instructed to establish lines of communication. The advanced units finally encountered the German corps and divisions that had taken up the defense.

The Germans no longer retreat, they die, but do not surrender. Their aircraft appears in the air. I'm afraid to make a mistake, it seems to me that in terms of cruelty, uncompromisingness and the number of losses on both sides, these battles can be compared with the battles near Stalingrad. It's all around and ahead.

I don't leave my phones. I take orders, I give orders. Only during the day there is time to bring the corpses out into the yard.

I don't remember where we took them.

In office buildings? I can’t remember where, I know that we never buried them.

The funeral teams seem to have been, but it is far in the rear.

So, I help carry out the corpses. I freeze at the wall of the house.

Spring, the first green grass on earth, bright hot sun. Our house is pointed, with weathervanes, in the Gothic style, covered with red tiles, probably two hundred years old, a courtyard paved with stone slabs, which are five hundred years old.

We are in Europe, we are in Europe!

I was dreaming, and suddenly two sixteen-year-old German girls enter the open gate. There is no fear in the eyes, but a terrible anxiety.

They saw me, ran up and, interrupting each other, they were trying to explain something to me in German. Although I don’t know the language, I hear the words “muter”, “vater”, “bruder”.

It becomes clear to me that in the atmosphere of the stampede they lost their family somewhere.

I feel terribly sorry for them, I understand that they need to run wherever their eyes look and quickly from our headquarters yard, and I tell them:

Mutter, fater, brooder - niht! - and I point my finger at the second distant gate - there, they say. And I push them.

Then they understand me, they quickly leave, disappear from sight, and I sigh with relief - at least I saved two girls, and I head to the second floor to my phones, carefully follow the movement of the parts, but twenty minutes do not pass before me some screams, screams, laughter, obscenities are heard from the yard.

I rush to the window.

Major A. is standing on the steps of the house, and two sergeants twisted their arms, bent those same two girls into three deaths, and on the contrary - all the staff servants - drivers, orderlies, clerks, messengers.

Nikolaev, Sidorov, Kharitonov, Pimenov ... - Major A. commands. - Take the girls by the arms and legs, skirts and blouses off! Stand in two lines! Unfasten your belts, lower your pants and underpants! Right and left, one at a time, start!

A. is in command, and my signalmen, my platoon, run up the stairs from the house and line up. And the two girls “rescued” by me are lying on ancient stone slabs, their hands are in a vice, their mouths are stuffed with scarves, their legs are spread apart - they no longer try to escape from the hands of four sergeants, and the fifth rips and tears apart their blouses, bras, skirts, panties.

My telephone operators ran out of the house - laughter and obscenities.

the ranks do not decrease, some rise, others descend, and around the martyrs there are already pools of blood, and there is no end to the ranks, cackle and obscenity.
The girls are already unconscious, and the orgy continues.

Proudly akimbo, Major A is in command. But then the last one rises, and executioner sergeants attack two half-corpses.

Major A. pulls out a revolver from a holster and shoots at the bloody mouths of the martyrs, and the sergeants drag their mutilated bodies into the pigsty, and the hungry pigs begin to tear off their ears, noses, chests, and after a few minutes only two skulls, bones, vertebrae remain from them .

I'm scared, disgusting.

Suddenly, nausea rises in my throat, and I turn inside out.

Major A. - God, what a scoundrel!

I can't work, I run out of the house, not making out my way, I'm going somewhere, I'm coming back, I can't, I have to look into the pigsty.

In front of me are bloodshot eyes of a pig, and among the straw, pig droppings are two skulls, a jaw, several vertebrae and bones and two golden crosses - two girls “rescued” by me.

The commandant of the city, a senior colonel, tried to organize all-round defense, but half-drunk soldiers dragged women and girls out of their apartments. In a critical situation, the commandant decides to get ahead of the soldiers who have lost control of themselves. On his instructions, the liaison officer gives me an order to set up military guards of eight of my machine gunners around the church, and a specially created team beats off the captured women from the victorious warriors who have lost control of themselves.

Another team returns the soldiers and officers who fled around the city in search of "pleasures", explains to them that the city and the region are surrounded. With difficulty creates a circular defense.

At this time, about two hundred and fifty women and girls are driven into the church, but after about forty minutes several tanks drive up to the church. Tankers squeeze, push my submachine gunners away from the entrance, break into the temple, knock down and start to rape women.

I can not do anything. A young German woman seeks protection from me, another kneels down.

Herr Lieutenant, Herr Lieutenant!

Hoping for something, surrounded me. Everyone is saying something.

And already the news is sweeping through the city, and a line has already lined up, and again this damned cackle, and a line, and my soldiers.

Back, f ... your mother! - I yell and I don’t know where to put myself and how to protect those lying around my feet, and the tragedy is growing rapidly.

The groans of dying women. And now, up the stairs (why? why?), they are dragging them up to the platform, bloody, half-naked, unconscious, and through the broken windows they are thrown onto the stone slabs of the pavement.

They seize, undress, kill. There is no one left around me. Neither I nor any of my soldiers have ever seen anything like this. Strange hour.

The tankers left. Silence. Night. An eerie mountain of corpses. Unable to stay, we leave the church. And we can't sleep either.

So the Soviet veteran Leonid Nikolaevich Rabichev answered, apparently, the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. The Germans, of course, gave birth - but only those who were not killed. And the dead, Tanya, do not give birth.

War and sexual violence

It is no coincidence that they say about war that it is a continuation of politics, only by violent methods. One type of violence is sexual. As in civilian life, in wartime it is primarily women who suffer from it. The most terrible of the known wars, the Second World War, and in relation to violence against women, was also the most, most, most ...

For a long time, with regard to sexual crimes during the Second World War, the well-known principle “the winners are not judged” was in effect, and if they are judged, they do not talk about it very much. For many years, sexual atrocities were an attribute exclusively of the armies of the "aggressive axis", which is quite right. But it would be a mistake to assume that such actions were not typical for Soviet military personnel, as well as soldiers of the "fraternal" armies. Very interesting facts on this subject are contained in the article "Physiology of Victory" by V. Perepad, published by the weekly Zerkalo Nedeli.

Let us leave aside German pedantry, which, combined with inhumanity, takes on ugly forms, like official field brothels. It's not about the desire of the Germans to streamline the satisfaction of the sexual hunger of their soldiers, it's about motivation. The main thing was not concern for the moral and physical health of the Wehrmacht, but the desire to limit interracial sexual contacts, to prevent the "pollution" of the Aryan gene pool, because, in accordance with the racist theory of the Nazis, the Slavs were classified as "subhuman". The Nazi leadership estimated that if no action was taken, approximately one million children of German-Slavic origin could be expected to be born in the eastern occupied territories in the near future.

The organized and unorganized sexual "bestiality" of the Wehrmacht soldiers in the occupied territories reverberated through Germany itself with a deafening echo. After the Allied troops entered the Third Reich, it was the turn of German women to become victims of the tragedy called "war". According to German researchers, up to 2 million German women and girls were raped by Soviet soldiers from the beginning of the fighting in East Prussia until the autumn of 1945, and 500 thousand of them were on the territory of the Soviet zone of occupation, that is, the future GDR. Polish, Czechoslovak, Yugoslav soldiers did not lag behind the Soviets.

According to V. Perepada, the practice of raping German women reached its apogee in Berlin. At the time the Red Army entered the city, 1.4 million women and girls lived there, of which 800,000 were aged 14 to 45. During the spring - autumn of 1945, at least 110 thousand of them were raped by Soviet soldiers. Approximately 10% of women died or committed suicide as a result, 20% became pregnant, of which over a thousand gave birth to children (5% of all newborns in Berlin from the end of 1945 to the summer of 1946). In general, in the Soviet zone of occupation, rape victims produced approximately 300,000 children. It is not surprising that the monument to the Soviet soldier in Treptow Park in Berlin (the figure of a warrior with a child in his arms) had a different meaning for the Germans than for the Soviet people.

The author of the article “Physiology of Victory” cites the testimony of the Ukrainian writer and artist Emma Andievskaya, who in 1945, at the age of 14, ended up in Berlin with her mother. According to her, when Soviet units entered the quarter, rapes began almost immediately. For the first few days, there was a continuous wild cry above the street - these were the women who were being seized by Soviet soldiers. The Andievskaya family was left alone by the soldiers, only when they ran into their “native language” - swearing. According to Andievskaya, almost all the women in the quarter were raped during the first three days. The paradox also lay in the fact that the Soviet field courts considered mainly the cases of those servicemen who entered into, so to speak, normal love relationships with the Germans.

There are several options for explaining the behavior of Soviet soldiers. Firstly, the presence in the army of penal units, in which there were many criminals. Secondly, the four hellish years of war, when death and violence became inalienable attributes of everyday life, could not help lowering acceptable moral standards. Let's not discount such a strong feeling as revenge.

It cannot be said that the Soviet command did not try to keep discipline in the army under control. As in every regular army, rapists, according to the Charter of the Red Army, were punishable by death. The question was whether it always worked. The need for increased attention to this problem arose already in March 1945, after the Soviet troops committed the first massacre of the German civilian population in East Prussia. And although the military commandant's offices and officers took the civilian population under protection, they could not follow everything. And in some cases, most likely, they did not want to.

The rape did not bypass the western lands of Germany, which included American, British and French troops. Thus, after the latter entered Stuttgart, more than a thousand cases of rape of women aged 14 to 74 were recorded. Most of the rapists turned out to be in the Moroccan units, which were distinguished by particularly rude treatment of the civilian population. As for the American army, from 1942 to 1947, about a thousand servicemen were convicted of rape, four of them were sentenced to death.

Relations between the occupying forces and the local population developed in different ways in the future. With the beginning of the Cold War, the population of West Germany began to see the Anglo-American troops primarily as defenders against communism. In addition, the United States provides the Western occupation zones, and subsequently the FRG, with serious economic assistance. It was especially necessary for the residents of West Berlin in 1948-1949, when the city was blockaded by the Soviet Army, and its civilian population was on the verge of survival. Then came the turn of the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO, the first European integration structures, so that the tragic events of the end of the war in the public mind were gradually forced out.

The USSR also provided East Germany with economic assistance, while dismantling and removing equipment from plants and factories. But something else was decisive - the total suppression of cases of violence. Despite this, in the first months of the Soviet occupation, the German communists had to solve a rather difficult propaganda task - to reconcile the image of the liberating army with mass rapes. At the beginning of the summer of 1945, there was even an open clash between party functionaries and party chairman Walter Ulbricht. The latter eventually succeeded in quelling the internal party discussion on the issue of mass rape, referring to the crimes committed by the SS troops in the occupied Soviet territory. However, the German communists could not avoid serious political consequences. Not without reason, many historians consider the defeat of the latter in the elections to the magistrate of Berlin in 1946 to be one of those - the majority of Berlin voters were women, since many men were either killed or captured.

Someone will say that it would be possible not to open these, so delicate and painful, pages of the Second World War. But history teaches only those who know it.

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VIOLENCE AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE

During the occupation in Germany, Soviet troops committed mass rape of local residents.

“According to the estimates of the two main Berlin hospitals, the number of victims raped by Soviet soldiers ranges from ninety-five to one hundred and thirty thousand people. One doctor concluded that approximately one hundred thousand women had been raped in Berlin alone. And about ten thousand of them died mainly as a result of suicide.

Senyavskaya Elena Spartakovna

The last months of the war were tragic for Germany. The story of the last defenders of the Reich, killed by Russian avengers, is very sad, but the fate of German women who fell into the hands of victorious Russian soldiers is even sadder. The mass rapes were methodical... with hatred and cruelty. This topic is rarely talked about, because it is a stain on the heroic image of the heroes of the supporters of the Second World War.

Catherine Merridal

And here is what the famous Soviet playwright Zakhar Agranenko, who at that time served as a marine officer in East Prussia, writes in his diary:

“I don’t believe in individual intimate relationships between soldiers and German women ... Nine, ten ... twelve people at the same time, it had the character of gang rapes ...”

A 21-year-old girl from the reconnaissance detachment Agranenko said: "Our soldiers behave with the Germans, especially with German women, absolutely correctly." Some people found it interesting. So, some Germans remember that Soviet women watched how they were raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalia Hesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: "Russian soldiers raped all German women between the ages of 8 and 80. It was an army of rapists."

When the raped women of Koenigsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, the Red Army men considered themselves offended. They answered: "Russian soldiers don't shoot women. Only the Germans do that." The Red Army convinced itself that, since it had assumed the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers had every right to behave as they pleased.

The rapes of Soviet women nullify attempts to explain the behavior of the Red Army as revenge for German atrocities on the territory of the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1945, the Komsomol Central Committee notified Malenkov about the report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov reported: "On the night of February 24, a group of 35 soldiers and their battalion commander entered the women's hostel in the village of Grutenberg and raped everyone."

Many women were forced to "surrender" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, tried to hide in a closet, but was pulled out by a young soldier from Central Asia. He was so turned on by the opportunity to make love to a beautiful young blonde that he came prematurely. Magda tried to explain to him that she agreed to become his girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he told his comrades about her, and one soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, Magda's Jewish friend, was also raped. When the Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and that she was being persecuted, they received in response: "Frau ist Frau" (A woman is a woman - approx. per.).

On January 3, my son came on vacation from the front. He served in parts of the SS. My son told me several times that the SS units in Russia did incredible things. If the Russians come here, they won't pour rose oil on you. It turned out differently.. When the Russians came, I decided to open the veins of my children and commit suicide. But I felt sorry for the children, I hid in the basement, where we sat hungry for several days. Unexpectedly, four Red Army soldiers entered. They did not touch us, and they even gave little Werner a piece of bread and a pack of cookies. I didn't believe my eyes. After that we decided to go outside. No one touched us with the children ...

Elizabeth Schmeer

Well, at least they didn't touch anyone.

Of course, there were no millions of victims, I personally don’t believe in it .. But when we first went to visit home .. one of my veteran grandfathers was still alive .. and to my question: did they rape German women in the 45th? answered: Well, no women at all .. while declaring that there were enough of their beautiful nurses .. Considering that in the 45th he was 23 years old and with a height of 185, broad shoulders .. he was also handsome .. I believe that the nurses did not refuse. But someone was denied .. and someone just took revenge ... everything is possible. But MASS..it's too much.

Do you even believe what this person is saying? Somehow I have big doubts.

Rape during armed conflicts always has a military-psychological significance as a means of intimidation and demoralization of the enemy. At the same time, violence against women acted as a manifestation of sexist (ie, purely masculine) and racist syndromes, especially strong in large-scale stressful situations.

War violence is different from peacetime rape. Sexual violence in times of war or armed conflict can have a double meaning if carried out on a large scale. It serves not only to humiliate the individual who experiences it, but also to demonstrate to the people of the enemy state that its political leaders and army are not capable of protecting it. Therefore, such acts of violence, unlike those carried out in everyday life, do not take place secretly, but publicly, often even with the forced presence of other people.

In general, there are three features that distinguish military sexual violence from peacetime rape. The first is a public act. The enemy needs to see what is happening to his "property", which is why rapists often rape women in front of their own home. This is an act against the husband (symbolically the father of the nation or the leader of the enemy), not an act against the woman. The second is gang rape. Comrades-in-arms perform it in one agreement: everyone should be like the others. This reflects the ongoing group need to strengthen and reproduce solidarity. In other words, drink together, walk together, rape together. The third is the murder of a woman after sexual violence.

Documents available to researchers testify to mass violence by Wehrmacht soldiers of women in the occupied territories. However, it is difficult to determine the real scale of sexual crime during the war caused by the invaders on the territory of the USSR: primarily due to the lack of generalizing sources. In addition, in Soviet times, this problem was not focused on and no records of such victims were kept. Certain statistical data could give women's appeals to doctors, but they did not turn to doctors for help, fearing the condemnation of society.

Back in January 1942, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Molotov noted: “There are no boundaries to the people's anger and indignation, which cause in the Soviet population and in the Red Army countless facts of vile violence, vile mockery of women's honor and massacres of Soviet citizens and women, committed by fascist German officers and soldiers… Everywhere brutalized German bandits break into houses, rape women and girls in front of relatives and their children, mock the raped…”.

On the Eastern Front, group sexual violence against women was quite common among Wehrmacht soldiers. But not only German soldiers did this during the years of occupation, their allies did not disdain such behavior. Especially in this, according to the witnesses of the occupation, the Hungarian military “distinguished themselves”. The Soviet partisans did not remain aloof from such crimes.

In Lvov in 1941, 32 garment factory workers were subjected to violence and then killed by German stormtroopers. Drunken soldiers dragged Lviv girls and young women into the park. Kosciuszko was raped. Jewish women had to endure terrible scenes of sexual humiliation during the pogrom on July 1, 1941 in Lvov. The angry crowd did not stop at nothing, women and girls were undressed, chased in their underwear through the streets of the city, which, of course, humiliated their dignity and inflicted, in addition to physical, also psychological trauma. For example, eyewitnesses told the following story: participants in the pogroms stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish girl, stuck a baton in her vagina and forced her to march past the post office to the prison on Lontskoy, where "prison work" was being carried out at that time.

The mass rape of women and girls in the villages of Galicia is mentioned in the report of the Ukrainian rebels for October 1943: “ On October 21, 1943, pacification began in the Dolynshchina. Pacification is being translated by the Zondereinsatz SD department, with a force of 100 people, composed exclusively of Uzbeks themselves, under the leadership of a security police officer in the Valley of the Pole Yarosh. The department of Uzbeks arrived at about 4 pm in the village of Pogorilets and, having arranged a terrible shooting, they wanted to catch people. People began to run wherever they could. All the men ran into the forest. The Uzbeks rushed to the households and began to shoot and catch chickens and geese, and search the houses for butter, cheese, eggs, meat and, first of all, moonshine, then forced the women to cook and bring food to them. After eating well and drinking moonshine they caught girls. They raped where they were caught. There were several cases of rape in the presence of relatives, who were forced to stand in the corners in the corners, and their bestial instincts splashed out on their daughters in the most refined way. The number of cases of rape is not known, since everyone is embarrassed to admit it. A similar pacification was carried out in the villages: Ilemnya, Grabov and Lopyanka". The rebels cited the reasons for such actions as the small number of people who wanted to go to Germany from these villages, and the actions of the partisans in the region.

No less horrific scenes of sexual violence were carried out in Western Ukraine by Soviet partisans. This is evidenced by many reports of the UPA detachments, however, to illustrate the rape of women by red partisans, it is still worth citing Soviet sources - they are reliable and, most importantly, objective, because the reports of the UPA and the memories of witnesses to a certain extent could "exceed" in this aspect. The documents of the "Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement" testify to sexual violence against the civilian population by the "people's avengers". An interesting point: in the reports of partisan formations stationed in the Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kiev regions, there are few references to the rape of women; they begin to appear with rare frequency during raids in Western Ukraine. This is explained by the attitude of the Soviet partisans towards this politically “unreliable” region and the unfriendly perception of the Soviets by the local population. The vast majority of Galicians considered them enemies and supported the Ukrainian rebels. It should not be discounted that the partisans during the raid were not too worried about their reputation, they understood that, apparently, they would not return to the places of their crimes soon. Being in the same territory, it is worth thinking about establishing normal relations with the population in order to be able to receive food or clothing from it. During the raid, it was possible to take all this by force.

The sexual violence is described quite thoroughly in the memorandum of the former partisans of the formation named after him. Budyonny V. Buslaev and N. Sidorenko in the name of the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR S. Savchenko. The document states, in part: In the village of Dubovki, near Tarnopol, a woman aged 40-45 was raped by partisans Gardonovim, Panasyuk, Mezentsev, the detachment commander Bubnov and others. The name of the victim is unknown. In the village of Verkhobuzh, near Brody, foreman Mezentsev tried to rape a girl and her mother of 65 years old, took her out into the street at night and, under pain of a weapon, demanded consent. He put it against the wall and fired from a machine gun over their heads, after which he raped ... In one village, I don’t remember the name, near Snyatyn, foreman Mezentsev, drunk drunk, took out a pistol and tried to rape a girl who ran away, then he raped her grandmother, who was 60 -65 years old… Platoon commander Bublik Pavel himself personally incited the fighters to do this, was engaged in selling horses for vodka, which he took back before leaving… He systematically drank, made illegal searches on his own and demanded vodka from the population. He always did this with weapons in his hands, shot at apartments, intimidated the population. In the village of Biskov (in the Carpathian Mountains), in the apartment of the headquarters of the formation, the cook of the headquarters shot through the windows, kitchen utensils and the ceiling because he wanted to rape the hostess, but she ran away. After that, he made his need on the table ... Robberies were carried out, of course, during searches under the pretext of whether there were “spies” or “Bandera”, and searches, as a rule, were carried out in places where there could be watches and other valuable things. Things like watches, razors, rings, expensive suits were simply taken without appeal. The population usually knew about the approach of our partisan unit 30-40 km away. And in recent days it was possible to meet villages left with some grandfathers, or even empty houses».

Of course, the leadership of the NKVD demanded an explanation from the command of the Budyonnovsky formation. In the report, the commander of the “For Kyiv” detachment, Captain Makarov, explained everything simply. He denies all the facts, and accused the partisans who wrote the note of treason (the complainants left the detachment and went to the rear of the Red Army) and ties with Bandera. By the way, this is a fairly common type of replies from the commanders of partisan detachments in case they are accused of looting, drunkenness or sexual violence. (It turned out to be a paradox - it turned out that Makarov did not suspect that there were two Banderaites in his detachment, but he "saw the light" only when they wrote a memorandum about violations in the unit). The case was probably hushed up. At least it was not possible to trace its further course due to the lack of documents indicating the punishments imposed on the defendants.

As you can see, during the war years, women often became victims of rape by soldiers of the warring parties. In the post-war period, it was very difficult for them to return to a full life. Indeed, in the USSR they did not receive proper medical care, in cases of pregnancy they could not get rid of the fetus - in the Soviet Union, abortions were prohibited by law. Many, unable to bear this, committed suicide, someone moved to another place of residence, thus trying to protect themselves from gossip or people's sympathy and try to forget what they experienced.