commander after examining the neat, to him impossibly prosperous-looking farmhouses of East Prussia:
How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens and apple trees. And they invaded us . . . For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them. 3
Another Russian, an officer this time, described being billeted in April 1945 in a block of flats outside Berlin:
Each small flat is comfortably furnished. The larders are stocked with home-cured meat, preserved fruit, strawberry jam. The deeper we penetrate into Germany the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere . . . I’d just love to smash my fist into all those neat rows of tins and bottles. 4
Rape may or may not have been the Russian soldiers’ main intent at Nemmersdorf. By the time, three months later, that the Red Army moved into German territory finally and definitively, there could be no doubt that a hate-fuelled spoliation of German bodies as well as property had become an obsessive preoccupation of the invaders.
Perhaps Russian soldiers saw enemy women as a form of German property. These were the women who – so their own prejudices and their government’s propaganda told them – had sat safe at home while the men of the Wehrmacht ravaged Belarus, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the plains before Moscow; who had received those parcels of exotic good things from conquered Russia while the wives, sisters and daughters of the men who now entered Germany as victors were starved and massacred – and, yes, raped, too. Although rape by German soldiers was not nearly as systematic (the Nazi regime disapproved of sexual intercourse with Russian women on racial grounds), it – and its marginally more respectable cousin, sexual exploitation – was certainly not unknown.
In fact, millions of by no means pampered German women had already suffered bombing, bereavement and loss of their homes. However, this was not, perhaps understandably, how the bitter and infuriated men of the Red Army saw it.
Not that the Red Army’s record in other countries was spotless. In September 1944 the Bulgarian Communist Party was constrained to address a complaint to the Soviet General Staff (the Stavka ), calling for it to ‘take measures to end occurrences of banditry, looting, and rape, strictly punishing guilty persons’. 5
Bulgaria had unwisely allied itself with the Axis early in the war. The same was true of Hungary, and in February 1945 the fall of Budapest to the Soviets was followed by ghastly scenes of mass rape and sexual violence on a scale unseen since the Thirty Years War. However, even though Czechoslovakia was considered a friendly country with close cultural and linguistic links to Russia, and had suffered grievously under German occupation for more than six years, even there, despite clear orders to avoid actions that could alienate the population, the advancing Soviet troops caused problems.
In March 1945, Stalin himself was forced to warn a Czechoslovak delegation, in his sinister, fake-jocular way:
The fact is that there are now 12 million people in the Red Army. They are far from being angels. They have been coarsened by war. Many of them have gone 2,000 kilometres from Stalingrad to the middle of Czechoslovakia. On their way they have seen much sorrow and many terrible things. So do not be surprised if some of our people do not behave as they should in your country. We know that some of our soldiers with a low level of political consciousness are pestering and abusing girls and women, are behaving badly. Let our Czechoslovakian friends know that now, so that the attraction of our Red Army does not turn into disappointment. 6
All the same, there can be no doubt that, once in Germany, it all got immeasurably worse. Subjected to crushing, brutalising discipline – initially aimed at stiffening defensive resolve during the calamitous months following the
How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens and apple trees. And they invaded us . . . For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them. 3
Another Russian, an officer this time, described being billeted in April 1945 in a block of flats outside Berlin:
Each small flat is comfortably furnished. The larders are stocked with home-cured meat, preserved fruit, strawberry jam. The deeper we penetrate into Germany the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere . . . I’d just love to smash my fist into all those neat rows of tins and bottles. 4
Rape may or may not have been the Russian soldiers’ main intent at Nemmersdorf. By the time, three months later, that the Red Army moved into German territory finally and definitively, there could be no doubt that a hate-fuelled spoliation of German bodies as well as property had become an obsessive preoccupation of the invaders.
Perhaps Russian soldiers saw enemy women as a form of German property. These were the women who – so their own prejudices and their government’s propaganda told them – had sat safe at home while the men of the Wehrmacht ravaged Belarus, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the plains before Moscow; who had received those parcels of exotic good things from conquered Russia while the wives, sisters and daughters of the men who now entered Germany as victors were starved and massacred – and, yes, raped, too. Although rape by German soldiers was not nearly as systematic (the Nazi regime disapproved of sexual intercourse with Russian women on racial grounds), it – and its marginally more respectable cousin, sexual exploitation – was certainly not unknown.
In fact, millions of by no means pampered German women had already suffered bombing, bereavement and loss of their homes. However, this was not, perhaps understandably, how the bitter and infuriated men of the Red Army saw it.
Not that the Red Army’s record in other countries was spotless. In September 1944 the Bulgarian Communist Party was constrained to address a complaint to the Soviet General Staff (the Stavka ), calling for it to ‘take measures to end occurrences of banditry, looting, and rape, strictly punishing guilty persons’. 5
Bulgaria had unwisely allied itself with the Axis early in the war. The same was true of Hungary, and in February 1945 the fall of Budapest to the Soviets was followed by ghastly scenes of mass rape and sexual violence on a scale unseen since the Thirty Years War. However, even though Czechoslovakia was considered a friendly country with close cultural and linguistic links to Russia, and had suffered grievously under German occupation for more than six years, even there, despite clear orders to avoid actions that could alienate the population, the advancing Soviet troops caused problems.
In March 1945, Stalin himself was forced to warn a Czechoslovak delegation, in his sinister, fake-jocular way:
The fact is that there are now 12 million people in the Red Army. They are far from being angels. They have been coarsened by war. Many of them have gone 2,000 kilometres from Stalingrad to the middle of Czechoslovakia. On their way they have seen much sorrow and many terrible things. So do not be surprised if some of our people do not behave as they should in your country. We know that some of our soldiers with a low level of political consciousness are pestering and abusing girls and women, are behaving badly. Let our Czechoslovakian friends know that now, so that the attraction of our Red Army does not turn into disappointment. 6
All the same, there can be no doubt that, once in Germany, it all got immeasurably worse. Subjected to crushing, brutalising discipline – initially aimed at stiffening defensive resolve during the calamitous months following the
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