Soviet mass rapes during and after WW2

[Domen]

It seems, that Russia still doesn't recognize their mass rapes, just like Turkey still doesn't recognize their genocides:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2013/10/poland-and-russia

Wounds of the past
Oct 21st 2013, 17:59

A Polish art student provoked a hiccup in the often difficult relations between his nation and Russia last week. Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk, 26, a student at Gdansk's Fine Arts Academy, placed a sculpture called "Komm, Frau" (Come, Woman), depicting a Red Army soldier raping a pregnant German woman while holding her hair and putting a gun to her head, on a street in the city then known as Danzig—next to a communist-era memorial to Soviet Union troops that defeated Nazi forces in 1945.

The 300 kilo sculpture was installed overnight. It only remained in place for a few hours as police removed it following a complaint. The event made national news and provoked an angry response from Russia’s ambassador to Poland.

“I am deeply outraged by a prank of a Gdansk Fine Arts Academy student whose pseudo-art desecrated the memory of 600,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the fight for Poland’s freedom and independence,” wrote Alexander Alekseev, the Russian envoy. Russian MP Franc Klincewicz said he would demand an apology from the artist.

In 1939 the free city of Danzig was home to Germans and a Polish minority. It became the Polish city of Gdansk when its German population was expelled or fled at the end of the war. Mr Szumczyk made the sculpture after reading about rapes committed against women in the city by advancing Red Army troops.

Dorota Karas, writing in Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish daily, said Gdansk city records estimate that up to 40% of the women living in Danzig were raped. “At a certain moment I felt that I had to get this topic that took place in Gdansk out of my system,” Mr Szumczyk told the Gazeta. “This topic scares me. I deliberately showed a soldier and a woman in the aesthetics of socialist realism. I wanted it to be in this style. I know that the work is vulgar but such is our history,” he said.

Prosecutors in the city began an investigation but dropped the case after they decided the student had not incited hatred on ethnic grounds nor desecrated a public space dedicated to historical memory. They added police are yet to determine whether Mr Szumczyk committed a misdemeanor for an alleged ‘tasteless incident’.

Antoni Pawlak, spokesman for Gdansk’s mayor said the rape of women by soldiers was one of many subjects that have been swept under the carpet in Polish history. “However I am surprised by the ambassador’s reaction. Similar artistic expressions take place all over the world; it shouldn’t be an event of international importance. It would be different if City Hall decided to erect such a monument,” he said.

Marcin Wojciechowski, a spokesman of Poland’s foreign office., tweeted: “I’m sorry about the incident of the statue of the Soviet soldiers in Gdansk. It’s a pseudo-artistic action. It will not influence relations between Poland and Russia”. It wasn’t only Soviet troops that brutally raped women as the Red Army and the western Allies fought their way into Germany in 1944-45; American, British, Canadian and French soldiers did so too.

Even so, according to Anthony Beevor, a British historian, the brutality against women from the Soviets was on a different scale. Writing in the Guardian in 2002, Mr Beevor said at least 2m German women are thought to have been raped, with 1.4m victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone. In Berlin, one doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide.

Many Russian historians dispute these claims saying the figures are based on faulty methodology and unreliable sources.

Rubbish about "desecrating the memory of Soviet soldiers" is even funnier considering the fact, that the USSR was an atheist state. How can one even "desecrate" soldiers of an officially and aggressively atheist state? Since when did the Soviets want to be associated with any kind of "sacredness"?

 

[privatehudson]

When I see articles like this I can't help but think that the arguments about the Centenary of the outbreak of WW1 are nothing compared to those that are coming for WW2.

 

[sherbz]

I think this is an interesting topic. It is not that widely known, and even in Germany it was often hushed up. I was amazed after speaking to some German friends and their attitudes to it. It was like German war guilt even extended to the excusing of crimes like this. Still though, many were upset that this aspect of the war has been largely ignored by people. I expect it will surface with greater vigor in the future.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

pseudo-art

What?

 

[Tahuti]

What?

Pseudo-What

It seems Pseudo-Russia still doesn't recognise the Pseudo-Rapes of Pseudo-German Pseudo-women, in the closing pseudo-days of the Great Pseudo-Patriotic Pseudo-War.

 

[Domen]

Also many of Polish women who were Pseudo-Liberated by Soviet soldiers were raped by their "liberators" (often because they were confused with German women and often because the Soviets simply did not care about the nationality of their victims). Below an excerpt from "Prussian Nights" by Russian poet (and veteran of the last years of WW2 at the same time) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in English translation) - it is such a Pseudo-poem by a Pseudo-poet:

Allenstein has just been taken.
An hour ago, a sudden strike
Of tanks and cavalry overwhelmed it...
Now the night flares. Burning sugar.
It flames with violet-coloured fire
Over the earth. It seems to simmer,
A trmbling blaze, a lilac shimmer...
Knocks. Rings. A tumult. Then we hear
A moment later, the cry of a girl,
Somewhere from behind a wall,
"I'm not German. I'm not a German.
No. I'm Polish, I'm a Pole!"
Grabbing what comes handy, those
Like-minded lads get in and start-
And oh, what heart
Could well oppose?

Allenstein = Olsztyn and it was located in mostly Polish-speaking southern part of East Prussia (inhabited by Polish-speaking Warmiaks and Mazurs).

 

[Domen]

Some recommended reading on the subject of Soviet rapes in WW2:

- Antony Beevor, "War and Rape, Germany 1945"
- Christopher Duffy, "Red Storm on the Reich"
- Ralph Kieling, "Gruesome Harvest"
- C. Kivlahan, N. Ewigman, "Rape as a Weapon of War in Modern Conflicts"
- Joachim Hoffmann, "Stalin's War of Extermination"
- Alexander Werth, "Russia at War 1941 - 1945"

I can also quote some excerpts from these listed above if you want, but it is a very unpleasant topic.

 

[Traitorfish]

What is the actual point of this thread? My charitable assumption would be that it's drawing attention to one of the more overlooked tragedies of the Second World War, and asking us to discuss why it might have been neglected, but the OP seems more concerned with making snotty remarks about Russians. So it's hard to tell.

 

[Domen]

The point is the same as in your charitable assumption.

However, my snotty remarks were about Russian attitudes when it comes to their war crimes during WW2, not about Russians themselves.

Here is an example of such attitudes of many Russians even today (which deserve snotty remarks, because the attitudes are as well snotty):

Attitudes in Russia do not seem to have changed very much over the years. A few months ago, a Russian interpreter hired by the BBC was outraged when she came across a German woman's description of her rape by Red Army soldiers. „If it's true, then she must have wanted it‟, she commented angrily. And in Helsinki a few weeks ago, I was attacked by a young pro-Soviet Finnish woman, who made the extraordinary statement that I had not made any allowance for the poverty of Red Army soldiers, because this had meant that they could not afford prostitutes.

Snotty attitude deserves snotty comments...

And Russians until today have snotty attitudes when it comes to discussing Soviet crimes commited against other neighbouring nations. They only see themselves as "liberators" and think that they were flawless, and that non-Russians complaining about Soviet crimes must be freaking nationalists and liers.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

It is not that widely known, and even in Germany it was often hushed up. I was amazed after speaking to some German friends and their attitudes to it. It was like German war guilt even extended to the excusing of crimes like this.

As in every sphere of culture there are many of those which just swim with what seems mainstream or alternatively as inoffensive as possible.
The luck of Germany is that both things mean a profound lack of TRADITIONAL nationalism. HOWEVER - that only means that the nationalistic tendency to want to look "civilized" overrules the nationalistic tendency to want to look "respectable". Which means that Germans are not any less nationalistic than neighboring nations but simply "suffer" a "nationalistic complex" causing their nationalistic respectability to dominate their nationalistic civilizedness.
As already mentioned - I believe this to be a good thing. But only in effect. In essence - Germans are just as nationalistic FOOLS as its neighbors if you ask me. Meaning - to return to my initial point - Germans have just as much a wish to be mainstream and/or inoffensive as their neighbors.

Sorry to be misanthrope - but it gets kinda forced on you.

 

[Silurian]

The point is the same as in your charitable assumption.

However, my snotty remarks were about Russian attitudes when it comes to their war crimes during WW2, not about Russians themselves.

Every nation looks at themselves through rose tinted spectacles.

 

[Akka]

Am I the only one who find so utterly laughable the claim that Russians seemingly selflessly "liberated" Poland, while they happily invaded and partitioned it with their then-buddies nazis barely five years before ?

 

[Traitorfish]

The Soviet line was that the initial invasion was a liberation, too. Immediately from the military regime, pre-emptively from the Nazis, and in a very general way from international capitalism. Which isn't all that less laughable, but at least internally-consistent.

 

[warpus]

Maybe all those rapes were just Russian soldiers liberating the women they were raping from lives of sexual monotony.

 

[Tahuti]

The Soviet line was that the initial invasion was a liberation, too. Immediately from the military regime, pre-emptively from the Nazis, and in a very general way from international capitalism. Which isn't all that less laughable, but at least internally-consistent.

They just had the firepower to do so. Basically, the only reason that mattered.

 

[Traitorfish]

Also an accurate description of the Allied invasion of Occupied and Vichy France, which most people would defend as a legitimate "liberation". The distinction is always, ultimately, ideological.

 

[Tahuti]

True. And it is quite naive to expect that the allies did so for grounds of human decency, which may have played a small part, but not most of it.

Still, in spite of many unjustified actions committed by the allies, no one should argue that we were worse off because of the destruction the Nazis and their allies by the Allied powers, even the Soviets.

 

[Akka]

Also an accurate description of the Allied invasion of Occupied and Vichy France, which most people would defend as a legitimate "liberation". The distinction is always, ultimately, ideological.

Or maybe the fact that the PEOPLE THEMSELVES called it "Liberation" is the actual main reason ?

 

[ParkCungHee]

Or maybe the fact that the PEOPLE THEMSELVES called it "Liberation" is the actual main reason ?

Are bullets the usual way the French welcome their liberators?

 

[Traitorfish]

Or maybe the fact that the PEOPLE THEMSELVES called it "Liberation" is the actual main reason ?

Polish communists also referred to the invasion as a "liberation". Likewise, as Park, plenty of people in France, Italy, Greece, etc. resisted Allied "liberation" just as intently as in Germany.

Which, queerly, is never described as a "liberation", despite on the surface meeting the criteria just as readily as Italy, whose authoritarian regimes was similarly home-grown. Presumably because the conventional narrative in the English-speaking world attributes responsibility for the Third Reich to the German people as a whole, while it only attributes responsibility for the Fascist and Vichy regimes to a minority. And yet, in Italy, the "liberation" is often seen as an Italian civil war coinciding with a foreign invasion, rather than as a foreign "liberation", a view also held by fringe elements in France.

As I said, the distinction is always ultimately ideological, and it's not immediately obvious why we should prefer one narrative to another.