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When Americans arrived in Berlin they were quite horrified. Over 100,000 women in Berlin were systemically raped by Russian soliders [i]. As an American/English

When Americans arrived in Berlin they were quite horrified. Over 100,000 women in Berlin were systemically raped by Russian soliders [i]. As an American/Englishmen witnessing this and ordered not to intervene created hate and disdain for the Russian forces. The American forces had no concept of what the Russian forces endured -- still not an excuse for rape. Eventually generals on the western side began forming plans to unite with pow German soldiers and start attacking the Russians -- it was such a secret plan it wasn't even disclosed until 1998. [ii] It is hard to visualize the attitude of the American top brass towards Russia in 1945 but I feel this is a fair representation of Patton: [iii]. [i] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679 [ii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable [iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxAIE9TbGyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxAIE9TbGyk

yeukhon 9y ago
It is so sad that rape is a common war crime in every war since very ancient time. Rape during WW2 was probably one of the biggest crimes after mass genocide. I am familiar with the Japanese’s rape crime but this is the first time I am hearing about this. Allies are no exception. The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I'm not sure what the correct psychology is. Add together 'shell shock', depression, a continuous fear of impeding death, repeated exposure to unimaginable horrors, separation from home and family for years at a time, and despair at ever reuniting with your loved ones. I wonder at those able to endure all that, and end up anything like normal.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    You also have to assume that a certain percentage of the soldiers would be or already have been rapists in civilian life, and now they perceive great opportunity in that regard. Edit - is this controversial? It’s simply a fact that some men do that, throughout history, in almost all cultures, hence the entire topic... Sometimes units of soldiers are even formed from criminals.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      The assumption seems correct, but hardly significant in explaining the scale of the phenomenon.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        And by scale, do you mean the amount of victims or the number of perpetrators?
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        The latter, as estimated from the former.
      - yeukhon 9y ago
        It is probably insignificant for most wars, but it isn't uncommon in history. For example, throughout ancient Chinese history, it was common for bandits to serve in army either after they had surrendered or when government paid them to fight (mostly because these bandits knew the terrain well and had strong combat experience). Many of the bandits were rapists and killers, as one would expect.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    True. Those can add up. I just thought of something controversial Homosexual soldiers do exist, and I do acknowledge there are same-sex rapes of both genders. Perhaps some of them used this rape opportunity to mask their homosexuality and even as a way to get their sexual urge out of the way (beside masturbation).
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  The evolutionary psychology of primitive war very likely includes these "reproductive opportunities". Going to war without benefit to the genes driving the impulse? We'd probably have stopped doing it a long time ago. We'd like to replace these, uhm, traditional benefits of war with, say, increased status at home for veterans, but have such efforts been going on long enough to erase the underlying psychology?
- danjc 9y ago
  I think rape (at least in those contexts) is mostly about power
  - Profragile 9y ago
    You don't really think that... you just repeat it because some retard said so.
- yakitori 9y ago
  > Allies are no exception. Absolutely. As Robert E Lee eloquently said: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." In war there is no good. It's just evil. The only difference is between winners and losers. > The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse. Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and rape/procreate with the females. For much of human history, rape wasn't a crime. One of the reasons for going to war was for women. Women were considered spoils of war. You can find it in seminal western texts like Iliad or the bible. The entirety of european colonization ( from africa to china ) was mass rape of women. As has been in pretty much all human cultures since we kept records.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    > The entirety of european colonization ( from africa to china ) was mass rape of women I was with you up until then. European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women.
    - scotty79 9y ago
      I don't think it was the goal. Just the side effect.
    - yakitori 9y ago
      > European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women. I meant for the entirety of european colonization ( its duration ), that the mass rape of women from africa to china was the norm. Not that rape was the only motivating factor. I think that was fairly obvious if you put that within the context of my other points. Women, along with resources, land, slaves, etc were part of the equation. It wasn't the sole reason.
  - scotty79 9y ago
    > Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and rape/procreate with the females. For much of human history, rape wasn't a crime. One of the reasons for going to war was for women. It's very deppressing but apparently shape of human penis is very good for shoveling sperm of the guy that was before you. In tribal or pre-tribal times it's possible that war gang rapes were common enough to shape evolution.
zipwitch 9y ago
Pure anecdote and likely shaded by the Cold War, but I remember my WWII veteran grandfather (European theater) telling me how after the war he had talked to fellow US and British officers responsible for turning POWs over to the Soviets. (I don't recall if he said whether they were the soliders of Axis powers being turned over to the Russians under some agreement, or soldiers from Russia or from Soviet occupied countries.) He recounted how the Soviets made no secret of the fact that the POWs were executed en masse, and the Allied officers responded by helping their own prisoners escape rather than hand them over to certain death.
- ransom1538 9y ago
  If you were a German with an armpit tattoo [i] and were taken by the Russians death was certain. The allies would routinely hand over these men to the Russians to avoid an entire war crime trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo
  - rsync 9y ago
    "If you were a German with an armpit tattoo [1] and were taken by the Russians death was certain." I can think of worse heuristics[1] to use for deciding "whom should we kill". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo
- qbaqbaqba 9y ago
  It's true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway29301 9y ago
I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of Cold-War-era propagandizing, with the deliberate intention of shifting the narrative of the end of WWII, away from Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe (especially Slavic Eastern Europe), where untold numbers of women, children, and elderly were massacred and entire villages were burned to the ground. This posturing was effectively utilized, politically, to justify the alienation of the USSR in a post-WWII era. As for Operation Unthinkable, it is one of the better-known realities of WWII that Churchill and Stalin enjoyed a mutual (and, to a retrospectively large extent, mutually-unfounded) paranoid fear of each others' ambitions. It is in that context that Unthinkable was formed – retaliation for poor treatment of POWs might have been a politically-tasteful façade, but was not the root as the parent might suggest. I believe in the saying that begins with two eyes and ends with zero. The parent's sentiment seems to preach on the failing moral integrity of the Red Army soldiers – after all, they went for that second eye. I'd like to think that I am morally well-formed enough to not rape and kill, even when provoked to some unknown, but hopefully high degree. When I try to imagine what it was like to be a Russian soldier in 1945, advancing against people whom you see directly responsible for the death by fire and famine of your brothers, fathers, cousins, wives, children; when you've seen men die instantly for standing in the wrong place in line, I can't. We call these things "shell shock", but it masks the depravity that we are unfathomably privileged to not endure. I can't imagine the person I would be. I don't think any of us could. Principles about eyes probably don't seem to carry weight when the only parts of your village left to come home to (that you passed, on your way to the front) are the parts that wouldn't burn. In that sobering context, one finds that the Red Army's treatment of Germany was (this is very counter-narrative west of the curtain) perhaps shockingly docile. The Red Army did not give orders to execute unarmed political officers on sight, or to burn entire swaths of countryside, with its villages and inhabitants, to the ground. Many German POWs perished for a myriad of reasons, among the biggest being insufficient supply lines, and an incredibly harsh winter of '45. The western allies had much better supply lines, rebooted in place, while the Soviets largely had to make them up as they went along. And yet, at least those take prisoner were treated with enough human dignity, to be taken prisoner in the first place. Their soviet counterparts were not given the same courtesy. I am recalling the diary of a Wehrmacht soldier, who was shocked that his captors did not kill him on sight – so conditioned was he to the reciprocal action, not only towards soldiers, but unarmed civilians, whom he had been instructed to believe were sub-human. Now this sub-human, in the reverse role, offered him bread of his own ration! Yes, the Red Army committed war crimes. But it is important to consider that the morale of their troops begged for war crimes far worse than those committed. In all, I humbly submit the idea that we are not in any position to judge. Citations from BBC magazine wikipedia, and youtube notwithstanding. At this point, I'm surely rambling, but I just want to close by saying that as we inherit our popularly-told modern history, it is important to keep in mind that there are humans in every story, and that we gain nothing but bigotry from deliberately excluding the experiences of one over the other. Lest we repeat their mistakes of irrational hatred, which begets more, and so on. On that note, I encourage us all to, at some point, read balanced histories of that era, which were inevitably written after the cold war. Shirer, whose account was authoritative while many of us were growing up, is a journalist who was the product of his time. His books are mostly regarded as a primary source by modern scholars. "Concise History of the Third Reich" by Wolfgang Benz, "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder, "The Unwomanly Face of War" by Svetlana Alexeivich, and "Burned Bridge" by Edith Sheffer are solid scholarly entry points for those of us for whom this more nuanced and even approach is appealing. For those of you who get to visit Berlin, I'd also strongly recommend the German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst – it's both utterly fantastic and utterly empty (on every day except for the May 8/9, when a large number of observant Russians come to pay respects), due to being so far away from the city centers. The guides there are some of the most knowledgeable people on this subject I've met.
Spooky23 9y ago
Not to make excuses, but there were widely varying levels of discipline in the Red Army. My understanding was that the "A team" shock troops and mainline motor infantry/armored divisions were well disciplined, but the later echelon of conscript infantry went into combat and gunpoint, didn't have functional unit leadership and were raping and pillaging.

yeukhon 9y ago

It is so sad that rape is a common war crime in every war since very ancient time. Rape during WW2 was probably one of the biggest crimes after mass genocide. I am familiar with the Japanese’s rape crime but this is the first time I am hearing about this. Allies are no exception. The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I'm not sure what the correct psychology is. Add together 'shell shock', depression, a continuous fear of impeding death, repeated exposure to unimaginable horrors, separation from home and family for years at a time, and despair at ever reuniting with your loved ones. I wonder at those able to endure all that, and end up anything like normal.
- code_duck 9y ago
  You also have to assume that a certain percentage of the soldiers would be or already have been rapists in civilian life, and now they perceive great opportunity in that regard. Edit - is this controversial? It’s simply a fact that some men do that, throughout history, in almost all cultures, hence the entire topic... Sometimes units of soldiers are even formed from criminals.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    The assumption seems correct, but hardly significant in explaining the scale of the phenomenon.
    - code_duck 9y ago
      And by scale, do you mean the amount of victims or the number of perpetrators?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        The latter, as estimated from the former.
    - yeukhon 9y ago
      It is probably insignificant for most wars, but it isn't uncommon in history. For example, throughout ancient Chinese history, it was common for bandits to serve in army either after they had surrendered or when government paid them to fight (mostly because these bandits knew the terrain well and had strong combat experience). Many of the bandits were rapists and killers, as one would expect.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  True. Those can add up. I just thought of something controversial Homosexual soldiers do exist, and I do acknowledge there are same-sex rapes of both genders. Perhaps some of them used this rape opportunity to mask their homosexuality and even as a way to get their sexual urge out of the way (beside masturbation).
YouAreGreat 9y ago
The evolutionary psychology of primitive war very likely includes these "reproductive opportunities". Going to war without benefit to the genes driving the impulse? We'd probably have stopped doing it a long time ago. We'd like to replace these, uhm, traditional benefits of war with, say, increased status at home for veterans, but have such efforts been going on long enough to erase the underlying psychology?
danjc 9y ago
I think rape (at least in those contexts) is mostly about power
- Profragile 9y ago
  You don't really think that... you just repeat it because some retard said so.
yakitori 9y ago
> Allies are no exception. Absolutely. As Robert E Lee eloquently said: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." In war there is no good. It's just evil. The only difference is between winners and losers. > The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse. Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and rape/procreate with the females. For much of human history, rape wasn't a crime. One of the reasons for going to war was for women. Women were considered spoils of war. You can find it in seminal western texts like Iliad or the bible. The entirety of european colonization ( from africa to china ) was mass rape of women. As has been in pretty much all human cultures since we kept records.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  > The entirety of european colonization ( from africa to china ) was mass rape of women I was with you up until then. European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women.
  - scotty79 9y ago
    I don't think it was the goal. Just the side effect.
  - yakitori 9y ago
    > European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women. I meant for the entirety of european colonization ( its duration ), that the mass rape of women from africa to china was the norm. Not that rape was the only motivating factor. I think that was fairly obvious if you put that within the context of my other points. Women, along with resources, land, slaves, etc were part of the equation. It wasn't the sole reason.
- scotty79 9y ago
  > Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and rape/procreate with the females. For much of human history, rape wasn't a crime. One of the reasons for going to war was for women. It's very deppressing but apparently shape of human penis is very good for shoveling sperm of the guy that was before you. In tribal or pre-tribal times it's possible that war gang rapes were common enough to shape evolution.

zipwitch 9y ago

Pure anecdote and likely shaded by the Cold War, but I remember my WWII veteran grandfather (European theater) telling me how after the war he had talked to fellow US and British officers responsible for turning POWs over to the Soviets. (I don't recall if he said whether they were the soliders of Axis powers being turned over to the Russians under some agreement, or soldiers from Russia or from Soviet occupied countries.) He recounted how the Soviets made no secret of the fact that the POWs were executed en masse, and the Allied officers responded by helping their own prisoners escape rather than hand them over to certain death.

ransom1538 9y ago
If you were a German with an armpit tattoo [i] and were taken by the Russians death was certain. The allies would routinely hand over these men to the Russians to avoid an entire war crime trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo
- rsync 9y ago
  "If you were a German with an armpit tattoo [1] and were taken by the Russians death was certain." I can think of worse heuristics[1] to use for deciding "whom should we kill". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
It's true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

throwaway29301 9y ago

I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of Cold-War-era propagandizing, with the deliberate intention of shifting the narrative of the end of WWII, away from Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe (especially Slavic Eastern Europe), where untold numbers of women, children, and elderly were massacred and entire villages were burned to the ground. This posturing was effectively utilized, politically, to justify the alienation of the USSR in a post-WWII era. As for Operation Unthinkable, it is one of the better-known realities of WWII that Churchill and Stalin enjoyed a mutual (and, to a retrospectively large extent, mutually-unfounded) paranoid fear of each others' ambitions. It is in that context that Unthinkable was formed – retaliation for poor treatment of POWs might have been a politically-tasteful façade, but was not the root as the parent might suggest. I believe in the saying that begins with two eyes and ends with zero. The parent's sentiment seems to preach on the failing moral integrity of the Red Army soldiers – after all, they went for that second eye. I'd like to think that I am morally well-formed enough to not rape and kill, even when provoked to some unknown, but hopefully high degree. When I try to imagine what it was like to be a Russian soldier in 1945, advancing against people whom you see directly responsible for the death by fire and famine of your brothers, fathers, cousins, wives, children; when you've seen men die instantly for standing in the wrong place in line, I can't. We call these things "shell shock", but it masks the depravity that we are unfathomably privileged to not endure. I can't imagine the person I would be. I don't think any of us could. Principles about eyes probably don't seem to carry weight when the only parts of your village left to come home to (that you passed, on your way to the front) are the parts that wouldn't burn. In that sobering context, one finds that the Red Army's treatment of Germany was (this is very counter-narrative west of the curtain) perhaps shockingly docile. The Red Army did not give orders to execute unarmed political officers on sight, or to burn entire swaths of countryside, with its villages and inhabitants, to the ground. Many German POWs perished for a myriad of reasons, among the biggest being insufficient supply lines, and an incredibly harsh winter of '45. The western allies had much better supply lines, rebooted in place, while the Soviets largely had to make them up as they went along. And yet, at least those take prisoner were treated with enough human dignity, to be taken prisoner in the first place. Their soviet counterparts were not given the same courtesy. I am recalling the diary of a Wehrmacht soldier, who was shocked that his captors did not kill him on sight – so conditioned was he to the reciprocal action, not only towards soldiers, but unarmed civilians, whom he had been instructed to believe were sub-human. Now this sub-human, in the reverse role, offered him bread of his own ration! Yes, the Red Army committed war crimes. But it is important to consider that the morale of their troops begged for war crimes far worse than those committed. In all, I humbly submit the idea that we are not in any position to judge. Citations from BBC magazine wikipedia, and youtube notwithstanding. At this point, I'm surely rambling, but I just want to close by saying that as we inherit our popularly-told modern history, it is important to keep in mind that there are humans in every story, and that we gain nothing but bigotry from deliberately excluding the experiences of one over the other. Lest we repeat their mistakes of irrational hatred, which begets more, and so on. On that note, I encourage us all to, at some point, read balanced histories of that era, which were inevitably written after the cold war. Shirer, whose account was authoritative while many of us were growing up, is a journalist who was the product of his time. His books are mostly regarded as a primary source by modern scholars. "Concise History of the Third Reich" by Wolfgang Benz, "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder, "The Unwomanly Face of War" by Svetlana Alexeivich, and "Burned Bridge" by Edith Sheffer are solid scholarly entry points for those of us for whom this more nuanced and even approach is appealing. For those of you who get to visit Berlin, I'd also strongly recommend the German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst – it's both utterly fantastic and utterly empty (on every day except for the May 8/9, when a large number of observant Russians come to pay respects), due to being so far away from the city centers. The guides there are some of the most knowledgeable people on this subject I've met.

Spooky23 9y ago

Not to make excuses, but there were widely varying levels of discipline in the Red Army. My understanding was that the "A team" shock troops and mainline motor infantry/armored divisions were well disciplined, but the later echelon of conscript infantry went into combat and gunpoint, didn't have functional unit leadership and were raping and pillaging.