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> I have also never heard anyone in East Germany complain about what Russian (Soviet, actually - there were more than just Russians in the USSR and Red Army) tr
by mopsi 2y ago
> I have also never heard anyone in East Germany complain about what Russian (Soviet, actually - there were more than just Russians in the USSR and Red Army) troops did at the end of WW2.
Then you have a huge blind spot. I'll let a man who was there describe it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ywe5pFT928 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ywe5pFT928
In total, between 1 and 2 million people were raped in Germany in the final months of the war. Not only German civilians, but everyone from Polish forced laborers to concentration camp prisoners. These stories are everywhere in personal histories. Helmut Kohl's wife, for example, sustained life-long injuries after she was gang-raped and thrown out of a window when she was 12. The Soviet war memorial in Berlin was known by locals as the tomb of unknown rapist.
Victims couldn't even speak about what had been done to them, because the glorious communist dictatorship brought along by the liberators denied for half a century that any of this ever happened. And it deserves a mention that people in Europe are subjected to this kind of "liberation" to this day: https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1820831971573973385 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1820831971573973385
The way social media campaigns fan up emotions and make people ignore all this just shows the incredible potency of social media as a tool of mass manipulation.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoI don't know who you're talking to, but having spent a good deal of time in East Berlin, I have never heard anyone refer to the Soviet war memorial that way. Putting "liberation" from the Nazis in scare quotes does, however, betray some highly questionable historical attitudes. Are you really going to deny that the people of East Germany were liberated from the Nazi regime? Do you know what would have happened to concentration camp prisoners and Polish forced laborers if the Red Army had not defeated the Wehrmacht?
- aguaviva 2y agoI have never heard anyone refer to the Soviet war memorial that way. Well yeah, because one almost never refers to it anyway (except for conveying directions). Are you really going to deny that the people of East Germany were liberated from the Nazi regime? You're playing word games here -- specifically by raising a false pretense. Of course the end of the NS-regime is universally seen as a liberation, in mainstream. The above commenter wasn't suggesting otherwise, and it is disingenuous to imply that they were, or would. The point is simply that -- the fact that these folks are happy to have been liberated (on the whole) doesn't mean that they consider the SED regime and all the other circumstances imposed upon them after 1945 to have been a necessary part of this "liberation". Or that positive feelings toward the liberation translate directly to positive feelings toward the respective occupiers.