Read what the Germans did in the USSR. You will think that the Sovs were teddy bears in Germany in comparison.
Sexual liaisons between an Aryan and a Jew were considered Rassenschande (racial shame), a criminal offence under the Nuremberg Laws. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, of course.
Further on that wiki article describes German attitudes to rape in the Soviet Union; in that it was only a problem if it affected military discipline.
Stalin eventually wised up to the problems that Soviet behaviour was causing, though he didn’t see anything wrong with the practice per se; when Yugoslav partisan Milovan Djilas complained that Russians were raping their women Stalin’s response was characteristic; “What’s so awful about having fun with a woman?”
On April 20th 1945 Moscow tried an awkward u-turn, the previous tones of blind revenge and rage against all Germans were officially denounced as “Comrade Ehrenburg Oversimplifies”. Stalin of course didn’t give a damn about women, but was aware that the rapes, among other things, were making Germans fight harder against his troops. By then though it was too late to change the momentum.
I wonder how many of the alleged rapes were actual rapes. A woman can get many advantages (and this was very true in occupied Germany of 1945) by taking up with enemy soldier, food and protection for instance. Yet that action post war can be seen as collaboration and face criminal or social sanction.
Not in 1945. The RUssians weren’t offering protection to anyone, much less Germans. They didn’t need to offer anything to take what they wanted; it was raw force. Many of the soldiers then moved on to other posts or positions, and new wings of the Red Army came through and did the same. This one event went a long way to destroying Russia’s slender moral credit in the eyes of Germans, even anti-Nazi Germans.
This did become true when the occupations settled down, however. A great many GI’s came home with new wives from Germany. Later on, some would marry Japanese lasses during post-war quasi-occupation of Japan. There were legal provisions for war brides and such, too, and even official transportation for them.
We cross posted by two minutes, but again, how you can call what I wrote a euphemism is odd to say the least, considering the part of the statement you quoted begins with “to be blunt”, and how you can infer approval when the words right before it that you didn’t quote are “What happened to German civilians was horrible” is bizarre.
Again, you’re making this up in your head. First, these crimes are generally acknowledged, and yet again, noting that they were “reaping the whirlwind” is in no sense “waving it away” or in the least bit comparable to saying “that sucks but that happens when you start a war.” It’s saying it’s hardly unexpected that it happens when the people you had been committing genocide against for three years bring the war to your doorstep. Perhaps they might not have been so bent on reprisal if you hadn’t, you know, been committing mass murder in their country for the past three years.
Try to lose to Western nations? Here’s a thought: try to not make it your plan to commit genocide on nations to the East and you’ll avoid all of this nastiness when you’re losing in the first place.
The entire discussion regarding “deserving” rape along with nit-picking over the expressions used to discuss it is over. That is not the actual topic under discussion.
[ /Moderating ]
They considered Jews to be subhuman and sex with them was akin to bestiality.
And white planters thought the same thing about black people.
These beliefs didn’t prevent rape, though.
NM.
Actually, this is exactly what I was looking for. This is the sort of thing that Hashimoto could point to (if he knew about this particular implementation) to “prove” that it is unfair to single out the Japanese for this kind of practice. The Japanese had “comfort stations” and the Brits had brothels. The nitpicky differences between physical coercion and economic necessity are just details (note that I am putting words into Hashimoto’s mouth, this is not my view).
Roddy
Relatively recent scholarship by Sonke Neitzel among others seems to indicate that that claim is incorrect. The German army appears to have been more or less as rape-prone as any other.
The battles in Eastern Germany from Jan 1945 onwards were some of the largest and worst in human history. The Soviets won. An army which is rape prone to such an extent is one whose discipline has broken down to a level where it will no longer be able to undertake such offensives as the Red Army took.
Indeed the loss of discipline and the consequent massive reduction in effectiveness is one of the reason Armies make such efforts to reign soldiers in.
So while I do not doubt that rapes happened, I find it difficult to believe that the the extent was to the level claimed.
I don’t. Everything I read on the subject, indicates that it wasn’t the front line troops that were massively guilty. It was the second, third, etc. echelons, that were the main culprits. Combat troops were too busy trying to survive. It was the rear-echelons who were true REMFs.
Which reraises the question about starting relationships with occupying troops for food and protection and having an incentive to claim rape when they have moved on to avoid recriminations.
The majority of the millions of ethic cleansed Germans were from East Prussia, parts of what is now Poland and used to be Czechoslovakia, and so on. It’s not like it was ever a secret, since it was agreed upon at the Potsdam conference
WWII expulsions spectre lives on
I used to debate Holocaust deniers and Armenian genocide deniers; I consider people denying or trivializing the crimes against German people in the last months of WW-II and in the period following it, to be of the same category as the other deniers, but cannot be bothered to debate any of them anymore. There is abundant information out there on the subject. If you decided to read up, a good place to start would be: Lev Kopelev. Solzhenitsyn have also written on the subject. For the rapes in Berlin see Antony Beevor, Berlin.
That’s an odd accusation little different from saying that the number of holocaust survivors have been dramatically overblown on account of the benefits, social and monetary, they can receive. In any case the upside for women (or girls, many were children – Hannelore Kohl, the wife of former German PM was 12 when she was raped by Soviet soldiers and thrown out the window when they were finished with her) having sex with Soviet soldiers were non-existing (except in the instances where they did it to avoid being murdered or having their children murdered, which is just as much rape as the concentration camp brothels were rape-centres), and there were no upside to later claim rape – especially in East Germany where it was an accusation bordering on treason. Many of the rapes were gang-rapes – an not uncommon method was tying the women spread-eagled to the grown and the soldiers lining up for their turn – and many ended with killing the girl – especially in the areas of East Prussia/Poland/etc. where expulsion was also on the program. Most victims never told. The attempted statistics have only been pieced together many decades later since investigating and reporting on it earlier was anything from treason (“bourgeois humanism”/”compassion towards the enemy”) to just considered suspect to also have eye on the crimes against German people. An estimated 2-3 million women and girls were raped, many – probably a vast majority – multiple times. In Berlin the number was 100.000 – 150.000 thousand.
The Soviet army, including front-line soldiers, had notorious problems with discipline. And rape wasn’t their biggest problem. It was not uncommon for German troops to find whole companies of Soviet soldiers drunk and useless.
By 1945 the Soviet army had nearly 10,000,000 troops in ~550 divisions under arms and by the end of the war had probably lost as many more. While crack, front-line troops were no doubt far more disciplined in relative terms, the masses of second-line troops used to garrison seized ground were unlikely to have been nearly as well-regulated.
In fact I remember an anecdote from Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle where a front-line Soviet combat officer made that exact point to a German woman whose property they were occupying - he warns her that while the combat troops under his command were “good boys,” the men coming behind them were “pigs.” By and large the first wave were too busy driving on Berlin to harass civilians, but the less reliable reserves coming up behind them to fill in the gaps did indeed commit rape. At least in that instance and I’m sure it wasn’t isolated. I see no a priori reasons to doubt the claims that rape was epidemic in some recently conquered sectors.
I remember reading that anecdote, except I recollect the word used was “animals”. I also do not doubt that rapes occurred, on a large scale in some sectors. It’s the numbers that seem…off somehow. I haves read millions a number that means that the Red Army had become a glorified mob, rather than an Army, which was clearly no the case.
Thinking that mass rape = lack of discpline would be a mistake. While leaders “officially” condemned it, and in a couple cases took token action against it, the plains fact was that nobody on the Soviet side much gave a damn about the Germans. They may, when convenient, have done so to, say, Poles or Czechs, but as far as it went the Germans were essentially fair game in Russian eyes. Beyond any issue of guilt, cosmic justice, or just desserts, the Sovs effectively gave their soldiers free reign to pillage as long as they kept advancing and kept sending back supplies.
Exactly.
The Russians have never been as ‘chivalrous’ in war to the extent that the rest of Western Europe has become, over time.
During WWI the Austrians also complained about ‘dirty tricks’ played by the Russsians, like pretending to surrender and then shoot the exposed captors.
Remember that our “gentlemen’s agreements” about rules of war are a cultural thing, not shared by everybody. The embodyment of these rules , the Geneva Convention, was not signed by the Russians.
Depends what you mean by “economic necessity”, but I think old Hashy would have to show that there was no realistic alternative to “volunteering” for the brothels (and that the Brits had seen to it that this was the case) before you could draw an equivalence with physical coercion.