This is not a valid comparison, because the discussion concerns the end of the war and what people would have been expecting from the conquerors.
At the end of the war, it would have been absolutely terrible to have been a woman in eastern Germany when the Soviets came though. Somewhere between a couple of hundred thousand to 2 million women were raped, many multiple times. The Red Army were raping girls as young as eight and women as old as 80 and there were countless deaths which was the result of the drunken orgy.
I went to Berlin in the late 90s and had a tour of the city. You could tell which part you were in because of the buildings. Part of the former West Berlin were much nicer, and the buildings were such that the first floor were shops and restaurants as is traditional in Germany.
In the former East Berlin, they didn’t have this because there wasn’t a need for that many shops or restaurants, and they simply didn’t have as many.
That was only stopped when Stalin suddenly realized the East Germans were now his new allies and he needed them on his side.
Now frankly, although the western allies acted better, there was also frustration on the part of France and England about why they had to go thru this again and wanting to make sure Germany never again was a threat. I read somewhere where they were thinking about moving the Germans out, getting rid of all industries, and even sterilizing all German males.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Christian minister who opposed Hitler and was part of the assassination plot, was executed on April 9 1945 just hours before his prison was overrun by allied soldiers. They could literally hear allied weapons going off during.
Bonhoeffer had because he was a minister been able to leave Germany during the war and he met with allied leaders in England and gave them the information about the plot with the hope the allies would support it. They refused and he went back to Germany to his eventual death.
Thing is Bonhoeffer could have easily escaped and a couple of his prison guards offered to help him.
The Allied armies did their share of raping and pillaging too. Some estimates put the figure of rapes by American and British soldiers at around a quarter of a million. Men, of whatever nationality, brutalized by war will count women as one of the spoils of victory.
The basic point is that there’s no way to revolt and replace the Nazi leadership and continue to be an independent state. You’re not really revolting at that point, you’re really working for the Allies and hastening the day when Germany surrenders unconditionally. And any real revolt would have to be a revolt by the armed forces, not by civilians. Yeah, some people thought they could kill Hitler, negotiate a separate peace with the western allies, and continue the fight against the Russkis. That was never going to happen.
The Germans really really did not want to surrender to the Russians. They knew what they were in for, and could have expected anything up to and including genocide.
I’d like to see a cite for this. There were certainly crimes committed by both sides, but the Red Army had several reasons for doing it a lot more than the Western armies. They sought revenge because of the horrible atrocities the Nazis committed in their invasion of the USSR, but mostly because the Red Army consisted of less civilized peasants and both they and their officers still believed in ‘war rape’ as an acceptable practice.
I’d like to see a cite as well. As I mentioned above, I just finished the book Germany 1945 which discusses this in depth and it talks about the horror of the Soviet side and that while there were rapes committed by the Western armies, it was not in the same league as the Soviets.
There very well could be people claiming that the US, the UK and French armies were as bad, as you always get people with agendas, but it’s my understanding that this is not the accepted view by most historians.
OTOH, one item I read said the “Final solution” was a result of “poor morale” in the army. The front line soldiers complained they signed up to fight, not to slaughter civilians wholesale by shooting them in the back of the head. As a result, some concentrated wholesale massacre plan was devised, where front line soldiers did not have to look at people while killing them.
To my mind, the “low morale” must have been particularly loud and widespread for the central command to sit up and take action to remedy the problem. After all, you couldn’t really haul away half your eastern front army and shoot them, too.
The psychological problems in participating in mass shooting made themselves apparent quite early on in the process.
Even Himmler himself was made queasy by witnessing it up close.
On the Western Allies raping, the claim of hundreds of thousands of rapes during the invasion and occupation of Germany seems to stem from this book. The most well documented rapes happening on the Allied side I’d heard of was French Moroccan Goumiers troops in Italy.
Interesting article. It looks like this is how she came up with the numbers:
So, in other words, she simply made it up. If she had made the assumption that 10 percent of the “war children” were the product of rape, then the Western armies would have been guilty of 380,000 rapes.
There is solid evidence of the mass rapes on the Soviet section from contemporary sources, including hospital records, such as
One would expect to have more contemporary evidence.
The Wiki article has a cite for 11,040 rapes by US troops in Germany.
I suppose that if you lived in a part of Germany that was unscathed by the war (like the Bavarian Alps), you could believe that Germany was “winning”. But frankly, by 1944, the German Army had over 1 million dead-in a population of 80 million, that is hard to conceal. The average German was probably thinking…“gee, Goebbels keeps talking about “glorious victories”…how come nobody comes back from Russia alive”?
When discussing 1944 or any year of the war, one needs to define what you mean. Are you talking about the beginning, middle or end?
Half of the bombs, by tonnage, were dropped from the fall of '44 to the end of the war, so when 1944 started, the German cities weren’t nearly as devastated as they would be by the end of that same year. Germans in the country side also were spared.
Also, here is a map of the Eastern Front, and in early 1944, the Nazis still held a considerable amount of Soviet real estate. It wasn’t until 1945 that Germany proper was invaded, and then it collapsed.
The total number of KIA and MIA stood at 1.7 million at the start of 1944 and the year ended with 3.2 million.
I read an account of a German civilian whose aunt has been guillotined in 1944 for saying at a tea party that she thought the war was as good as lost. There was a Gestapo spy there and she was caught.
