Battle of Berlin - World War II: A History From Beginning to End (World War 2 Battles Book 9) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2018-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Rape of Berlin

“People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle.”

—Joseph Stalin

For more than 1,400 days, Germany and the Soviet Union were pitted against each other in a battle for survival. The German invasion of the Soviet Union included plans to exterminate the Slavic peoples just as the Nazis had dedicated themselves to destroying the Jewish people in Europe. The Slavs, the Germans believed, were subhuman and were a tainted species. They planned to get rid of over 50 million Slavs. The rules of the Geneva Convention did not apply in this instance, the Germans believed, because the German soldiers would not be prosecuted for the deaths of civilians when those deaths were motivated by ideology.

As the Germans advanced, they applied their policies of extermination. In forests across eastern and southern Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states, the populations of villages and towns were escorted to places of execution, ordered to dig their own shallow graves, and then shot. But machine guns and gas vans were unable to kill the conquered Slavs at a rate that was fast enough to suit the Germans.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union would see 27 million people dead, but that would not be the end of the story. The massive Russian Motherland had an endless supply of people to replace the ones who were lost, and when the tide turned and the Russians were pursuing the Germans, those soldiers brought a burning desire for revenge with their advance on Berlin.

No one would argue that, after the carnage of Stalingrad, the Red Army had no reason to have vengeance on its mind as it entered Berlin. The Wehrmacht had been brutal during the invasion of the Soviet Union and, even though the invasion ultimately failed to achieve Hitler’s delusional dream of a subjugated region which would allow Germany to expand its borders while sending the despised Slavs into slave labor, the Russians suffered.

But the vengeance that the Russians wrought was taken against German civilians who had had no direct part in the military’s cruelty on the Eastern Front. German women paid the price for the deeds of German soldiers, as Russian soldiers raped the female population with staggering abandon. Many women serving in the Russian Army as soldiers and medical staff saw nothing wrong with the rapes. Sometimes, the Soviet women watched and laughed as they witnessed their soldiers raping the German women. But not all Soviet women excused the action. Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse recalled, “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists.”

The Russians had not waited to rape until reaching Berlin. In the spring of 1945, they began their attack against the women of Germany in Dresden, a city already brought to its knees by Allied bombing. The soldiers went into houses, brought out the mattresses inside along with the women, and raped the women while the German men were forced to watch before they were shot.

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