Delitos sexuales en el ER en la SGM

[Brunner]

SOVIET RAPES IN BERLIN: UNKNOWN TOTAL



The official figures for Berlin rapes by Soviet troops does exist but has never been published. However, Berlin’s former mayor, Ernst Reuter, said that the figure given him was 90,000. In 1945, Berlin had a population of some 2,700,000 of which about 2,000,000 were women. Many rapes of course were never reported only hospitalized cases and doctors reports. Some 10,000 women in Berlin died as a result of rape. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania. Doctors were besieged by women seeking information on the best way to commit suicide. A charity institution, orphanage and maternity hospital, 'Haus Dehlem ' was forcibly entered by second line Russian troops and pregnant women and women who had just given birth were repeatedly raped. In the Soviet Zone of Germany nearly 90% of females ages between 10 and 80 were raped in what undoubtedly was the largest case of mass rape in history. This included women expelled from the eastern provinces.



Most German children born in Berlin in 1946 were the result of rape. Women and young girls were forcibly dragged from their homes and raped, the drunken Soviet Mongolian soldiers queuing up to await their turn. For two whole weeks these mass rapes of women continued. Some Jewish women, thinking that their nationality would save them, showed their identity cards to the rapists but none of them could even read. Marshal Zhukov issued orders that any soldier caught in the act of rape after the two week period was up, was to be shot on the spot. Many a Russian soldier met his end this way. Between 1942 and 1945, a total of 2,420 rapes were reported in England, 3,620 in France and more than 11,040 in Germany. No US soldier was ever executed for rape in Germany. As one GI wrote ' Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how 'our boys' over here conduct themselves'. The only way many German mothers could keep their children from starving was to become a mistress to one of the occupying troops. (It is estimated that around two million German women had undergone an illegal abortion in the three years after the war ended)



Less notice was taken of Beevor's effort to organize the rape narrative into phases, and to venture a little way into the dark wood of explanations. Rightly, I think, he dismisses the idea that Soviet hate propaganda and the vengeful war-verse of Ilya Ehrenburg had much to do with it. The hate was there already, and Beevor sees it expressed in the horrible atrocities committed in the first East Prussian villages reached by Soviet troops when they crossed the German frontier. There, gang-rape was accompanied by mutilation and murder; the naked, crucified women found by German counter-attack forces were filmed by the Nazis and stiffened the will to fight on. As the war progressed, however, Beevor identifies a second phase: the sadism grew rarer, and soldiers simply helped themselves to German women with a casual minimum of force, as if they were looting a bottle of cognac or grabbing a civilian's bicycle. Now the rapist (Frau, komm!) might unpredictably offer his victim an endearment, or a piece of sausage. A third phase, in occupied places where all supply had broken down, replaced the need for guns and violence with the need of starving women to bargain their bodies for food. In a fourth, according to Beevor, women were able to keep their families alive and secure themselves against further rape by setting up 'occupation wife' arrangements with individual soldiers or officers.

All this information was available to anyone who went looking for it, but looking was discouraged. Even though Stalinism was abominable, who wanted to tarnish the reputation of the simple Russian soldiers who saved Europe from Hitler? But since the resurgence of gang-rape by irregular troops in Bosnia, attitudes have changed. The world now admits what professional soldiers have known since Roman times - that armed men have a strong inclination to rape 'enemy' women - and wants to know why.

Beevor suggests that it is something to do with a male instinct to scatter seed as widely as possible. If true, that does not help much. He is nearer the mark with a reference to 'bonding': military gang-rape can be a sort of comforting oath-ritual among men frightened by what they have already done. My own sense (in Beevor's phase two) is less esoteric: soldiers rape for sex. Frightened men violently force their way into a place which, for a few moments, they can pretend to be the place where they are loved and protected.

But disciplined soldiers should not rape. Living under the worst tyranny on earth, shoveled into the furnace like so many tons of coke by their callous commanders, subject to instant arrest and execution by NKVD and Smersh security troops following the front line, these soldiers were anything but cowed. (Anyone who has met both Soviet and American troops on active service will remember that - Being shot out of hand for raping or looting was a risk plenty of them chose to take. On capturing a German position, they would go for the wristwatches ('Uri! Uri!') as swiftly as for the weapons. Anything remotely portable - tools, leather cut off a German sofa, even window glass - would be scrawled with an indelible-pencil address and posted home to Russia. They were drunk much of the time. Their transport columns looked like circus caravans: Primo Levi, after the victory, watched camels towing yellow Berlin buses across the Ural steppe into Asia.

 

[Brunner]

Wednesday May 1, 2002
The Guardian


"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."
The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour. Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers". Numerous examples of gang rape were given - "girls under 18 and old women included".
Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield." It appears to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight." One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.

Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers' treatment of women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the "bodies of the defeated enemy's women" to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January 1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.

A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed. Freud's work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.

Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography". All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.

The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an old man, older than my father'."

The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them."

In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim's perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see things from the perpetrator's point of view, especially in the later stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February.

Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau."

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. "The 13-year old Dieter Sahl," neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, "threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot."

After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted "the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution". Soon after the surrender in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of "the grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection".

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.

Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit.

© Antony Beevor.
www.antonybeevor.com

 

[Manfred Klaus]

Un poco largo pero no tiene desperdicios

MILLONES DE MUJERES ALEMANAS VIOLADAS POR LOS RUSOS

“¡Maten! ¡Maten!. En la raza alemana no hay mas que mal, ¡ni uno entre los vivos, ni uno entre los aun no nacidos, nada mas que mal! Sigan los preceptos del camarada Stalin. Aniquilen a la bestia fascista de una vez por todas en su guarida. ¡Usen la fuerza y rompan el orgullo racial de esas mujeres alemanas! ¡Tomenlas como su botín de guerra! A medida que avancen, maten, nobles soldados del ejercito rojo.”

Comisario judío soviético Llya Ehrenburg


Es uno de los dramas más trágicos y ocultos del siglo XX, pero ahora —medio siglo después— el libro de un historiador militar británico logró que muchas mujeres alemanas hablaran de él: los horrores vividos a manos de soldados soviéticos, que perpetraron violaciones en Alemania desde 1945 hasta 1949. La odisea de estas mujeres salió a la luz gracias a Anthony Beevor, cuyo libro Berlín: The Downfall, 1945 (Berlín: La caída, 1945) se publicó el mes pasado y se convirtió en suceso. En su best-séller, Beevor —un ex soldado británico— usa material inédito de los archivos rusos de Moscú y describe el terrible sufrimiento de unas dos millones de mujeres y niñas alemanas. Entre las víctimas hubo mujeres que llegaron a ser figuras destacadas. Por ejemplo, Hannelore Kohl, esposa del ex canciller Helmut Kohl. La señora Kohl (se suicidó el año pasado) fue violada a los doce años, cuando ella y su mamá no pudieron escapar en un tren que iba a Dresden. El libro de Beevor tuvo una conmovedora recepción de las víctimas, muchas de las cuales viven en Gran Bretaña.



"Me habían ordenado enterrar a unos muchachos de la Juventud Hitleriana cuando ellos me encontraron", dice Martha Dowsey. "Seis soldados del Ejército Rojo con las caras tiznadas me tiraron al suelo junto a las tumbas y me violaron, uno tras otro". La mujer tiene ahora 81 años. Durante décadas, nunca había encontrado a nadie que creyera lo que le tocó vivir. Por años, se consideró que el Ejército Rojo era un grupo de héroes que había liberado a Alemania de los nazis. Para Martha no fue así. "Eran agresivos, brutales. Nunca les conté esto a mis hijos; y mi esposo sólo supo que me había pasado algo horrible. Tuvo la delicadeza de no preguntar", dice en su casa de un barrio del sur de Londres. Hace muy poco que Martha se armó de valor y habló. Y fue gracias al libro de Beevor. Las víctimas —a quienes Beevor señala que los rusos consideraban "botín de guerra" con el que compensar los crímenes de la Wehrmacht en Rusia— iban de los 12 a los 80 años de edad o más. Una mujer alemana —Jutte, de Preston— le escribió a Beevor: "Muchas veces quise hablar de eso, pero sabía que nadie me creería o que interpretarían mi historia como un rapto de autocompasión. Lo que usted escribió es una forma de mostrar cómo se puede soportar el sufrimiento."



Una mujer a la que Beevor visitó en Berlín le contó que había matado a un soldado con su arma mientras él trataba de violar a su mamá. "Después —dice Beevor— me di cuenta de que el soldado la había violado a ella y que ella luego había armado la historia y trataba desesperadamente de creerla." En sus cartas, las mujeres confirmaron lo que describe Beevor en el libro en el sentido de que, para evitar correr la misma suerte que sus vecinas, muchas mataron a sus hijas y luego se suicidaron. Para fines de la década de 1940 —las violaciones se sucedieron durante tres años o más— las tropas soviéticas habían sembrado desesperación. Según algunos informes, el 90% de las mujeres berlinesas había contraído enfermedades venéreas. Beevor cita declaraciones de un médico que le dijo que, de las aproximadamente 100.000 mujeres violadas en Berlín, un 10% murió, la mayoría por suicidios. La tasa de mortalidad del casi millón y medio de mujeres violadas en el este de Prusia, Pomerania y Silesia, dice, es más elevada. En el caso de las embarazadas, se estima que el 90% abortó. Las que optaron por seguir con el embarazo, dieron al bebé en adopción porque no soportaban la vergüenza. En 1946, el 3,7% de los niños nacidos en Berlín eran hijos de rusos.



Helke Sander, militante izquierdista alemana y autora de Liberador y liberado, una extensa investigación sobre las mujeres violadas que realizó en 1992, asegura que todavía se sienten las consecuencias. "Hay mujeres que nunca pudieron hablar de esto y cuyos maridos se los prohíben. También están sus hijos, que ahora descubren que son producto de una violación. Finalmente, están los que tratan de averiguar la identidad de sus padres". Berlín: La caída, 1945, despertó indignación en Rusia. El embajador ruso en Gran Bretaña lo calificó de "acto de blasfemia". El libro se publicará en Alemania en setiembre, y ya le dijeron a Beevor que lo más probable es que desate una tormenta. El diario Die Welt dijo que es "un golpe épico" que revela "una crónica desconocida de las atrocidades cometidas cuando el Ejército Rojo avanzó hacia Berlín". Luego del revuelo que el libro provocó en Rusia, Beevor está preparado para la posibilidad de que haya un incidente diplomático entre Berlín y Moscú. "Es un tema muy delicado, y el gobierno alemán se muestra renuente a desenterrarlo por temor a perjudicar la nueva relación que estableció con Putin y el Kremlin", dice.



También llegará al mercado alemán en momentos en que ese país se encuentra inmerso en un debate sobre la "normalización", mediante el cual trata de abordar su historia de manera más amplia. Die Welt señala que después de "medio siglo de frío interior" durante el cual Alemania trató de reflexionar y expiar su pasado nazi pero prestó muy poca consideración a las penurias que vivieron sus ciudadanos, el libro de Beevor demuestra que, para seguir adelante, los alemanes tienen que evaluar no sólo su papel de verdugos, sino también el de víctimas.nterior" durante el cual Alemania trató de reflexionar y expiar su pasado nazi pero prestó muy poca consideración a las penurias que vivieron sus ciudadanos, el libro de Beevor demuestra que, para seguir adelante, los alemanes tienen que evaluar no sólo su papel de verdugos, sino también el de víctimas.ante, los alemanes tienen que evaluar no sólo su papel de verdugos, sino también el de víctimas.



Diario CLARÍN (Argentina) 4-7-2002



VIOLADAS POR EL EJERCITO RUSO

3 de febrero de 2002

Crónica EL MUNDO

Antony Beevor, autor de «Stalingrado», una novela que causó gran impacto internacional, ha realizado una minuciosa investigación sobre otro episodio de la II Guerra Mundial: la caída de Berlín. Su nuevo libro sacude las conciencias con las revelaciones de barbaridades cometidas por soldados rusos

El diario se descubrió entre las ruinas en llamas de Berlín, totalmente arrasada por el choque de dos ejércitos poderosos y desesperados.No había ningún nombre escrito en la portada, pero entre todas las historias de privaciones y luchas, una revelaba el infierno de una guerra que se acercaba a su apocalíptico final. La autora, una joven alemana, describía cómo había sido violada por los soldados del Ejército Rojo, que avanzaba ávido de tomar la ciudad y de vengarse de los alemanes. «Cierra los ojos, aprieta los dientes, no digas nada», garabateó la mujer, recordando cómo se había inducido al silencio para soportar la agresión. «Pero cuando la ropa interior cae rasgada y los dientes rechinan involuntariamente, la última prenda...Estoy paralizada. No siento asco, sino una completa frialdad.Es como si mi espalda estuviera helada. Estoy mareada, tengo frío en la nuca. Antes de marcharse extrae algo del bolsillo y lo lanza sobre la mesa sin decir palabra; aparta la silla y sale dando un portazo. Ha dejado un paquete de tabaco arrugado.Es la propina».

Ha habido que esperar hasta ahora, 60 años después de que se produjera la violación de esta mujer anónima, para que se conozca la verdadera dimensión de la campaña de violaciones perpetrada por el Ejército Rojo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El escritor británico Antony Beevor, ex oficial del Ejército cuya reconstrucción de la batalla de Stalingrado se convirtió en un éxito de ventas, está a punto de publicar un libro sobre la caída de Berlín. Al buscar entre archivos soviéticos, cuyo acceso había estado vedado a los historiadores hasta hace poco, Beevor descubrió una tormenta de venganzas que le dejó «totalmente consternado».

Se cree que unos dos millones de mujeres fueron violadas, agredidas o asesinadas por los soldados del Ejército Rojo en su avance sobre Alemania, pero el libro de Beevor revelará horrores aún mayores. «Cuando el Ejército Rojo llegó a Berlín, los soldados ya consideraban a las mujeres una especie de botín carnal», afirma.«Creían que podían hacer lo que quisieran, ya que estaban liberando Europa». En algunos casos las mujeres de una calle entera fueron violadas: abuelas, embarazadas, incluso mujeres que se encontraban en su lecho de muerte. Según el representante del Vaticano en Berlín, en octubre de 1945, seis meses después del final de la guerra, miles de mujeres permanecieron semanas escondidas en los tejados para eludir los saqueos y registros de los escuadrones del Ejército Rojo quienes, cuando se emborrachaban, avivaban su apetito sexual.

«Han violado a mujeres de entre 10 y 70 años, e incluso a algunas de hasta 75 años», aseguraba el representante del Vaticano. Beevor ha descubierto aspectos todavía más siniestros: los rusos violaron incluso a reclusas liberadas de los campos de concentración, mujeres esqueléticas, vestidas de harapos. «Esto echa por tierra la idea de que los soldados sólo utilizaron la violación como una forma de venganza contra los alemanes», afirma. Sus comentarios ya han provocado polémica. El embajador ruso en Londres ha acusado al escritor británico de «blasfemar» contra el pueblo ruso. «Es una injuria contra el pueblo que salvó al mundo del nazismo», ha declarado indignado esta semana Grigory Karasin.

Pero para comprender los hechos de la caída de Berlín, es necesario conocer lo ocurrido antes. En su avance hacia Stalingrado, los alemanes abrieron una brecha de destrucción a lo largo de Rusia, una de las mayores infamias registradas en los anales de la guerra.El 30 de marzo de 1941, en un discurso pronunciado ante 200 altos mandos del Ejército alemán, Hitler explicaba a grandes trazos que la Operación Barbarrosa, la ofensiva contra la Unión Soviética, sería totalmente distinta a las guerras anteriores. «Debemos olvidar la camaradería entre combatientes», decretó. «Los comunistas no son camaradas, ni antes ni después de la batalla. Esta es una guerra de aniquilación. Venceremos al enemigo, pero si no comprendemos esto tendremos que volver a luchar contra los comunistas dentro de 30 años».

A las tres de la madrugada del 22 de junio de 1941 se desató la mayor ofensiva militar de la Historia. Tres millones de soldados cruzaron un frente de casi 1.600 kilómetros. Había comenzado el conflicto que, según Hitler, sería «una guerra sin normas».A finales de ese año, cuatro millones de rusos habían muerto en combate y otros 3,5 millones habían sido hechos prisioneros.El 97% moriría. En su avance, los alemanes hicieron desaparecer del mapa 7.000 aldeas rusas. Los hombres fueron asesinados por los Escuadrones de Acción de las SS; las mujeres a menudo eran violadas y enviadas a las fábricas alemanas a trabajar como esclavas o a campos de concentración o de exterminio. La mayoría de los niños eran ejecutados en cuanto llegaban a los campos de Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec y, más tarde, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

En el campo de batalla, los soldados del Ejército Rojo no podían recurrir a la rendición. «No entendíamos cuando sacaban la bandera blanca en Francia, sabe, eso de rendirse», declaró un miembro de la SS de Das Reich durante los juicios celebrados tras la guerra. «En Rusia, cuando la gente se rendía simplemente les pasábamos por encima con los tanques». En la gran Leningrado, los nazis organizaron un asedio que se extendió durante 900 días, se cobró 1,5 millones de vidas y obligó a algunos ciudadanos a practicar el canibalismo. Con razón los rusos sentían un odio profundo hacia «el invasor fascista». Y cuando la suerte de la batalla de Stalingrado cambió a favor del Ejército Rojo, que comenzó a avanzar, los rusos vivieron una verdadera pesadilla al pasar junto a casas destruidas, ciudades arrasadas y agujeros llenos de cadáveres. Esto avivó el afán de venganza, algo que Stalin fomentó de todas las formas posibles.

Los soldados del Ejército Rojo eran hombres duros mongoles, cosacos, tártaros y siberianos , no eran rusos occidentalizados de Leningrado o Moscú, hombres más moderados por influencia de la educación, o por su participación en el socialismo utópico del partido. De todos modos, las violaciones no fueron hechos generalizados desde el principio. Cuando entraron en territorio alemán, lo primero que los soldados decían era «Ur», es decir, reloj de pulsera. El saqueo o la destrucción de las posesiones de una burguesía que despreciaban eran para ellos prácticas legítimas.Pero pronto comenzaron a decir «Frau, Komma». Y durante el final apocalíptico del Tercer Reich, las mujeres y los niños tuvieron que pagar por los pecados de las SS, la Gestapo y los «einsaizgruppen», o escuadrones de la muerte.

TAMBIÉN MORIBUNDAS

En la aldea de Dahlem, recuerda una mujer, «los rusos se colocaron en fila delante de un grupo de mujeres. Ni siquiera se daban cuenta de que algunas estaban agonizando, porque habían ingerido veneno o sufrían hemorragias internas. Los soldados les abrían la boca a la fuerza y las obligaban a tomar bebidas alcohólicas». Anna Seddig, una joven de Prusia oriental que intentaba escapar de la guerra encinta y con su hijo de un año, Siegfried, fue otra víctima de los rusos. «Una noche, cuando buscábamos un lugar para refugiarnos, nos topamos con un grupo de soldados. Nos iluminaron con una linterna. Uno me dijo: "Te vamos a llevar a un lugar donde podrás pasar la noche". Era un refugio antiaéreo. Ahí me violaron, uno tras otro. Era como si estuviera muerta, tenía calambres por todo el cuerpo. Sientes repugnancia, sólo sientes repugnancia. Éramos blancos legítimos para los rusos. No sé cuántos hombres había, 10, 15...».

Muchos han intentado ocultar lo ocurrido. Cornelius Ryan, autor de The Last Battle, donde narra la caída de Berlín, descubrió que tras publicarse el libro en 1966 algunos editores lo presionaron para que eliminara pasajes como el siguiente: «Mientras continuaba la batalla, se producía otra ofensiva salvaje. Era encarnizada, personal. Las hordas rusas que llegaban tras los disciplinados veteranos del frente exigían el derecho de los conquistadores: las mujeres de los conquistados». «Úrsula Roester dormía en el sótano de una casa de Zehlendorf junto con sus padres, sus hijas gemelas de seis años, y Bernard, su hijo de siete meses, cuando cuatro soldados rusos golpearon la puerta con la culata de sus fusiles». «Registraron el refugio. Un soldado ruso encontró un frasco de perfume francés. Lo destapó, lo olió y lo derramó sobre su uniforme. Otro encañonó a los padres e hijos de Úrsula y los encerró en el sótano. A continuación, los cuatro se turnaron para violarla».

«Al día siguiente, a eso de las seis de la mañana, Úrsula estaba amamantando a su bebé cuando otros dos soldados rusos entraron en el sótano». «Intentó escapar por la puerta con su bebé en brazos. Pero estaba muy débil. Uno de los rusos le quitó el bebé y lo colocó en su cochecito. El otro la miró y sonrió. Ambos la violaron...». El legado de la campaña de violaciones del Ejército Rojo es imperecedero.Para los soldados vencidos de las divisiones nazis, así como para los industriales, los banqueros y los altos cargos del partido que se habían pavoneado durante el apogeo del régimen, la violación de sus mujeres era la máxima humillación. Hanna Gerlitz, esposa de un banquero de Berlín, fue violada por seis soldados rusos delante de su marido. «Cuando terminaron», recuerda, «dispararon sus fusiles al aire. Las otras personas que estaban en casa creían que me habían asesinado, hasta que les grité: "Estoy bien. Ya todo ha acabado"». Después tuve que consolar a mi esposo y ayudarlo a recobrar el valor. Lloraba como un niño».

El viaje hasta este infernal crisol de crueldad ha resultado traumático para Beevor, y le ha hecho pensar: «He llegado a la conclusión de que ante la falta de disciplina militar un hombre armado, deshumanizado tras dos o tres años de guerra, se convierte en la mayoría de los casos en un violador en potencia». Mientras, Berlín sigue reconstruyéndose con su nueva imagen de ciudad europea y quienes sufrieron llegan al final de sus vidas.Las cicatrices de Alemania van desapareciendo. A los rusos les es más difícil olvidar. En cada punto de las estepas donde los alemanes borraron del mapa una aldea, ahora hay una campana.Aún tocan a la crueldad del hombre cuando el viento bate las tierras sobre las que los alemanes marcharon triunfalmente, las mismas por las que más tarde se replegaron en la ignominia.

Antony Beevor publica, "Berlín" sobre el final de la II Guerra Mundial


El británico Antony Beevor explica en su último libro, "Berlín. La caída: 1945", los pormenores de los últimos días de la II Guerra Mundial, las complejas tácticas militares, y descubre que en su avance las tropas rusas violaron a mujeres rusas, polacas y yugoslavas, y no sólo a alemanas. El dato de que dos millones de mujeres fueron violadas en 1945, cuando las tropas soviéticas avanzaban hacia Berlín, no es novedoso, pero Beevor, después de varios años de investigación, concluye que entre las víctimas hubo mujeres polacas, yugoslavas, e incluso rusas y alemanas comunistas, de niñas a ancianas. En una entrevista con EFE, Beevor admitió que contó con una ventaja sobre los historiadores alemanes, y es que a él se le permitió el acceso a los archivos rusos de la época, "donde pude encontrar detalles y una figura general de todo lo que ocurrió, información nueva y totalmente chocante" en algunos casos. Gracias a esta información, el autor de "Stalingrado" pudo dar una visión diferente de una batalla "deshumanizada y monstruosa" al explicar los sentimientos y pensamientos "individuales de los soldados que lucharon".



Por ejemplo, explicó Beevor, "las violaciones de las mujeres rusas en Alemania cuestiona la justificación de la venganza de Rusia, y muestra que de hecho el ejército rojo estaba fuera de control". Sin embargo, prosiguió el autor, "los oficiales rusos no pararon a sus soldados, y cuando quisieron hacerlo no podían luchar contra hombres borrachos y armados con metralletas, porque así arriesgaban sus vidas". El libro, según Beevor, "confirma que las violaciones no eran una estrategia de la guerra, Stalin simplemente creía que eran graciosas. No es que las animaran, pero tampoco hicieron nada para frenarlas". El autor resaltó que "también hubo muchos soldados que estaban horrorizados, e incluso había oficiales rusos judíos que tenían más razones para vengarse pero hicieron todo lo que pudieron para proteger a las alemanas". "Berlín" describe los miles de suicidios de mujeres después de sufrir múltiples violaciones, el modo en que muchas de ellas intentaron matar a sus hijas para librarlas, así como el fracaso de la mayoría de ellas, que "intentaron cortarse las venas pero no lo consiguieron, porque no sabían hacerlo".



En su libro, Beevor se adentra con gran precisión en los pormenores de las batallas que pusieron fin a la II Guerra Mundial, los complejos avances de las tropas soviéticas y los retrocesos de las alemanas, así como las conspiraciones de los altos mandos alemanes, con una narrativa de alta densidad política. Beevor, antiguo oficial del ejército británico, dedica especial atención a las diferentes actitudes entre las tropas rusas, norteamericanas, francesas y británicas, estas los más disciplinadas, porque "por su estructura existía mayor control sobre los soldados". "Berlín. La caída: 1945", editado por Memoria Crítica, está siendo traducido a 21 idiomas, y contará con una versión cinematográfica con guión de John Goldsmith, aunque todavía no se ha decidido la figura del director. Esta película, según Beevor, "contará la historia verdadera, y recopilará las vivencias de las mujeres, para construir no una película bélica sobre hombres, sino sobre las auténticas víctimas de la guerra, los civiles".

 

[CONDORPLT]

Según tengo entendido, para que la ONU declare el genocidio, es necesario, entre otras condiciones, que el número de víctimas supere los 30.000 (De donde me suena este numero???). Si encuentro la data de referencia la subo, pero lo escuche en más de una conferencia seria....

Saludos

 

[federicobarbarroja]

Todavia seguimos hablando de un tema del que hay arta bibliografia? El que tenga dudas lea http://www.johnsack.com/

saludos

 

[Rumplestilskin]

Mr. Banana Nose: Apologista de Stakin! ..

Aviso a los moderadores: existe un reglamento en el foro

http://zona-militar.com/foros/showthread.php?t=4006 (puntos 2 y 3)

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahora:

Ya que insiten con Beevor: ¿Pueden nombrar una sola de sus fuentes? Tengo el libro, no da ni una. No es difícil, solo vayan al final del libro y busquen en "Bibliografía", o busquen una cita a las correspondientes "fuentes alemanas" de sus cifras. No las hay. No es algo nuevo, se discutió en otro foro, fueron muchos los que bufaron, pero las fuentes de Beevor nunca aparecieron. El libro no es caro, 30 pesos en su edición de bolsillo, así que si alguien quiere comprarlo y ver por sí mismo Aquí por ejemplo: http://www.lsf.com.ar/libros/9/848432598.html), puede hacerlo.

No peguen textos como esos porque los hay de a cientos y son todos iguales, hablan de unos cuantos casos particulares y luego tiran una cifra inmensa sin ningún sustento.

El caso de Ernst Reuter, alcalde de Berlín Occidental ¿Tenía estadísticas del otro lado de algo llamado cortina de hierro.

Repito; mientras no hablemos de por lo menos 150.000 casos en firme (un 5% de los soldados soviéticos) no hay violaciones masivas, solo violaciones como ocurren en China, EE.UU, Argentina, Corea, Perú, o cualquier otro lado, que de ser por mí, las penaría con la hoguera, pero no estamos en presencia de algo masivo..

 

[Manfred Klaus]

Aviso a los moderadores: existe un reglamento en el foro


Repito; mientras no hablemos de por lo menos 150.000 casos en firme (un 5% de los soldados soviéticos) no hay violaciones masivas, solo violaciones como ocurren en China, EE.UU, Argentina, Corea, Perú, o cualquier otro lado, que de ser por mí, las penaría con la hoguera, pero no estamos en presencia de algo masivo..

Que pasa si no son 5 millones no se cuenta

 

[Brunner]

Sres moderadores,,candadito por favor....Este es un tema subido con muy mal leche y una apologia no solo de Stalin sino de un crimen masivo...

 

[Rumplestilskin]

Que pasa si no son 5 millones no se cuenta

Por supuesto que sí, pero cambia el culpable, detalle no menor.

Es el caso de ahora en Iraq, podemos señalar dos culpables de los abusos; los autores materiales y las autoridades que los encubrieron, pero nunca culpar al US Army de ser una panda de violadores. Estás metiendo en la bolsa a miles de hombres inocentes.

En caso soviético en Alemania es igual, si o si tenemos dos culpables, los autores de las violaciones (porque las hubo) y quienes ignoraron el crimen (autoridades), pero para meter a un tercero, el ER en su conjunto, millones de hombres, prácticamente un pueblo (una gran proporción de su población masculina en edad militar) se necesita más.

¿O acaso dirías por ejemplo que el exterminio de judíos o gitanos era "práctica habitual" en los ciudadanos alemanes?

Si tienes el libro de Beevor, verás cosas como las que tu mismo posteaste:

"Según algunos informes, el 90% de las mujeres berlinesas había contraído enfermedades venéreas. Beevor cita declaraciones de un médico que le dijo que, de las aproximadamente 100.000 mujeres violadas en Berlín, un 10% murió, la mayoría por suicidios. La tasa de mortalidad del casi millón y medio de mujeres violadas en el este de Prusia, Pomerania y Silesia, dice, es más elevada. En el caso de las embarazadas, se estima que el 90% abortó. Las que optaron por seguir con el embarazo, dieron al bebé en adopción porque no soportaban la vergüenza. En 1946, el 3,7% de los niños nacidos en Berlín eran hijos de rusos."

¿Qué informes? ¿De qué fecha? ¿En qué archivo está? ¿Se estima; quién estima?

Es lo que él nunca dice. Si te da fuentes (con cita a la bibliografía como se hace en un libro) de casos individuales, pero cuando entra a hablar de grandes cifras, nunca da una fuente de lo que dice, nunca hay una cita a un informe concreto en un archivo, una partida fechada en un hospital, un nombre.

Lo usual es que un autor si desea escribir sobre la SGM por poner un ejemplo, diga:

"En tal ciudad el número de muertos durante la guerra ascendió a unos 25.000 personas"* (llamada a una cita)

(y en "Bibliografía)*Según comparación de censos 1938-1946, Archivos generales de Berlín. (por decir algo)

No será de exacta presición, pero avala sus cifras. Eso Beevor no lo hace, nunca te cita un estudio, o al menos aproximación fundada.

 

[Brunner]

No me extraña que trates de minimizar estas bestialidades, de defender lo indefensible-pero sorry about that..! la evidencia del crimen ruso es incontrovertible: y tambien la identidad de gran numero de los culpables y responsables.

One of this century's greatest crimes, and probably one of the greatest crimes against women in history, was the mass rape of the conquered women of Europe after the Judeo-Communist victory there in 1945. The rapists were mainly Red Army soldiers, some of them non-White troops from the Far East and Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union. But I am sorry to say that many of the rapists were men of our own race, and some were Americans. They were brutes no doubt, but they were permitted and encouraged to indulge their lower than bestial urges by official "Allied" policies which incited hatred particularly against the Germans, but also against those of other European nationalities which were then allied with Germany in an anti-Communist bloc. One cannot contemplate this great mass orgy of rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery of innocent women and little girls without revulsion. It would be easy for you to toss this newsletter aside and pickup more pleasant or amusing reading. But if you want to know the truth about one of the darkest secrets of our present establishment, a horrible crime against women about which the Politically Correct feminists are strangely silent, then I urge you to read on.
I claim no originality for the documentation or recounting of this ghastly crime perpetrated mainly by what Franklin Roosevelt called "our noble Soviet ally." We are indebted to Dr. Austin J. App, a professor and scholar of English literature at Catholic University, the University of Scranton, and LaSalle College, among others, who risked career and livelihood to bring these truths to light. In April, 1946, when he published the work upon which this article is based, entitled Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe, he was a lone voice crying out for justice in an America still high on war propaganda and on a "victory" that in the later Cold War years and after would be seen clearly as a defeat for America and the West as much as it was for Germany.

As the Red Army advanced toward her in 1945, the city of Berlin had become a city virtually without men. Out of a civilian population of 2,700,000, 2,000,000 were women. It is small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Doctors were besieged by patients seeking information on the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.

In Berlin stood a charity institution, the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital, and foundling home. Soviet soldiers entered the home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth. This was not an isolated incident. No one will ever know how many women were raped, but doctors' estimates run as high as 100,000 for the city of Berlin alone, their ages ranging from 10 to 70.

On March 24, 1945, our "noble Soviet allies" entered Danzig. A 50-year-old Danzig teacher reported that her niece, 15, was raped seven times, and her other niece, 22, was raped fifteen times. A Soviet officer told a group of women to seek safety in the Cathedral. Once they were securely locked inside, the beasts of Bolshevism entered, and ringing the bells and playing the organ, "celebrated" a foul orgy through the night, raping all the women, some more than thirty times. A Catholic pastor in Danzig declared, "They violated even eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers."

The Most Reverend Bernard Griffin, British Archbishop, made a tour of Europe to study conditions there, and reported, "In Vienna alone they raped 100,000 women, not once but many times, including girls not yet in their teens, and aged women."
A Lutheran pastor in Germany, in a letter of August 7, 1945, to the Bishop of Chichester, England, describes how a fellow pastor's "two daughters and a grandchild (ten years of age) suffer from gonorrhea, [as a] result of rape" and how "Mrs. N. was killed when she resisted an attempt to rape her," while her daughter was "raped and deported, allegedly to Omsk, Siberia, for indoctrination."

The day after our noble Soviet allies conquered Neisse, Silesia, 182 Catholic nuns were raped. In the diocese of Kattowitz 66 pregnant nuns were counted. In one convent when the Mother Superior and her assistant tried to protect the younger nuns with outstretched arms, they were shot down. A priest reported in Nord Amerika magazine for November 1, 1945, that he knew "several villages where all the women, even the aged and girls as young as twelve, were violated daily for weeks by the Russians."

Sylvester Michelfelder, a Lutheran pastor, wrote in the Christian Century: "Bands of irresponsible bandits in Russian or American uniforms pillage and rob the trains. Women and girls are violated in sight of everyone. They are stripped of their clothes."

On April 27, 1946 Vatican Radio charged that in the Russian occupation zone of Eastern Germany cries of help are going up "from girls and women who are being brutally raped and whose bodily and spiritual health is completely shaken."

The rapists did not all wear a red star. John Dos Passos, writing in Life magazine for January 7, 1946, quotes a "red-faced major" as saying that "Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier's pay." A serviceman wrote to Time magazine for November 12, 1945 "Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how 'Our Boys' conduct themselves, with such complete callousness in human relationships over here." An army sergeant wrote "Our own Army and the British Army ... have done their share of looting and raping ... This offensive attitude among our troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army of rapists."

An Italian survivor of American bombing states that Black American troops, stationed in Naples, were allowed by their superiors free access to poor, hungry, and humiliated Italian women. The result of this interracial rape and sexual slavery was the production of a generation of pitiable mixed-race children, a legacy of the brutal conqueror.

According to an AP dispatch of September 12, 1945, entitled "German- American Marriages Forbidden", the Franklin Roosevelt government instructed its soldiers that marriage with the inferior Germans was absolutely forbidden, but those having illegitimate children by German women, whose husbands and boyfriends were conveniently dead or held as prisoners or slave laborers, could count on allowance money. And, according to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, the government provided these soldiers with an estimated 50 million condoms per month, and graphically instructed them as to their use. For all practical purposes, our soldiers were being told: "Teach these Germans a lesson -- and have a wonderful time!" Such were the great crusaders who brought "democracy" to Europe.

For the Americans and British, open rape was not as common as among the Soviet troops. The Soviets simply raped any female from eight years up and if a German man or woman killed a Russian soldier for anything, including rape, 50 Germans were killed for each incident, as reported in Time magazine, June 11, 1945. But for most of our boys, having that "wonderful time" depended a great deal on the "cooperation" of the German and Austrian women. From the starving and the homeless, of course, sexual "cooperation" could be bought for a few pennies or a mouthful of food. I don't think we ought to dignify this arrangement with any other than its true name of sexual slavery.

The Christian Century for December 5, 1945 reported "the American provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Beane, said that rape presents no problem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make rape unnecessary. Think that over, if you want to understand the situation in Germany." The Weekly Review of London, for October 25, 1945, described it thus: "Young girls, unattached, wander about and freely offer themselves for food or bed ... very simply, they have one thing left to sell, and they sell it ... as a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months -- or even years."

Dr. George N. Shuster, president of Hunter College, wrote in the Catholic Digest of December 1945 after a visit to the American Zone of occupation, "You have said it all when you say that Europe is now a place where woman has lost her perennial fight for decency because the indecent alone live." By official policy, the Allies created conditions in which the only German mothers who could keep their young children alive were those who themselves or whose sisters became mistresses of the occupying troops. Our own officials admittedly brought the Germans down to a total daily food intake less than that of an American breakfast, a level which leads to slow but sure death unless relieved.

According to testimony given in the United States Senate on July 17, 1945, when the colonial French troops under Eisenhower's command, presumably mostly Africans, entered the German city of Stuttgart, they herded German women into the subways and raped some two thousand of them. In Stuttgart alone, troops under Eisenhower's command raped more women in one week than troops under German command raped in all of France for four entire years. In fact, of all the major belligerents in World War II, the German troops had by far the smallest record of rape and looting. The German army's incidence of rape in all of Germany's occupied territories was even lower than that of American troops stationed on American soil!

According to the International News Service in London, January 31, 1946, when American soldier's wives were brought to Germany, they were given special authorization to wear military uniforms because "the GIs did not want their wives mistaken for Fraeuleins by other occupation troops." A writer for the New York World Telegram January 21, 1945 stated "Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers." Dr. G. Stewart, in a health statement submitted to General Eisenhower, reported that in the first six months of American occupation, venereal disease jumped to twenty times its former level in Germany.

I want you imagine an orgy of rape like this happening in your country, in your neighborhood, to your family, to your wife, your sister, your daughter. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to be totally powerless to stop it from happening, completely unable to bring the criminals to justice. And I want to ask you, were there ever any "war crimes" or "hate crimes" trials of these butchers and rapists and inciters to butchery and rape? We in America are very good at raining "smart bombs" on our adversaries, and in violently enforcing the dictates of the United Nations on faraway peoples that our press have vilified. But we have really been very insulated from the horrors of mass warfare on our own territory.

Few today remember that in the 1940s, the Allies, who even then were calling their world-government-in-the-making the "United Nations," were pursuing a policy of unconditional surrender, which meant that the Germans would be obligated to accept an occupation government whose announced intentions, the infamous and genocidal Morgenthau Plan, would have reduced Germany to medieval conditions and cut her population by enforced starvation. Go to a large library and check out Secretary Morgenthau's book, Germany Is Our Problem, Harper and Brothers, 1945. You will note the use of the term "United Nations" on the front flyleaf and in the foreword by Franklin D. Roosevelt. A prominent Jewish writer in America, Theodore Kaufman, had in 1941 written a book entitled Germany Must Perish, which advocated the extermination of all Germans by sterilization. Kaufman's book received favorable reviews in major American magazines and newspapers. Other books, such as Louis Nizer's What To Do With Germany, also contributed to this atmosphere of strident anti-German hatred. War propaganda and official policy combined to create an image of the German as sub-human and deserving of almost infinite punishment if not annihilation. [Image: Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR's Jewish Secretary of State.]

Churchill said to the Germans in January, 1945, "We Allies are no monsters. This, at least, I can say, on behalf of the United Nations, to Germany ... Peace, though based on unconditional surrender, will bring to Germany and Japan immense and immediate alleviation of suffering and agony."

Against that false claim the late Dr. Austin App proclaimed the truth: Those Allies who were "no monsters" literally raped more European women than had ever before been raped in the history of the world. They put Germany on a starvation-level diet. Under direct orders from Dwight Eisenhower, they killed more than a million German POWs. They looted 12 million people of their homes, goods, food, and even clothes and drove them from their homelands. They took one-fourth of their farmland, they took their ships and their factories and their farm implements and then told them to live by farming. They abused and starved to death more German babies than there ever were Jews in Germany. They raped and debauched hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian, and Hungarian girls and women from eight to eighty. They brought to their death five times as many Germans in one year of peace as died during five years of war. Yes, yes, of course, these men of the United Nations, these men of the New World Order are no monsters.

Quite apart from any ethnic or ideological considerations, World War II was a war between, on the one side, the elitists who created Communism as a way-station on the road to their New World Order; and on the other, those who opposed that New World Order. It is a tragedy of millennial proportions that America and Britain were induced to fight on the side of Communism and Communism's masters.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free Speech -- April 1994

 

[Brunner]

De Wikopedia Encyclopedia

Discussion of atrocities committed in Germany and throughout Eastern Europe by the end of the World War II and in its aftermath are rare in Russia [1]. With rare exception (notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn) the evidence is based on Western sources.

When the Red Army entered German and Hungarian territory, some of its personnel engaged in plunder, rape, and murder of civilians, although the laws of the Red Army officially prohibited such activities.[citation needed] Such crimes were not uncommon during times of war, but atrocities of Red Army personnel became the object of a special investigation of journalists. The common notion is that these atrocities were a revenge for German atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union (11.5 million civilian deaths) and for mass killing of Soviet POWs (3.6 million dead of total a 5.2 million POWs). This explanation is disputed by military historian Antony Beevor, at least with regards to the mass rapes. Beevor claims in his findings that Red Army soldiers also raped Russian and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and contends that this undermines the revenge explanation.[2]

German sources listed below estimate that at the end of World War II, Red Army soldiers raped more than 2,000,000 German women, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died from injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered outright. [3] [4] [5] After June 1945 the Soviet high command imposed punishments for rape ranging from arrest to execution. In 1947 Soviet troops were completely separated from the residential population of Berlin. Estimates of the total number of rape victims during 1944 and 1945 are as follows: Eastern Provinces: 1,400,000; zone of Soviet occupation excluding Berlin: 500,000; Berlin: 100,000. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] The 2,000,000 rape victims estimate is also supported by the research of historian Norman Naimark.[13] In addition, many of these victims were raped repeatedly, some as many as 60 to 70 times. [14]

During the occupation of Budapest (Hungary) it is estimated that 50,000 women were raped.[15][16]

Fleeing from the advancing Soviet forces, possibly more than two million people in the eastern provinces of Germany (East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania) died, many of cold and starvation, but many were killed by Soviet forces, or killed while being caught up in combat operations. But the fact is that the Nazis had invaded Poland and later the Soviet Union to enslave them all and take all their land but now the Nazis had lost the war and were forced to give up the land, in any case many times less Germans died then Soviet did in the occupation of land.

References
^ Russians angry at war rape claims Telegraph.co.uk 01/25/2002
^ Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps
^ Richard Overy, Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN 1-57500-051-2
^ Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
^ Vadim Erlikman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5931651071
^ Bundesarchiv Koblenz [1], Ostdokumentensammlung , Ost-Dok. 2 Nr. 8,13,14; Ost-Dok.2/51, 2/77,2/96
^ Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv Freiburg [2], Akten Fremde Heere Ost, Bestand H3, Bd. 483, 657, 665, 667, 690
^ Archiv der Charité and Landesarchiv Berlin[3]
^ Archiv der Charité and Landesarchiv Berlin[4]
^ Helke Sander and Barbara Johr. BeFreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vegewaltigung, Kinder Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag (2005), ISBN 3-596-16305-6
^ Franz W. Seidler and Alfred M. de Zayas. Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20. Jahrhundert Hamburg-Berlin-Bonn (2002), p.122, ISBN 3-8132-0702-1
^ Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ostmitteleuropa, 5 Bde, 3 Beihefte, Bonn 1953-1961
^ William I. Hitchcock The Struggle for Europe The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945 to the Present ISBN 978-0-385-49799-2 (0-385-49799-7)
^ Ibid
^ Mark, James "Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 1944-1945" Past & Present - Number 188, August 2005, pp. 133
^ "The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women. Rapes - affecting all age groups from ten to seventy are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared." Swiss embassy report cited in Ungváry 2005, p.350. (Krisztian Ungvary The Siege of Budapest 2005)
^ Richard Overy, Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN 1-57500-051-2
^ Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
^ Vadim Erlikman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5931651071
Elizabeth B. Walter, Barefoot in the Rubble 1997, ISBN 0-9657793-0-0
Fisch, Bernhard, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944. Was in Ostpreußen tatsächlich geschah. Berlin: 1997. ISBN 3-932180-26-7. (about most of the Nemmersdorf atrocity having been set up by Goebbels)

 

[Brunner]

THE LAST BATTLE by Cornelius Ryan. 571 pages. Simon and Schuster. $7.50.

Everyone who saw him still remembers how calm Soviet Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov appeared. In a hillside bunker overlooking the Kustrin bridgehead, less than 38 miles from the stricken city, he rested both elbows on the concrete ledge and took a last look into the predawn darkness through his field glasses. Finally, he glanced at his watch and allowed a few more seconds to tick by before he said, "Now, comrades. Now."

Three red signal flares soared upward, bathing the Oder River in a garish crimson. Seconds later, 140 huge antiaircraft searchlights and the lights of hundreds of tanks, trucks and other vehicles flashed on and illuminated the German lines brighter than a midday sun. Then three green flares soared into the heavens, and more than 20,000 guns of all calibers erupted with an earsplitting, earth-shaking roar. The German countryside beyond the Kustrin bridgehead seemed to explode. Entire villages disintegrated. Earth, concrete, steel, bits of trees spewed into the air. The concussion from the thundering guns was so tremendous that troops and equipment alike shook uncontrollably. A hot wind suddenly sprang up and howled through the forests, bending saplings and whipping dust and debris into the air.

This mighty bombardment, never before equaled on the eastern front, began at precisely 4 a.m., Monday, April 16, 1945. History records it as the beginning of the battle for Berlin, the final assault against the capital of Hitler's Reich. As this thoroughly researched and often exciting book makes clear, Berlin was a fortress only in Hitler's fevered imagination. Incredibly, there was no plan to protect Berlin against attack, no defenses worth mentioning, and very few troops.

Run on Poison. Berlin had become virtually a city without men. Out of a civilian population of about 2,700,000—less than two-thirds of what it had been when the war began—roughly 2,000,000 were women. Small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Nazi propaganda had long painted Soviet troops as slant-eyed Mongols who butchered women and children on sight, raped nuns and burned clergymen to death with flamethrowers. As a result, doctors were besieged by patients seeking information about the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.

After the first Soviet troops fought their way into the city, however, the terrified populace began to relax somewhat. The soldiers sometimes seized watches and jewelry, and they dealt ruthlessly with any kind of resistance, but in general they ignored civilians. One fighting unit, bivouacking in Schwarze Grund Park, shared food and candy with neighborhood children. Other soldiers took it as a great joke when they saw how their presence petrified some Berliners. Still, more than a little prophetic was the comment of a polite young Soviet lieutenant who told a Roman Catholic mother superior: "These are good, disciplined and decent soldiers. But I must tell you. The men who are following us, the ones coming up behind, are pigs."

And so they were, writes Ryan. The later waves of Soviet soldiers went wild. Article ToolsPrintEmailReprints (2 of 2)


Rape, plunder and suicide became commonplace. Soldiers entered the Haus Dahlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital and foundling home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and those who had recently given birth. All told, the number of rape victims in Berlin—ranging from women of 70 to little girls of ten—will never be known, although Ryan reports estimates from doctors that run from 20,000 to 100,000.

Stalin's Scheme. Before the Soviet troops entered the city, most Berliners had been sustained by the hope that the Americans and British would not allow the city to fall into Russian hands; under daily attack by U.S. and British bombers, they still spoke of the Americans and British as liberators rather than conquerors. Ryan's account of the incredible blunders and political naivete that destroyed the hope is one of the most engrossing portions of the book.

Whatever the catastrophic political results, Ryan argues that Eisenhower made an eminently sound military decision when he ordered back the advanc ing units of the U.S. Ninth Army and refused to consider Berlin a worthwhile military objective. That is an argument that is still debatable. What cannot be disputed is the Allies' great mistake in accepting Stalin's word that he also considered Berlin to have no strategic importance. Actually, Stalin always considered the city a prime prize. Through interviews with surviving Soviet military people, Ryan provides a fresh account of how Stalin called his marshals to Moscow and craftily hatched his scheme for the massive offensive to snatch Ber lin before the Allies did.

Britain's Plan. Ryan also draws on long-forgotten documents to demolish the notion that Franklin Roosevelt drew up the zones of occupation for Germany. Actually, the plan was Britain's. F.D.R. was first shown the occupation plans in 1943, when he was aboard the U.S.S. Iowa on his way to the Cairo and Teheran conferences. He was both ir ritated and troubled, says Ryan, because the British plan, called Operation Rankin, placed the U.S. zone in the southern German provinces. "We should go as far as Berlin," Roosevelt said. "The U.S. should have Berlin. The Soviets can take the territory to the east."

Roosevelt even drew the zones he favored on a National Geographic map, placing Berlin on the boundary line between the U.S. and Soviet zones. He held stubbornly to his position throughout the war, but his wishes were never made known or they went unheeded. At Yalta, when the Big Three formally accepted the British plan, Roosevelt was too ill and dispirited to continue the fight. No one protested that provision had not been made for Anglo-American access to ruined Berlin. Stalin didn't complain, either.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph Stalin
AKA 'Koba', AKA 'Uncle Joe'. Stalin translates to 'Man of Steel'.

Country: Former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR - Soviet Union).

Kill tally: Approximately 20 million, including up to 14.5 million needlessly starved to death. At least one million executed for political "offences". At least 9.5 million more deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the 'Gulag Archipelago' never returning alive. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the 'Gulag'.

Background: The vast Russian Empire is thrown into turmoil in March 1917 after Tsar Nicholas II abdicates and the Imperial Government is replaced by a Provisional Government led by moderate socialist Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky.

The Bolsheviks, a network of communists headed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, are opposed to the Provisional Government's plan to establish a bourgeois democracy in Russia. They seize government in a coup d'état staged on 6 November, the so-called 'Bolshevik Revolution'. (By the old Julian calendar the coup took place on 24 October and is therefore also known as the 'October Revolution'.)

Civil war follows as the anticommunist 'White Army' battles the communist 'Red Army'. The communists finally secure government in 1921. The USSR, a union of the Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Transcaucasian republics, is established in December 1922. When Lenin dies in 1924, Communist Party leaders begin to jostle for the top position.

Mini biography: Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on 21 December 1879 in Gori, Georgia, in the then Russian Empire. He is the only child of a poor and struggling family. His father, a cobbler, dies when Stalin is 11.

1894 - Stalin and his mother move to Tiflis, where Stalin enrols at the Tiflis Theological Seminary and joins the Marxist underground in an empire racked by dissent and heading closer to revolution. Stalin becomes a leader of a clandestine Marxist group at the seminary, however, when his revolutionary activities are discovered, he is expelled.

He takes up work as first a tutor then a clerk, devoting his nights to revolutionary pursuits. In 1898 he joins the Russian Social Democratic Party.

1900 - Stalin organises labour demonstrations and strikes in the main industrial centres of the Caucasus (the region comprising Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia).

1903 - He joins the Bolsheviks and is repeatedly arrested and exiled for his revolutionary activities. In 1905 he serves as party organiser in Tiflis and as coeditor of the Tiflis-based 'Caucasian Workers' Newssheet'.

1905 - In December he acts as the delegate from the Caucasus to the first national conference of the Russian Social Democrats, in Tammerfors, Finland, where he meets Lenin for the first time. Stalin attends subsequent assemblies of the party at Stockholm in 1906 and London in 1907.

1912 - Lenin appoints him to the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and as one of the leaders of the Bolshevik underground. Later, Lenin places him on the editorial board of 'Pravda', the Bolshevik's newspaper.

1913 - He changes his name to Stalin, which translates to 'Man of Steel'. During the year he is arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he remains until March 1917, when a general amnesty is proclaimed following the abdication of the Tsar.

1914 - The First World War begins at the start of August. The Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) is pitted against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Germany sees in the Bolsheviks an opportunity to destabilise Russia and begins to offer support. In 1917 Lenin is allowed to pass through Germany on his way from Switzerland to Russia. Germany also provides the Bolsheviks with financial aid.

1917 - On his return from exile Stalin rejoins the editorial board of 'Pravda' and is elected to the party's Central Committee, helping Lenin to organise a meeting of Bolsheviks that approves an armed uprising.

The 'Bolshevik Revolution' takes place on 6 November. Lenin and his followers take control of first Saint Petersburg and then the whole country. Following the revolution, Russia drops out of the First World War. Stalin is made commissar (minister) of nationalities in the new communist administration.

1918 - From March the Bolsheviks refer to themselves as Communists. Their party is the Communist Party.

 

[Brunner]

1919 - Stalin is elected as a member of the Politburo, the inner circle of the Central Committee and foremost policy-making body in the Soviet Union. A further position as head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate gives him the power to investigate every official in the country.

1921 - He is placed in charge of the Communist Party bureau responsible for appointing and dismissing party members.

1922 - Stalin takes charge of the whole party administration when he is given the newly created post of general secretary of the Central Committee, a position that gives him control over party appointments and allows him to develop his power base. He will consolidate his influence further by spying on his colleagues, a tactic that will become a hallmark of his dictatorship.

When Lenin suffers a stroke in May, a troika (triumvirate) composed of Stalin, Lev B. Kamenev, and Grigorii V. Zinoviev assumes leadership of the party.

Lenin recovers late in year and reasserts control. He criticises the troika and Stalin in particular, accusing him of using coercion to force non-Russian republics to join the Soviet Union and saying he is "crude" and is accumulating too much power through his office of general secretary. Though Lenin recommends that Stalin be removed from the position, the party takes no action. Stalin remains as general secretary when Lenin dies on 21 January 1924.

1925 - Following Lenin's death, the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin troika again comes to prominence. Stalin consolidates his power base until he is able to break with Kamenev and Zinoviev. He has the city of Tsaritsin renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and allows the development of a Stalin personality cult and propaganda campaign.

From 1926 to 1930, he progressively ousts his opponents on the left and right of the party, silencing debate about options for the development of communism and the USSR. By the end of the decade Stalin has emerged as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. He is hailed by cultists as a "shining sun", "the staff of life", a "great teacher and friend", the "hope of the future for the workers and peasants of the world" and the "genius of mankind, the greatest genius of all times and peoples".

1928 - Stalin introduces the first five year plan, the "revolution from above", to develop the USSR. "We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries," he says in 1931. "We must cover this distance in 10 years. Either we do this or they will crush us."

The state takes control of the economy, introducing a program of rapid industrialisation and agrarian consolidation and setting unrealistic goals for development.

Industry and commerce are nationalised. All social, political and regulatory power is centred on the state. Twenty five million peasant farmers are forced to collectivise their property and then work on the new state-controlled farms. Wealthy peasants (kulaks) and the uncooperative are arrested and either executed or deported to work camps in Siberia.

The collectivised farms are required to meet ever increasing production quotas, even if this results in starvation on the farm. In the Ukrainian Republic up to five million peasants starve to death in the "famine" of 1932-33 when the state refuses to divert food supplies allocated to industrial and military needs. About one million starve to death in the North Caucasus.

By 1937, the social upheaval caused by the "revolution from above" has resulted in the deaths of up to 14.5 million Soviet peasants.

1929 - The Politburo begins to discuss the expansion of the work camp system set up by Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution. The system will come to be known as the 'Gulag Archipelago' or 'Gulag'. (Gulag is an acronym of 'Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei' - Russian for 'Main Camp Administration'.)

1932 - Although industry has failed to meet its production targets and agricultural output has dropped in comparison with 1928 yields, Stalin announces that the first five year plan has successfully met its goals in only four years. The second five year plan is introduced in 1933 and third in 1938.

On 8 November, Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda (Nadya) Alliluyeva, commits suicide following an argument with Stalin during a party at the Kremlin.

Her suicide also reportedly comes after a group of students she is teaching are arrested for sedition after attempting to inform Stalin of the plight of the peasants.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva's suicide and the scathing personal note she leaves Stalin are believed to have had a shattering effect on him.

1934 - The Communist Party celebrates its economic achievements at the 'Congress of Victors'. While Stalin is lavishly praised for his leadership more than 100 of the 2,000 delegates to the congress cross out his name on a secret ballot for the Central Committee. Only three delegates cross out the name of the Leningrad party chief, Sergei Kirov.

Believing that a conspiracy is now afoot to unseat him and overthrow the socialist revolution, Stalin has Kirov assassinated in December then begins a series of purges of party members suspected of disloyalty. Thousands from the Leningrad party office are deported to work camps in Siberia. Few will return alive.

At show trials held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938 dozens of former party leaders are forced to confess to crimes against the Soviet state. They are then executed. Among those put to death are Kamenev and Zinoviev, the former members of the troika that included Stalin. More than half of the delegates to the 'Congress of Victors' also disappear. By the end of 1938 almost every leading member of the original Bolsheviks has been killed.

The campaign of terror, flamed by the secret police (the NKVD, or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs - the forerunner of the KGB, or Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti), extends throughout the party and into the general community, including the military high command. Also targeted are scientists, artists, priests and intellectuals.

All told, about one million are executed, in that will come to be known as 'The Great Terror', 'The Great Purge', or the 'Yezhovshina' (after the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov). At least 9.5 million more are deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the Gulag never returning alive. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the Gulag.

Stalin personally orders the trials of about 44,000 and signs thousands of death warrants. He also ends early release from work camps for good behaviour.

1936 - The Spanish Civil War begins on 18 July when Spanish Nationalists led by Francisco Franco stage a coup against the country's left-leaning Republican Government. Stalin provides support to the Republicans but is wary about antagonising Germany's Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, who is backing the Nationalists.

1937 - On 30 July the NKVD issues Order No. 00447 setting out the "means of punishment of those to be repressed, and the number of those subject to repression." The operation is to begin on 5 August and be completed in four months.

"All kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements to be repressed are to be divided into two categories," the order stats.

"a) The first category are the most hostile of the enumerated elements. They are subject to immediate arrest, and after their cases have been considered by a three-person tribunal (troika) they are TO BE SHOT.

"b) In the second category are the other less active though also hostile elements. They are subject to arrest and imprisonment in a camp for 8 to 10 years, and the most evil and socially dangerous of these, to incarceration for the same period in prison, as determined by the three-person tribunal."

The order then lists the numbers of individuals from regions around the Soviet Union to be "subject to repression". 75,950 are to be executed and 203,000 exiled.

At the same time, the purge of the Red Army begins. The purge results in the execution, imprisonment or dismissal of 36,671 officers, including about half of the 706 officers with the rank of brigade commander or higher. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 top commanders are executed.

1938 - On 29 September, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the 'Munich Agreement'. The agreement, which cedes the German-speaking area in the north of Czechoslovakia to Germany, is an ill-fated attempt to avoid the Second World War.

Stalin interprets the agreement as a sign that he will not be able to count on either Britain or France if Germany becomes hostile.

1939 - On 23 August, Stalin signs a nonaggression pact with Germany. Under the pact Eastern Europe is carved up into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with the USSR claiming Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, part of the Balkans and half of Poland.

German troops invade Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later. The Second World War has begun.

Stalin acts to secure the USSR's western frontier without antagonising Hitler. Soviet forces seize eastern Poland in September and enter Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in October. War is declared on Finland at the end of November.

In Poland, soldiers and others who might resist the Soviet annexation are arrested en masse. By 1945, about two million have been imprisoned or deported to the Gulag. More than 20,000 Polish officers, soldiers, border guards, police, and other officials are executed, including 4,500 military personnel who are buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest near the Russian city of Smolensk.

Meanwhile, Stalin helps supply the German war effort, providing the Nazi regime with oil, wood, copper, manganese ore, rubber, grain, and other resources under a trade agreement between the two nations. Stalin views the war against Germany as a conflict "between two groups of capitalist countries", saying there is "nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other".

Stalin is named 'Time' magazine's man of the year for 1939 for switching the balance of power in Europe by signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler, a decision that is described as "world-shattering". "Without the Russian pact," the magazine says, "German generals would certainly have been loath to go into military action. With it, World War II began."

In December 1939, to celebrate his 60th birthday, he is awarded the Order of Lenin and given the title 'Hero of Socialist Labour'.

1940 - The war with Finland ends on 8 March. Finland looses some territory but retains its independence. In the south, the Soviets occupy part of Romania in June.

1941 - Stalin appoints himself as head of the government. Japan and the Soviet Union sign the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact on 13 April, removing the threat to the Soviets of invasion by Japan.

To the west, German troops begin to mount on the Soviet border in preparation for 'Operation Barbarossa', as the German plan to invade the Soviet Union is called. However, Stalin refuses to believe reports of the troop build-ups or that invasion is imminent. An order is issued instructing Soviet border troops not to fire on German positions and Stalin refuses to place the country on a war footing.

Germany invades on 22 June. Stalin is caught completely off guard. He takes command of the Soviet forces, appointing himself commissar of defence and supreme commander of the Soviet Armed Forces in what comes to be know in the USSR as the 'Great Patriotic War'.

On 3 July, Stalin makes a radio address to the nation. "Comrades, citizens, brothers, and sisters, fighters of our army and navy," he says, "We must immediately put our whole production to war footing. In all occupied territories partisan units must be formed."

He also announces that a "scorched earth" policy will be employed to deny the Germans "a single engine, or a single railway truck, and not a pound of bread nor a pint of oil."

The Germans advance swiftly but are halted on 6 December by a Russian counterattack just short of Moscow, where Stalin directs the Soviet campaign from his rooms in the Kremlin. His armies fight under the slogan 'Die, But Do Not Retreat'.

The 'Battle for Moscow' will be the biggest of the Second World War, involving seven million participants and an area of operations the size of France. The Germans' failure to capture the city will be their first military defeat of the war.

To the north, the Germans reach Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in August. The city is surrounded on 8 September, beginning a 900-day siege during which almost 1.5 million civilians and soldiers will die.

In order to encourage military aid from the Western Allies, Stalin agrees to release about 115,000 of the Poles imprisoned after the 1939 annexation.

Meanwhile, the United States enters the war when the Japanese airforce bombs the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on 7 December. Germany and Italy declare war on the US on 11 December.

1942 - In 'The Declaration of the United Nations' of 1 January the Allies agree not to make a separate peace with the enemy and pledge themselves to the formation of a peacekeeping organisation (now the United Nations - UN) on victory.

An accord between the British and the Soviets is accepted in May. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's plan for a "grand alliance" between his country, the USSR and the US is now a reality.

Stalin is again named 'Time' magazine's man of the year, this time for stopping Hitler and opening the possibility of an Allied victory in Europe.

In August Stalin appoints Marshal Georgy Zhukov as his deputy commander-in-chief of defence. Zhukov will direct much of the Red Army's counteroffensive against the Germans.

The military turning point of the war in Europe comes with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43. On 28 July, Stalin orders the Soviet troops to take "not one step backwards". Front line forces are flanked by second lines under orders to shoot down any soldier who tries to flee. When the German forces laying siege to the city are encircled and trapped by a Soviet counteroffensive, Hitler refuses to allow them to attempt an escape. They surrender on 2 February 1943.

Almost 500,000 Red Army troops have died during the Stalingrad campaign. A further 600,000 have been wounded. The German Sixth Army has been effectively destroyed in what is at the time the most catastrophic military defeat in German history. Over 500,000 of the German-led troops are dead.

In the wake of the victory, Stalin promotes himself to the rank of marshal. He will personally direct the counteroffensive that drives the German Army out of the Soviet Union, across eastern Europe, and to the heart of Berlin.

Meanwhile, conditions in the work camps of the Gulag Archipelago steadily deteriorate over the course of the war, with well over two million people dying. Camps go for weeks on end without receiving any supplies. In the winter of 1942-1943 alone about a quarter of the Gulag prisoners die from starvation.

1943 - The Western Allies take Africa at the start of the year, land in Sicily and Italy, and prepare for the 'D-Day' landings on the Normandy beaches in France on 6 June 1944 and the invasion of Germany six months later.

In the Soviet Union, the Red Army follows up on its victory at Stalingrad. By the end of the year, the German siege of Leningrad has been broken and much of the Ukrainian Republic recaptured.

From 28 November to 1 December Stalin meets with Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The three leaders discuss the details of their joint campaign against Hitler and reaffirm their joint policy of accepting nothing less than an unconditional surrender from Germany.

1944 - By the middle of 1944 the Red Army is approaching Warsaw, the capital of Poland. However, the army stops short when noncommunist resistance forces launch a rebellion against the German garrisons in the city.

The ensuing route of the resistance forces by the Germans clears the path for the ascendancy of the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation (Lublin Committee). The decision to halt the Soviet forces outside of Warsaw is seen as a deliberate tactic by Stalin to smash the noncommunist Poles. The Lublin Committee is recognised by the Soviets as the government of Poland in January 1945, beginning a 44-year period of communist rule.

1945 - On 30 January advanced Soviet troops reach the Oder River, less than 70 km away from the centre of Berlin.

From February 4-11, Stalin again meets with Churchill and Roosevelt. The conference, held near Yalta in the Crimea, concludes with the issuing of the 'Yalta Declaration' committing the Allies to the destruction of German militarism and Nazism.

A conquered Germany will be divided into three zones of military occupation. Soviet forces will remain in Eastern Europe until free elections are held and the people are allowed to choose the form of government under which they will live.

The declaration also announces that a "conference of United Nations" will be held in San Francisco in April. However, while the UN will be established, Stalin fails to allow free and fair elections in the Eastern European countries the Soviets occupy after the war.

By March, as the Western forces reach the Rhine River, Soviet armies have overrun most of Eastern Europe and are converging on Berlin. The Soviets march under the slogan, "There will be no pity. They have sown the wind and now they are harvesting the whirlwind."

Few are spared. As the Soviets move through Germany they rape at least two million German women in an undisciplined advance that is now acknowledged as the largest case of mass rape in history.

Stalin is aware of the rape and looting, but does nothing to prevent it until 20 April, when he issues an order calling on his troops "to change their attitudes towards Germans ... and treat them better". On 3 August, Marshal Zhukov follows up Stalin's command, introducing regulations to control "robbery", "physical violence", "scandalous events", and "unsanctioned absences". By April an Allied victory in Europe is certain. Berlin falls to the Soviet forces on 2 May. On 7 May, Germany surrenders unconditionally.

Over 46 million Europeans have died as a result of the war, including:

Over 26 million Soviets,
Over seven million Germans,
About 6.8 million Poles,
Between one million and 1.7 million Yugoslavs,
985,000 Romanians,
810,000 French,
750,000 Hungarians,
525,000 Austrians,
520,000 Greeks,
410,000 Italians,
400,000 Czechs,
388,000 British,
250,000 Dutch,
88,000 Belgians,
84,000 Fins,
22,000 Spaniards,
21,000 Bulgarians,
10,000 Norwegians, and
4,000 Danes.
Close to 60% of the European war dead are from the Soviet Union. Of the more than 26 million Soviets killed, nearly 18 million are civilians. About nine million servicemen and women from the Red Army have died.

With the pressure of the war-effort now lifted, Stalin acts to secure the gains. Soviet citizens repatriated from wartime detention in foreign prisons and work camps are deemed to be traitors and are executed or deported to Soviet prison camps. Over 1.5 million Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans are sent to the Gulag or to labour camps in Siberia and the far north. Stalin even disowns his own son, who had been captured by the Germans in 1941.

Civilians repatriated from Germany are kept under surveillance by the NKVD and forbidden to go within 100 km of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.

Freedoms granted during the war to the church and collective farmers are revoked. The Communist Party tightens its admission standards and purges many who had joined during the war.

Eastern European countries occupied by the Soviets are turned into "satellite states" governed by "puppet" communist regimes. The 'Iron Curtain' falls across Europe and a 'Cold War' develops between the USSR and the West.

Stalin, meanwhile, is appointed 'Generalissimo' "for outstanding service in the Great Patriotic War". He is also named a 'Hero of the Soviet Union' and awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of Victory.

1948 - The Soviets cut off land access to Allied-occupied West Berlin in June. After the blockade is lifted in May 1949, Germany is partitioned.

1949 - Another wave of Stalinist purges sweeps the Soviet Union. On Stalin's 70th birthday most of the Leningrad party organisation, including their parents, spouses and children, are secretly arrested in what will become known as the 'Leningrad Affair'.

Believing that Leningrad's experience of independence during the German siege is a threat, Stalin forces the city leaders to confess to treason. After a quick trial they are shot.

1950 - In April Stalin agrees to a plan by the Soviet-backed leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, to force a reunification with South Korea through a preemptive invasion. The Korean War begins on 25 June. It will last for three years and cost about three million lives but ends with no definitive outcome.

1953 - In February Stalin orders the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for new terror campaign, this time directed against Soviet Jews. However, the plan will never be put into action.

Stalin is pronounced dead at 9.50 p.m. on 5 March, after collapsing four days earlier at his country house outside Moscow. The cause of death is declared to be a cerebral haemorrhage, although some mystery surrounds the actual circumstances and it is rumoured that he was poisoned to stop him from starting a nuclear war with the US.

Thousands of people from across the USSR flock to Moscow to view his body as it lies in state, culminating in a stampede that kills hundreds rushing to pay their last respects.

Following his funeral, Stalin's embalmed body is laid to rest in the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, beside the body of Lenin, which is also preserved.

Postscript

1956 - Stalin and his policies are denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, in a "secret speech" at the 20th party congress in February.

1961 - Khrushchev orders that Stalin's body be removed from the Lenin mausoleum and buried nearby, alongside the Kremlin wall. In November Stalingrad is renamed Volgograd.

Present-day - According to Memorial, Russia's leading human rights organisation, official records prove that during Stalin's reign at least one million people were executed for political offences, and at least 9.5 million more were deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the Gulag.

However, a poll conducted by Russia's Public Opinion Foundation in February 2003, finds that more than half of all Russians surveyed view Stalin with ambivalence or as a positive force, with 36% saying he "did more good than bad for the country". Only 29% believe the opposite.

Another poll conducted by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion finds that of the 1,600 surveyed 53% believe that Stalin's role in Russian history was "absolutely positive" or "more positive than negative". Just 33% think that his role was "absolutely negative" or "more negative than positive". While 27% describe Stalin as a cruel and inhumane tyrant, 20% say he was wise and humane. Sixteen percent predict that another Stalin will come to power in Russia.

On 24 March 2004, Memorial releases a list naming 1,345,796 victims of Stalin's purges, including the 44,000 sent to trial on the former dictator's personal orders.

"This list is intended to help people search for their relatives who suffered repression," says the chairman of Memorial, Arseny Roginsky. "But it is also a warning to the society and the authorities about what happens in a country where power is unchecked by the society."

Comment: The name Stalin conjures an image of 'Big Brother' - a cold, calculating yet ultimately paranoid tyrant never seen but seeing everything in an Orwellian world of terror and betrayal. A gross oversimplification, to be sure, but with its roots in the reality of the Man of Steel's shadowy life and times.

By his own admission, "rough" and uncultivated, and with a troubled personal life, Stalin set a benchmark for the ruthless pursuit of social engineering. He was the 'Engineer of Human Souls' in the bleak and callous Europe portrayed in the book of the same name by Czech writer Josef Skvorecky. Others have attempted to follow Stalin's lead - Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania; Pol Pot in Cambodia - but none have had his "success".

More information
Links are to external sites.

Soviet Union - A Country Study (Library of Congress Country Studies Series)

How Many Died? A Summary of Stalin's Victims

A Rational Choice Explanation for Stalin's 'Great Terror' - PDF file

Page created on 23 May 2001. Reviewed 31 July 2003. Updated 28 December 2006.

 

[Brunner]

Source "Berlin" by Antony Beevor. (Viking) 2002. ISBN 0-670-88695-5.
Pages 409-414.

The round of victory celebrations did not signify an end to fear in Berlin.Many German women were raped as a part of the extended celebrations. A young Soviet scientest heard from an eighteen-year-old Germany girl with whom he had fallen in love on that night of 1st May a Red Army officer forced the muzzle of his pistol into her mouth and had kept it there throughout his attack to ensure her compliance.

Women soon learned to disappear during "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end.Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning,when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol rom the night before.Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughters.

Berliners remember that, beacuse all the windows had been blown in, you
could hear5 the screams every night. Estimates from two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000 rape vistims. One doctor deduced that out od approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide.The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia , Pomerania , and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substabtial minority , if not a vast majority apper to have suffered multiple rape. A friend of Ursula von Kardorff and the Soviet spy Schulze-Boysen was raped by " twenty-three soldiers one fater the other". She had to be stitched up hospital afterwards.

The reaction of German women to the experience of rape varied greatly.For many vistims, especially protected young girls who had little idea of what was being done to them the psychological effects could be devasrtating. relationships with men beacme extremely difficult, often for the rest of their lives. Mothers were in general far more concerned about their children, and this priority made them surmount what they had endured.Other women, both young and adult, simply tried to blank out the experience." I must repres a lot in order , to someextent, to be able to live", one woman acknowledged, when refusing to talk about the subject.Those who did not resist and managed to detatch themselves from what was happening appear to have sufferred much less. Some described it in terms of an "out of body experience"."That feeling" wrote one"hads kept the experience from dominating the rest of my life".
A robust cynicism of the Berlin varity also seemed to help."Allin all", wrote the anonymous diarist on 4th May, "we are slowly beginning to look upon the whole buisness of rape with a certain humour, albeit of the grimmer kind". They noted that the Ivanms went for fatter women first of all, which provided a certain "schadenfreude". Those who had not lost weight were usually the wives of Nazi party funtionaries and others who had profited from privileged psoitions.
Rape had become a collective experience - the diarist noted - and therefore it should be collectively overcome by talking among themselves. yet men, when they returned, tried to forbid any mention of the subject, even out of their presence.Women discovered that while they had to come to terms with what had happened to them, the men in their lives often made things far worse.Those who had been present at the time were shamed at their inability to protect them. Hanna gerlitz gave in to two drunk Soviet officers to save both her husband and hersself. "Afterwards" she wrote"I had to consle my husband ad help rstore his courage. he cried like a baby."
Men who returned home, having evaded capture or been released early from prison camps, seem to have frozen emotionally on hearing that their wife or fiancee had been raped in their absence. (Manyprisoners who had been in Soviet camps for longer periods also sufferred from " desexualization" as a result of starvation).They found the idea of the violation of their women very hard to accept.Ursula von Kardorff heard of a young aristocrat who immdeiately broke off his engagement when he learned that his fiancee had ben raped by three Russian soldiers.The anonymous diarist recounted to her former lover, who turned up unexpectedly, the experiences which the inhabitants of the building had survived."You've turned into shameless bitches" he burst out. "Every one of you !" She then gave him her diary to read, and when he found what she had written about being raped, he stared at her as if she had gone out of her mind.He left a couple of days later , saying that he was off to search for food and she never saw him again.
A daughter, mother and grandmother who were all raped together just outside berlin cponsoled themselves with the idea that the man of the house had died during the war. he would have been killed trying to prevent it, they told themselves.yet in reality few German men appear to have demonstrated what would admittedly have been a futiel copurage. One well known actor Harry Liebke, was killed by a bottle smashed over his head as he tried to save a young woman sheltering at his apartment , but he appears to have been fairly exceptional.The anonymous diarist even heard from one woman in the water pump queue that when Red Army soldiers were dragging her from the cellar , a man wholived in the same block said to her " Go along, for God's sake! You're getting us all into trouble".
If anyone attempted to defend a woman againtst a Soviet attacker it was either a father or a youny son trying to protect his mother."The thirteen year old Dieter Sahl , neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event "threw himself with fists flailing at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him.He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot.
Perhaps the most grotesque myth of Soviet propaganda was the notion "that german intelligence left a great number of women in Berlin infected with veneral diseases with the purpose of infecting Red Army officers. Another NKVD report specifically ascribed it to Werwolf activity."Some members of the underground organisation, Werwolf , mostly girls, recieved from their leaders the task to harm Soviet commanders and render them unfit for duty". Even just before the attack from the Oder, Soviet military authorities explained the increase in VD rates on the grounds that "the enemy is prepared to use any methods to weaken us and to put our soldiers and officers out of action."
Large numbers of women soon found that they had to queue at medical centres. It was small consulation to find so many in the same condition.One owman doctor set up a veneral diseases clinic in an air-raid shelter, with the sign "Typhoid" written in Cyrillic outside t keep Russian soldiers away. As the film "The Third man" illustrated , penicillen was soon the most sought after item on the black market. The abortion rate also soared.It has been estimated thataround 90% of victims obrtained abortions, although this figure appears extremely high. many of the women who did give birth abandoned the child in thee hospital, usually because they knew that their husband or fiance would never accept its presence at home.

 

[Manfred Klaus]

Por supuesto que sí, pero cambia el culpable, detalle no menor.

Es el caso de ahora en Iraq, podemos señalar dos culpables de los abusos; los autores materiales y las autoridades que los encubrieron, pero nunca culpar al US Army de ser una panda de violadores. Estás metiendo en la bolsa a miles de hombres inocentes.
Lo del caso de IRAK si se puede culpar al US Army (Plana mayor)debido a que en el ultimo tiempo se enrolaron miles de criminales en sus filas con opcion al perdon al mejor estilo los 12 del patibulo.
En caso soviético en Alemania es igual, si o si tenemos dos culpables, los autores de las violaciones (porque las hubo) y quienes ignoraron el crimen (autoridades), pero para meter a un tercero, el ER en su conjunto, millones de hombres,Con un odio impuesto por sus superiores hacia los habitantes alemanes sean nacional socialista o no prácticamente un pueblo (una gran proporción de su población masculina en edad militar) se necesita más.

¿O acaso dirías por ejemplo que el exterminio de judíos o gitanos era "práctica habitual" en los ciudadanos alemanes? Seguro que no y hay ejemplos muy claros en la historia de que ciudadanos alemanes ayudaron a escapar de la Gestapo a sus vecinos de origen judio.
En un post anterior mencionaste las violaciones en argentina, yo te pregunto como catalogan los DDHH argentinos a todas las fuerzas armadas " violadores, torturadores, y demas, pero no todos los integrantes de las fuerzas lo fueron es mas los civiles con la AAA hicieron lo mismo y recien ahora parece que se dieron cuenta.

 

[Manfred Klaus]

Sres moderadores,,candadito por favor....Este es un tema subido con muy mal leche y una apologia no solo de Stalin sino de un crimen masivo...

Me sumo al pedido

 

[Rumplestilskin]

Lo del caso de IRAK si se puede culpar al US Army (Plana mayor)debido a que en el ultimo tiempo se enrolaron miles de criminales en sus filas con opcion al perdon al mejor estilo los 12 del patibulo.

No, culpa a las autoridades (y únicamente a los que tuvieron conocimiento del heho), pero no a los miles de hombres que lo componen. Eso es inadmisible.

Seguro que no y hay ejemplos muy claros en la historia de que ciudadanos alemanes ayudaron a escapar de la Gestapo a sus vecinos de origen judio.

¿O sea que no culpas a todos los alemanes (cosa correcta), pero sí a todo el ER?

yo te pregunto como catalogan los DDHH argentinos a todas las fuerzas armadas " violadores, torturadores, y demas, pero no todos los integrantes de las fuerzas lo fueron es mas los civiles con la AAA hicieron lo mismo y recien ahora parece que se dieron cuenta.

Exacto, ahora, lo curioso es que haces esa distinción con las FFAA argentinas, pero no con las soviéticas. Eso es ir con la banderita política en la cabeza.

Cuento una anécdota; el mejor profesor que he tenido, fue un profesor de filosofía, una verdadera eminencia. El es un católico de pura cepa (Agustiniano); cuando llegó el momento de exponer a Marx, nos pidió perdón por lo que iba a hacer, y sacó un inmenso apunte sobre marxismo y nos dijo "Sé que es muchísimo, pero estoy harto de ignorantes que adulan o critican a Marx sin tener idea de lo que dicen. Si lo quieren amar u odiar es cosa suya, pero es mi deber como profesor de filosofía, que amen u odien con conocimiento de causa, por respeto a un gran pensador, así que me voy a asegurar de que conozcan el marxismo de alfa a omega". Repito, eso viniendo de un devoto católico.

Cuando terminó el año, hasta a la mujer más linda la veíamos barbuda y fumando un puro de tanto marxismo.

¿Sabes como se llama eso? Honestidad intelectual.

Un bien rarísimo hoy en día.

Bien, la historia es la búsqueda de los hechos, no se la investiga o lee con unos anteojos del color político que uno tiene, no si se es intelectualmente honesto. Así que una vez más ¿Dónde están las fuentes de Beevor? Dónde el nombre de un hospital con actas fechadas, un estudio profundo sobre el tema, un reconocimiento oficial. Porque "ciertos informes" sin nombre o fechas; "cierto hospital" sin nombre; "se estima" sin decir en base a qué o con qué estadísticas, etc, no son la forma de trabajo de un historiador. Si no, nadie dudaría de los OVNIS.

 

[Brunner]

No estamos hablando del US Army, ni del hombre en la luna-vos subistes este topico tratando de exculpar a Stalin..es que no puedes concretarte?/ por demas la culpabilidad del personaje a quien pretendes defender y os crimenes del ejetcito rojo estan requete superprobados..o otro perro con ese hueso....

 

[Rumplestilskin]

Dices eso porque tu odio te ciega, pero basta con pensar un poco.

Si exculpamos a Stalin de estos crímenes; ¿Lo convertimos en un buen tipo?

Yo creo que no, tenemos los millares de ucranianos muertos de hambre, los millares de enemigos políticos, los millares y millares de rusos muertos directa o indirecta (por sus malas políticas), y el listado es tan largo, que es como querer quitar o agregar una gota al mar.

No me juzgues tan trabajador como para ponerme en la tarea de exculpar a Stalin, además estoy harto de repetirlo, lo que me interesa es que no se meta en la bolsa a miles de soldados sin ninguna prueba.

 

[Brunner]

El odio te cuiega-estan los informes de los hospitales dd Berlin y de otras zonas "liberadas" por el ej. rojo que confirman las masivas violaciones -todos tus demas argumentos sin uinnecesarios.