I am sad, not angry.
Anyway, the rant.
There are many eyewitness (for example, on the site
iremember.ru) and victim accounts of the Red Army's mass rapes, especially in Berlin, and other atrocities. Claiming otherwise, I believe, is outright idiotic. However, there's almost no hard physical data on the scale of said war crimes. All numbers, such as the ones cited by Anthony Beevor, for example, are results of various amounts of guesswork and extrapolation, the latter of which is based on the number of births, pregnancies and abortions in 1945 on the occupied territories, which most likely do not provide accurate data on the number of rape cases due to the fact that pregnancies and abortions result not only from rape but also from :
1) Consensual sex with enemy troops due to mutual attraction or unrequited sexual desire, comparatively rare as these cases may be.
2) Arguably consensual sex with enemy troops in order to gain various goods and/or services from them (such cases were widespread in the American army, where about 15% of soldiers had venereal diseases from Italian, French and German women from whom they have bought sex in exchange for food, tobacco, soap, etc...,).
3) Consensual sex with husbands, boyfriends, roommates, co-inhabitants and other men of the same nationality and/or faction as they were heading out to battle and wanted to have one last romp before they die.
4) Consensual sex with husbands, boyfriends, roommates, co-inhabitants and other men of the same nationality and/or faction due to the women not wanting to lose their virginity to the enemy troops, which were portrayed by the Axis propaganda as a horde of barbaric rapists, bandits and murderers in order to garner the civilian population's support of defence effort.
The number of rape victims in Berlin, the most famous case of Soviet war atrocities, is widely believed to be somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 women. This data is based mostly on the number of abortions Berlin women had in the months following the Soviet occupation, which were performed for free if the woman wrote a declaration stating that she has been raped by an enemy soldier. Considering that abortions were otherwise mostly prohibited in Germany at that time, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least some of the women who claimed that they had been raped by Soviet troops were lying in order to recieve an abortion they otherwise had no chance of getting. In addition, most women in their declarations described their rapists as asian, or asiatic-looking, with narrow eyes and flat faces. Considering that the absolute majority of Red Army soldiers were distinctly european, with members of the asian race being a minority, and that the "barbarous asian" was the prevailing Soviet stereotype at the time thanks to Goebbels' propaganda, the aforementioned fact further undermines the credibility of the statement that the number of claimed rape cases in Berlin corellates with the number of actual rape cases. Of course, for some of the rape victims the trauma, or the fear, might have been so overwhelming that they couldn't remember the faces of their assailants clearly, but it is also possible that women who weren't raped but still wanted to have an abortion lied about it and in their declarations described the stereotypical asiatic Soviet barbarian because they wanted to be believed (likewise, most of the Berlin women in Allied-occupied regions who claimed that they were raped described their assailants as black).
What is the point of this quasi-scientific rant? I want to say that it is almost impossible to determine how many rapes did the Red Army commit, even though there's ample evidence that rape took place.
But Knit Tie, you say, why don't people just accept this fact like they accepted the Holocaust and say that "The number of women who were raped by the Soviets is unknown, but it most likely numbers in the tens, even hundreds of thousands. This is a dark blemish on the Red Army's reputation that should also be remembered as a proof that all sides suffer greatly in war?"
I don't know.
I!
Don't!
Know!!!
Instead, we have this horrible situation where this historical fact of Soviet atrocities is wielded like a weapon by every side of the argument in an attempt to prove their point of view. Anti-Soviets cite each other and various obviously politically-charged books, papers and films and claim that increasingly large numbers of women were raped by the Red Army and that the USSR is therefore completely evil and bad. Pro-Soviets refute these statements with equally worthless politically-charged books and papers and try to prove that the USSR was a time of halcyon glory, where none of the Stalin's purges or mass deportations took place. Unbiased opinion is completely absent
even among the rape victims themselves.
And I am sad, really, really sad because this slew of propaganda is insulting to the memories of both the genuinely heroic Soviets and the victims of their immoral compatriots.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9751050 times)