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... as 80 or more. Thanking him for his book, one woman living in Little Hampton, West Sussex said: 'I have so many memories. I'd thought of writing an autobiography, but people would not believe the things I have survived... I think I was a little insane afterwards. ' "Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding places of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter.
Older Berliners still remember the screams every night, " Beevor describes. Beevor estimates that rape victims from Berlin's two main hospitals ranged from 95, 000 to 130, 000, one doctor deducing 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, " Beevor says, maintaining that at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appearing to have suffered multiple rape. In Berlin, says Beevor, 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. Beevor said he had been stunned by the response. A lot of these women have obviously barely talked about this maelstrom of horror they experienced, and suddenly they " ve been plunged into discussing things they haven't even been able to tell their closest family members, he said.
One German woman, Just from Preston, wrote to him: Often I was tempted to talk about it, but I realized that no one would believe me or would interpret my story as excessive self-pity. What you have written is a way of showing how suffering can be endured. A woman whom Beevor visited in Berlin told him she had garroted a soldier with his gun as he had tried to rape her mother. Only later, said Beevor, did I realize that she was the one who had been raped and had invented the story because she was so traumatized and was desperate for it to be true. In their letters the women confirmed the accounts in Beevor's book of how, rather than befall the same fate as their neighbors, many tried to kill themselves and their children by cutting their wrists. Others hanged themselves.
Reports say classrooms of schoolgirls committed suicide en masse. web Beevor details the horrific consequences of events that resonated for years, affecting women's attitude towards sex and causing huge social problems between men and women. By the late 1940 s - the rapes went on for three years or more - the Soviet troops had left behind them a broken people. According to some reports, 90 per cent of Berlin women were infected with venereal diseases, while Beevor cites one doctor who said that, of the 100, 000 women estimated to have been raped in Berlin, a tenth of them died, mostly from suicide. The mortality figures for the approximately 1. 4 million raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, he says, are believed to have been much higher. Of those who became pregnant, an estimated 90 per cent had abortions.
Those who did give birth often gave their children up for adoption because of the shame. In 1946, 3. 7 per cent of children born in Berlin had Russian fathers. Even now, says Here Sander, a German left-wing activist and author of The Liberator and the Relieved, an extensive 1992 study of women who were raped, the consequences are still felt. While the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, the ordeal for German women in Soviet occupied areas continued. A "high proportion" of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled from Germany's eastern provinces were raped.
About two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948. There are women who have never been able to talk about it and whose husbands forbade it. There are their children, who are finding out for the first time that they are the product of rape, and there are those who attempt to look in vain for their fathers. Beevor has shed considerable light on a chapter in German history; the extent of which has remained largely unknown outside Germany and which in the country continues to be a taboo subject. In Russia, Berlin: the Downfall has been thoroughly denounced.
Its ambassador to Britain called it 'an act of blasphemy'. When it is published in Germany in the autumn, Beevor has been warned it is likely to cause a storm. The daily Die Welt has already described it as 'an epic shock' that reveals a previously unknown chronicle of the rape atrocities which took place as the Red Army made its way from East Prussia to Berlin. Having already been denounced in Russia, Beevor is prepared for the diplomatic row the book is capable of unleashing between Berlin and Moscow. 'This is a subject of huge delicacy, and there's tremendous reluctance on the part of the German government to bring this up and thus upset the new relationship with Putin and the Kremlin, ' he says. But it will also hit the market as Germany finds itself in the thick of a 'normalization' debate in which it attempts to take a broader approach to its history. Die Welt says that after 'half a century of inner chill', during which Germany has attempted to reflect on and atone for its Nazi past but has paid scant regard to the way ordinary citizens suffered, Beevor's book is proof that to move forward Germans need to reassess themselves not just as persecutors, but also as victims.
Most probably all the mass rapes and atrocities were organized and encouraged by the NKVD, the organization that was actually controlling the Red Army. The head of NKVD Beria and the General Secretary and the head of the armed forces Joseph Stalin perfectly knew what was going on, and by not stopping those atrocities they indirectly supported the horrible crimes committed by the Soviet Soldiers. The Red Army men who entered German territory (East Prussia) toward the end of 1944 and later were exposed to propaganda, which explicitly called on them to inflict mass violence on the German population. That is, the propaganda did not simply say "The Germans are bad guys"; with the soldiers concluding that it was therefore permissible to commit acts of violence. The propaganda explicitly said "Kill all Germans." The propaganda was put out by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the chief disseminator being the publicist Il " ia Erenburg. In doing so, Erenburg et al were pursuing their own judeo centric agenda, essentially revenge, but the exterminatory propaganda was certainly approved by Stalin, as long as it served his purposes.
Once the end of the war came in sight, and Stalin's main concern became the construction of a subject German state that would provide a more developed component of his largely backward empire, Erenburg's exterminatory propaganda became counter-productive. Accordingly, in April 1945 Erenburg was dismissed and the propaganda was toned downed, with the emphasis being on the new, Socialist Germany to be built was the German people had been "liberated." That is the reason why anti-Soviet propagandists can point to Soviet propaganda that definitely promotes genocide of the Germans, and pro-Soviet propagandists can counter with propaganda material that is the very opposite. The importance of that war is hard to overestimate. The most important and by far the most voluminous front of the WWII was the Eastern Front. Throughout the entire 2000 -mile extent of it, the Russian and German forces had engaged in stubborn inch-by-inch fighting that produced the largest ever casualties in the history of combat. In fact, there were more German divisions engaged on the Russian Front then on all the other fronts combined.
At no time during the Great Patriotic War did Germans have less than 60 - 70 percent of their entire troop strength at the Eastern Front. Rightfully, Soviet Union bore the full brunt of the war almost alone and ultimately forced the Nazi Germany to surrender. In the process USSR did suffer incredible casualties that are still unequaled in the annals of history. Many forget that USSR not only ended facing Nazi Germany's war machine, the Wehrmacht, but it also faced the armies of Hungary, Slovakia, Finland, Romania, and Italy.
Nevertheless, even regarding all that the Soviet Army made for the liberation of Europe, there is still one issue that is not yet resolved, and it is hard to say if it will be ever resolved: can the aforementioned mass crimes committed by the Soviet soldiers be justified by the fact that they exterminated nazism and established freedom in the Europe. Bibliography: Beevor, Anthony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945. Viking: London. 2002. Cornelius, Ryan.
The Last battle. Prentice Hall, NY. 1996. Karl Friedrich Grau. Silesian Inferno: War Crimes of the Red Army on its March into Silesia in 1945. Introduction by Prof. Ernst Deuerlein.
Valley Forge, Penn. : Land post Press, 1992. Romuald J. Misiunas, Soviet Historiography on World War II and the Baltic States, 1944 - 1974. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.
Andrew Ezergailis, War Crimes evidence From Soviet Army. Nationalities Papers, volume XVI (Fall 1988).
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