Liberation of Europe by Soviet Red Army – Mass Rapes of Women

Commanding officers whose troops raised the Soviet flag over the Nazi Reichstag

Raising of the Soviet Communist flag in the capital of the vanquished German Reich

Soviet Occupation Zone or Ostzone (Berlin 1945)

Lost German Girl - 42 seconds frozen in time (Czechoslovakia 1945)

The Soviet Russian wartime rapes has been surrounded by decades of silence. As well as the estimated two million rapes in Germany, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 in Wien and anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 in Hungary, as well as thousands in Romania and Bulgaria, which had been pro-Nazi, but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which had not been. The Soviet Red Army even raped women who had been liberated from concentration camps, emaciated and wearing their prison uniform. Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis, wrote Russian Communist playwright Zakhar Agranenko about his red comrades in his diary when serving as a Soviet officer in East Prussia in early 1945. Rape was often accompanied by torture and mutilation ending with the victim being killed or bludgeoned to death. British Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Sir Richard J. Evans, guotes a Soviet officer recalling when his unit overtook a column of fleeing German refugees: Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women, who are bleeding or losing consciousness, get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children. The Soviet Red Army's atrocities against women in Dresden in the spring of 1945, a city that had already suffered heavily from Allied bombing, were carried out in a sickeningly systematic manner. Gulag survivor John H. Noble, a U.S. civilian from Detroit, who at the time lived in Dresden recalled: Soviet troops went in and pulled the women on to the street, had their mattresses pulled out and raped the women. Right at the end of the street, a woman was tied to a wagon wheel and terribly misused. The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Leningrader Natalya Gesse, a personal friend of Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, observed the Red Army in action 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent: The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists, she recounted later. Jewish Ukrainian novelist Vasily Grossman, another front-line reporter attached to the gigantic invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women. Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them, he noted. 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. Schwester Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem in Berlin, a maternity clinic and orphanage, told the following story: The majority of the Red Army's soldiers were ill-educated and primitive. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity. Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish lieutenant and a diarist from Ukraine, wrote with extraordinary frankness about some captured German women in February 1945: They must be destroyed without mercy. Our soldiers suggest stabbing them through their genitals but I would just execute them. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. Altogether at least two million German females are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape. Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000, a subject still taboo in Russia. References and sources: Historians Sir Antony Beevor, Richard Lourie, Franz W. Seidler, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Helke Sander and Barbara Johr. Quotes from British Daily Mail and The Guardian. Top image: Soviet General Major A.I. Litvinov, General Lieutenant M.F. Bukshtynovich and General Colonel V.I. Kuznetsov of the 3rd Shock Army whose troops captured the Reichstag and hoisted the Hammer and Sickle atop of its ruins. Second image: an iconic photo by Ukrainian-born Jewish officer and photojournalist Yevgeny Khaldei that became a symbol of the victory over Nazi Germany. The original photo taken on May 2 1945 was altered by Khaldei because Dagestani Sgt. Abdulkhakim Ismailov's multiple wristwatches were visible in the photo. Top two photos credited Olga Shirnina. Soviet Union stock photos. PD. Third image: Berliners become familiar with their new masters; a woman holds onto her bicycle as a Soviet soldier tries to yank it away. FU. Bottom still: The Lost German Girl. Footage by Swedish-American Captain Oren William Haglund between Prague and Pilsen on May 8 1945. U.S. National Archives. PD.