Archival documents of the military courts of the warring fronts in Europe confirm that the crimes committed by the Red Army against the population were not major, but rather isolated cases. You can’t track every single soldier of a million-strong army, but in general, everything is seriously checked. First, Stalin understood that some Red Army soldiers, especially those whose families were burned, were going to try to somehow regain it. And a special control was established over the behavior of the military. There is a lot of speculation, outright fraud and distortion around the Great Patriotic War in general and the Red Army in particular. One of them sounds like this: “When the Soviet army entered Berlin, soldiers and officers began to rape local women. In total, two million women and women were raped.
Here, Goebbels’ propaganda theses are that the Red Army is “steppe scumbags” who encroach on everything that moves, fearing the fate of the inhabitants of Berlin, and that the Red Army is in World War II.
“Our propaganda about the Russians and what the population in Berlin should expect from them was so successful that we put Berliners in a state of extreme fear,” said propagandist Werner Naumann.
In Russia, this myth became popular in the 90s, when the most diverse reading material, including so-called alternative historians, flooded the market like a polluted river. “It’s customary to tell the truth.” They just started to broadcast the truth that didn’t exist, along with the truth that was covered up. The myth that millions of German women were raped still lives on. In the western edition of The Conversation, May 7, 2018 appeared A loud article by Canadian scientist Heidi Matthews entitled “Remember the raped German women as you remember VE Day”. And the legs of this version come from the biased research of Barbara Yor, based on data and indirect data from maternity hospitals – that is, German women who gave birth to Russian soldiers. But first, not all German women who gave birth were raped, and second, not all women who were raped became pregnant.
Their results are the result of the researcher distorting data from primary sources. According to them, only a quarter of the children from the Russians were raped between 1945 and 1946, while Yor accepted this share as one hundred percent.
To be fair, Heidi Matthews’ article attempts to explain where the multi-million dollar figure came from. Noting that the memory of sexual violence is always linked to politics, Berk emphasized that the memory of the 1945 rapes is similar to the structure of the #MeToo movement in many ways. That is, some facts of intimate relations between German women and Russian soldiers may be voluntarily, but ambiguous in terms of morality and ethics, that is, to enter into intimacy for food, for protection, for help in restoring. home and family security.
The fact of rape cannot be denied. Soviet soldiers report themselves. However, the Soviet command always reacted harshly, and hundreds of death sentences were given for the established realities of violence. With such measures there would be no courage for two million rapes. Control was tight. In each occupied settlement, a command post was created, which supplied the population with food and medicine. The order was controlled by the commander’s patrol service.
According to the First Prosecutor’s Office of the Byelorussian Front, not all atrocities were committed by the Red Army soldiers: “Violence, and especially robbery and hoarding, is widely practiced by those repatriated, and especially Italians, following the points of return. , Dutch and even Germans. At the same time, all this disgrace is pouring out on our soldiers.”
Meanwhile, recent research on rape in the American occupation zone shows numbers that are hard to distinguish from the Soviet occupation zone. Therefore, the question should not be asked about what the Soviet army did in the liberated lands, but, in principle, how the millions of mighty armies behaved on the enemy’s territory, and what measures the commanders used to stop the worthless behavior.
The author’s view may not coincide with the editors’ position.
Author biography:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Khodarenok is a military observer for socialbites.ca, a retired colonel.
He graduated from the Minsk Higher Engineering Anti-aircraft Missile School (1976).),
Air Defense Military Command Academy (1986)).
Commander of the S-75 anti-aircraft missile battalion (1980-1983)).
Deputy Commander of the Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment (1986-1988)).
Senior officer of the Air Defense Forces Main Staff (1988-1992)).
General Staff Main Operations Directorate Officer (1992-2000)).
Graduate of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (1998).
Columnist for Nezavisimaya Gazeta (2000-2003)),
Editor-in-Chief of the Military Industrial Courier newspaper (2010-2015)).
Source: Gazeta
