During the Second World War, an officer of the Soviet Army kept a diary in which he wrote about crimes committed on the territory of another country.

As Politeka reports, the material refers to a BBC publication.

The diary belonged to officer Vladimir Gelfand and describes the everyday life of soldiers. Among other things, it records the lack of discipline in the Soviet Army, meager rations, lice, antisemitism, and “endless stealing” that reached extreme proportions.

The diary also describes crimes committed by Soviet soldiers after they entered Berlin.

“I asked the German women, in broken German, where they lived and why they had left their home, and with horror they told me about the grief inflicted on them by the soldiers at the front line on the first night after the Red Army arrived here,” the diary says.

One German woman told Gelfand that she had been raped by a group of men. It happened in front of her mother.

“They poked me here,” the beautiful German woman explained, lifting her skirt. “All night long, and there were so many of them. I was a virgin,” she sighed and began to cry. “They ruined my youth. There were old men among them, men with pimples, and all of them climbed on me, all of them poked me. There were no fewer than twenty of them, yes, yes,” and she burst into tears, the diary recounts.

At another moment, the young woman suddenly rushed toward him and asked him to stay.

“Stay here,” she suddenly said to me. “You will sleep with me. You can do anything you want with me, but only you alone,” the author writes.

The diary also describes how propaganda “spurred” Soviet soldiers toward violence while they were on German territory. The article adds that German soldiers had behaved in the same way and had stained themselves with crimes while occupying the territory of the Soviet Union.

Andrey Sukhrakov
© Politeka